Once again, fire is raining down on Gaza. Neither the demands for the return of the hostages addressed to their captors and torturers have been heard. Nor those for negotiations to take precedence addressed to an Israeli government, that is reinforced in its policy of force and which revels in the perpetuation of war. (We are republishing the report of Day 210 after October 7. K. dove into the protests for the liberation of the hostages.) Once again, the declared desire to eliminate the Hamas leadership is being paid for with an unjustified number of Palestinian civilian deaths, and the victims are piling up in the midst of a polarization that no responsible political discourse, in either camp, is able to stop. Such a discourse would presuppose that the current dominant trend, which sometimes seems on the verge of sweeping everything away, is finally being countered: the trend that inclines towards unbridled nihilism, the nature of which has yet to be diagnosed.
In terms of such a diagnosis, it is equally striking to see that what brings us closest today, in our regions, is the reflection that arises from the apparently irrepressible surge of antisemitism. What do antisemitic people believe in? Answer: Nothing. But in this case, it is a Nothing that becomes all-powerful and all-consuming. It proliferates in the period we are living through. The important thing here is the gesture that denies, because when speech is decreed powerless, all that remains is to oppose it with the perspective of an act that would have the immense capacity to exhaust all meaning. From this arise those apocalyptic dreams, half-exalted and half-anguished, in which the…
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Hatred of mediation and language, abolition of differences in an all-or-nothing logic, a solipsistic dream in which the world disappears: in this aphoristic text, the philosopher Gérard Bensussan proposes a conceptual approach to nihilism. This pathology of reason appears, beyond the diversity of its manifestations, as that which threatens thought as soon as it forgets its outside - a slope on which the critical gesture easily slides, and where the old Jewish question is encountered.
On Sunday, January 19, the sixth edition of the "Choosing a Jewish School" fair, launched in 2019 by Elodie Marciano, was held in Paris. In 2023, K. had already devoted an article to this event, which has shaken up the institutional world and has become an unmissable meeting place for the entire ecosystem of French Jewish education and youth. One year and three months after October 7, we decided to go back, curious and concerned about the effects of the current climate on the youngest. Between the stands of the youth movements and the large school complexes, the images of the hostage release were on a loop against a background of Am Israel Chai - let's follow the guide!
Two members of the K. editorial team, Julia Christ and Élie Petit, are currently in Israel to document and analyze the various movements underway in the country, post-October 7 - the war in Gaza is still going on and an agreement is in indirect talks between Israel and Hamas for the cessation of fighting and the release of hostages. First stop on their journey this week: on their first evening in Tel Aviv, they took part in one of the weekly anti-Netanyahu demonstrations, guided by producer Karen Belz. They report their impressions and first analysis.
Isn’t the meaning of Purim – the quintessential exile festival that reflects the issue of protecting the dispersed people – bound to fade away once the Jews have given themselves a state charged with preserving them from persecution? This is the question Danny Trom reopens in light of October 7 and its aftermath. How should we understand the circulation, for this year’s Purim, of calls for children to adopt Ariel Bibas’ Batman costume? Is it not the case that the Jewish political condition in exile remains latent in the realization of the Zionist project, merely awaiting its actualization?
For International Women’s Rights Day, K. is publishing a text that is a departure from its usual line. A young Jewish woman sent us a manuscript that, pastiching the famous SCUM Manifesto (1967) by radical feminist activist Valerie Solanas, virulently expresses her anger at the Jewish world’s deafness to the demands for women’s emancipation. This anger is the political expression we get from bottling up what’s ready to explode.
The Brutalist, which has just won three Oscars, offers a romanticized retelling of the career of a famous Hungarian-Jewish architect who survived the Shoah. A brilliant film, it nevertheless takes the risk, through its approximations and exaggerations, of missing one of the dimensions of this story – the one relating to architecture, which is at the heart of the film. An insight by architect Albert Levy.
Last March, Jean-Claude Milner delivered a disturbing diagnosis in our pages: the rapid American trusteeship of Israel, due to the loss of the illusion that made the Jewish state an “impenetrable and solitary diamond”, a representative of the democratic West in hostile lands. In his text, “Western” meant above all the recognition of American supremacy, WASP values and a doctrine where peace is the rule and war the exception. An alternative was emerging for Jews: either orientalization in a vassalized Israel, or dissolution in the new American Jerusalem. At a time when the Trump presidency seems to be reshuffling the cards by reconnecting with an imperial logic, and Europe seems increasingly marginalized, Milner revisits his diagnosis.
Who is Herbert Kickl, and what political project does he promise Austria? As the far-right FPÖ party, which won the last elections, prepares to take the helm of a coalition government and appoint Kickl as chancellor, Liam Hoare traces the trajectory of this party and its leader with Nazi sympathies.
Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were buried yesterday, Wednesday, February 26, 2025. What hope did the Bibas family represent? What was at stake in the act of tearing down the posters showing the faces of the hostages in the public space? As pain mingles with rage at the discovery of the murder of the Bibas children and their mother, Bruno Karsenti examines their fate in the context of the persistence of Jewish life, and the struggle that it entails.
What has happened to Odessa, once dubbed the “Star of Exile” by Isaac Babel, since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Joseph Roche gives us his account of how the Jewish community is trying to survive there, despite the war and the departures.
The German federal elections – which will take place this Sunday, February 23, 2025 – are of decisive importance for the future of Europe. With this in mind, Monty Ott delivers for K. an investigation into the history of the AfD, which is growing strongly. Now supported by Trump and Musk, and championing Russian interests, since its creation about ten years ago this party has undergone a process of radicalization leading it towards increasingly anti-European and far-right positions. A dive into the networks and ideology of German sovereignism.
The truce concluded between Israel and Hamas has given rise to a deplorable spectacle. On the Hamas side, they are shouting “victory” over a field of ruins and corpses, with no regard for the fate of the Gazan population for whom the group has no other plan than that of martyrdom. On the Israeli side, Netanyahu is delighted with the parodies of “solutions” announced with incredible levity by President Trump. Here, K. shares a Palestinian voice, that of Ihab Hassan, first published in Liberties, who thinks in the only politically viable terms: those of a conflict between two equally just national claims, pointing to the horizon of a two-state solution.
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