During this summer break, the magazine is pausing its regular publications. However, while we await the start of the new school year, we’ll be offering our readers a weekly feature exploring an important theme that has mobilized us this year and which, in our current context, remains topical. An opportunity to discover the article you missed, to rediscover the one that caught your eye, and to share some of K. ‘s publications with friends who don’t yet know us. As a reminder, our archives are open, and we invite you to browse through the hundreds of texts we’ve already published over the last three and a half years, all of which bear witness to the magazine’s ambition: to move between topicality and historical depth, to take account of contemporary issues that call for reflection on the situation of European Jewry.
This week, the focus is on our interviews, each of which provides an opportunity to familiarize ourselves with a particular way of thinking about history, memory or Jewish identity, and the challenges we face today. Readers in search of a literary escape will be delighted by Etgar Keret and André Markowicz. And we recommend the enlightening interviews with David Nirenberg on the genealogy of anti-Judaism, with Tal Bruttmann on the ethics of the historian, with Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani on the construction of the concept of ‘race’, and with Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski on the militancy of Polish nationalists rewriting the history of the Holocaust on Wikipedia.
This summer, we’re preparing for the new school year, and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our donors and invite regular readers who haven’t done so to support us (via PayPal orHelloasso). We are currently developing projects to give the magazine a greater impact, which we feel is more necessary than ever in these troubled times. We know that many of our readers share this view, as their numbers have more than doubled since October 7th brought the Jewish world to its knees and to the center of national debates, as witnessed by the recent elections across Europe.
Have a good summer and happy reading!
The Editors
Every week this summer, K. brings you a selection of six texts that have already appeared in our pages, and have been brought together for the occasion around a few key themes. This week, we invite you to (re)discover interviews with Etgar Keret, Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani, Tal Bruttmann, Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski, David Nirenberg and André Markowicz.
Etgar Keret is a leading Israeli writer, whose talent for blending the mundane with the magical is appreciated both in Israel and abroad. In this interview conducted by Emmy Barouh a week ago, Keret evokes the feeling that, since October 7 and as the government plunges the country into war, the reality experienced by Israelis is losing its consistency, and escaping any grip they may have had on it.
The book by historians Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani - Race and History in Western Societies (15th-18th centuries) - intersects with many issues familiar to readers of Revue K. It recounts the construction of the concept of "race", as it plays out in racist thought, as a process spanning several centuries, from the imperialist Ancien Régime to the modern period. It thus offers a much richer history of racism than those often limited to the scientistic theories of the late 19th century. Above all, the book places the "Jewish question" at the heart of its history of the concept of race: election, obstinacy and the invisibility of differences are all problems that Christian societies have encountered in their relationship with the Jews, and whose mark racism bears. Interview with the authors.
David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition proved an instant classic of Jewish studies on its publication a decade ago. Nirenberg, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, presents anti-Judaism as a structural discourse in the history of the West (and arguably in the history of the world at large). The figure of the “Jew,” and the bugbear of “Judaism,” he maintains, have served as epistemic tools for philosophers and theologians to define themselves – and Western civilization – over and against. In such a scheme, Judaism morphs from religion into foil, the Jew from living being into abstraction; and even societies hosting few or no Jews can entertain “Jewish questions.” Nirenberg’s study starts in the Egypt of the Hellenistic Period and ends in our own time.
Each week this summer, K. brings you a selection of texts that have already appeared in our pages, but have been brought together for the occasion around a few key themes. This week, we invite you to (re)discover K.’s work on the words of conflict. With texts by Bruno Karsenti, Julia Christ, Danny Trom, Diana Muir and David Lemler.
What does it mean for a nation to exist? Taking as his starting point the position of Milan Kundera – who died exactly a year ago – and the movement of cultural resistance to the dissolution of Soviet totalitarianism, Danny Trom questions the difference between nationalist dreams of power and the irreducible claim to a national (and European) spirit. Is there not something at stake here for the future of Israel?
In France, the radical left is plagued by antisemitism that expresses itself in multiple, underground ways. Since October 7 in particular, anti-Jewish outbursts, conveyed in particular by France Insoumise executives and activists, have been documented and constantly denounced by Jewish organizations. Yet, while this left wing acknowledges its anti-Zionism, it denies any accusation of antisemitism, claiming to belong to the anti-racist camp. Recently, intellectuals close to France Insoumise published an opinion piece that caused quite a stir, with the explicit aim of clearing their movement of any antisemitism. Elisheva Gottfarstein’s text is a step-by-step response to their diabolically specious arguments.
In Georgia, the local Jewish community is referred to in the past tense. And yet, this community has never experienced antisemitism. Here, Clément Girardot and Yoann Morvan reveal the story of this surprising Georgian exception, a nation whose philosemitism is not enough to ensure the continuity of its Jewish presence.
With parliamentary elections approaching in France, and the issue of antisemitism taking center stage in the political debate, the editorial staff of K. felt it was their duty to take a stand. However, given the existential and strategic dilemma facing Jews, we felt it was impossible for this position to be expressed in a single voice: it had to be divided. Two Jewish voices, those of Bruno Karsenti and Danny Trom, are thus articulated and answered here. Let there be no mistake: the aim is not to make each hold one pole of the electoral dilemma, but rather to grasp it at two different levels. First, that of the philosopher, who poses it from the point of view of what the reference to the Jewish condition represents, or should represent, for the Jews themselves, and above all for the Left and its future. Then that of the sociologist, who takes charge of the practical dimension of the dilemma, illuminating through the strategies of perseverance in exile the embarrassment and wanderings of Jews who no longer know where to look for security.
Some people claim that the French far-right party Rassemblement National (RN) is no longer antisemitic, and that the vast majority of Jews would vote for Bardella. To discuss these two dubious assertions, we spoke to film director and essayist Jonathan Hayoun– notably the author, with Judith Cohen-Solal, of La main du diable : Comment l’extrême droite a voulu séduire les Juifs de France (Grasset,2019) [TN:The Devil’s Hand: How the far right tried to seduce the Jews of France] –, and Johan Weisz, journalist and editor-in-chief and committed founder of the online media StreetPress. Interviewed by Elie Petit, they question the idea that, beyond the communication strategy, there would be a real normalization of the RN, while questioning the feeling of danger in which the Jews of France live, and its political consequences.
We know without a shadow of a doubt that the far right is structurally antisemitic. We even know it so well that we sometimes forget that antisemitism is not structurally extreme right-wing. In this text, Julia Christ examines the deleterious effects of this discrepancy between what is known, and what does not want to be known. Without changing its ideological matrix, the far right has turned suspicion into strength – the ability to assume what it does and control what it says – aided and abetted by opponents who, rather than assuming their political responsibility, take refuge in childish posturing: “we didn’t know…”.
The result of Zionism, in other words, access to political sovereignty, also meant that the Jewish state had to exercise violence. In this text, Danny Trom returns to the difficulties of coming to terms with the violence inflicted, and its articulation with the violence suffered by Jews. It seems as though, after the Zionist revolution, Jews could only oscillate in their relationship to violence.
Since the student mobilizations in support of Gaza began, universities have become the focus of media and political curiosity. But what does the situation look like from the inside? A student familiar with the activist world gives us their view of what happened in the universities, the forces at play and the ambiguities that run through the pro-Palestinian mobilization.
Join us
With the support of:
Thanks to the Paris office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their cooperation in the design of the magazine’s website.