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 your friends who don’t yet know him. 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, we return to the Jewish-American symbiosis, and the prospect of its deterioration. The days when Motl discovered New York with his eyes full of stars seem long gone. Today, it’s more a kind of malaise that seems to grip American Jews, particularly in their relationship with the progressive camp or through reflections on heritage and belonging. From the media coverage of Jewish victims in the United States, to the press of Hasidic communities to the history of relations between Jews and African-Americans, the articles in this dossier explore the tensions in the American Jewish community.
This summer, as we prepare for the new school year, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all our donors and invite regular readers who have not yet 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 in France.
Wishing you a good summer and happy reading!
The Editors
This week, we invite you to (re)discover K. 's texts on Judeo-American symbiosis. And its deterioration? With texts by Mitchell Abidor, Elie Petit, Mona El Khoury, Macha Fogel and Christian Voller.
After having published a review of Motl in America a month ago, Mitchell Abidor returns in his text to this extraordinary tale of Jewish immigration to the United States. Blending his family's memories with Sholem-Aleichem's account, Abidor recounts the journey to the "Promised Land", the new arrivals' disorientation and their acculturation to American society. Above all, he pays tribute to the unfailing optimism of these Jews who had left "Pogromland".
Dara Horn is a journalist, essayist and professor of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. In this interview, she talks about what prompted her to write People Love Dead Jews in 2021, and the question this book explores: why do dead Jews arouse so much more interest than living Jews? Between the ritualization of a sterilized memory of the Holocaust, fascination with the figure of the Jew reduced to helpless victimhood and denial of the actuality of antisemitism, Dara Horn questions the deeply ambiguous way in which the West, and America in particular, relates to Jews, and to the ghosts they evoke.
How can we explain the convergence, apparently so spontaneous on American campuses, between anti-racism and anti-Zionism? Following the radicalization of the civil rights movement, Christian Voller traces the genesis of the link between Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine. His story takes us through Brooklyn, where the encounter between Black people and traditionalist Jews sometimes took the form of a gang war.
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.
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.
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