Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous (Whites, Jews and Us, not translated) still figures as a memorable title in French racial discourse. The work of indigéniste activist Houria Bouteldja, the tome exhorts French Jews to divest themselves of their “whiteness”… Balazs Berkovits examines Boutdelja’s 2016 book, among others, as forming part of “a simulacrum of social theory” in the first installment of an essay for K. We might also describe the kind work of Bouteldja belong to as a parody of political and cultural history, but that would be to overlook how such a text reflects the rise in France of such fields as Critical Race Studies and Critical Whiteness Studies, disciplines which have their roots on the American university campus. Berkovits delves into how Jews are evaluated in these discourses, that is to say, how Jews are classified as “white” in a drawing of a color-line that has major political and academic stakes. An example of how this can go awry: in 2017, on an American campus, a tract circulated according to which “Ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege.” This formulation would no doubt have stupefied participants at the “Nazism and Italian Racial Laws” colloquium, held on March 13, 1961, in Bologna. Primo Levi delivered his first public comments on the Holocaust in the course of this conference… >>>
How did Jews come to be defined as "white" by a critical discourse in vogue today? Why do we label Jews as dominant or privileged - and Israel as a colonial entity practicing apartheid motivated by Jewish and white supremacism? Part one of an essay by Balázs Berkovits on the supposed color of Jews...
Conservative Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz is on the cutting edge of support for Israel. During last month’s confrontation with Hamas, Kurz had the Israeli flag raised on government buildings. After...
On March 13, 1961, Primo Levi was invited, with several other prominent political and intellectual figures from across Italy, to speak at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, in one of a series of conferences held that year on “Nazism and the Racial Laws in Italy.” It was one of the first times he spoke publicly. Commemorating this event, the Jewish Museum of Bologna has dedicated a virtual exhibition to Levi’s speech,.
The series Unorthodox and Shtisel have been worldwide successes, familiarizing audiences with Haredi life. Noémie Issan-Benchimol discusses another Israeli series for K., Autonomies, which imagines the nation riven in two: on one side, the autonomous territory of Jerusalem, a theocracy led by the ultra-Orthodox; on the other side, the secular and Zionist state of Israel, its capital Tel Aviv.
The writer measures the success of his work in the number of copies sold. No matter how self-confident he might be, sales at the bookstore matter to him….
Would the prohibition of ritual slaughter jeopardize the very existence of a European Judaism? What is at stake goes beyond the simple comfort of the Jewish community: it is the durability of the pact linking Jews to the continent that is at stake. Beyond that, the identity of Europe and the place it intends to give, in the twenty-first century, to its own Hebrew roots are at stake. Here is the second part of David Haziza’s essay on ‘shehita’ in Europe.
How do we explain the return of pogrom imagery as Israel grapples with interethnic violence between Jews and Arabs? More than seven decades after the state’s founding and the end of the British Mandate, why does such language persist? Examining the spate of Jewish-Arab clashes, Danny Trom reflects on the political dimension of majority-minority relations in Israel.
A certain postcolonial thinking is diametrically opposed to what can be considered left-wing politics and would be structurally anti-Jewish argues the great art historian Horst Bredekamp, one of the founders of the Humboldt Forum, in an op-ed published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) last March. This text had a considerable impact on the German and English-speaking intellectual and media scene. We take it up in K., putting it in context: within a controversy about the ‘decolonization’ of art and museums.
The Humboldt Forum’s vocation is to host exhibitions on non-European cultures. But this ethnographic museum is now at the center of a controversy over the ownership of artworks and objects obtained during the German colonial empire in Africa and Asia. In this interview with the art historian Horst Bredekamp, we wanted to learn more about a forgotten German ethnographic tradition – and in particular about the contribution of Jewish scholars and collectors within this tradition.
The three of them are at Paris’ Gare du Nord on a cold morning: the Father, the Mother, and the Child. The Child was going to England, for a vacation of language learning.
It’s February. If you can’t ski, what else is there to do? … >>>
Discussions agitated the French revolution in the winter of 1789 when it was decided to examine the case of the Jews. The question that preoccupied the Assembly was simple: could Jews be citizens like any others? “Yes!” replied Clermont-Tonnerre and Abbé Grégoire. Not yet,” said the Prince de Broglie, “but never,” said Monseigneur de la Touraine. Never,” affirmed Monseigneur de la Fare…
The monument dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust planned to be installed in Zagreb in the coming months is finished, but still kept in three different factories. The controversy, which testifies to an ambiguous Croatian memory of the Ustasha past and its crimes during the war, is still ongoing. What should be inscribed on the monument? What message should it carry?
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