One could – one hoped to – ignore the continuous flow of messages that Éric Zemmour has been pouring into the French public debate for years. But even those who have become accustomed to it were startled by his parallelism between Mohamed Merah and the children he executed in cold blood in Toulouse. Zemmour does not confuse victims and executioners. He unites them in a status of aliens to France. “The earth does not lie,” Emmanuel Berl whispered to Marshal Pétain in 1940, giving him his most famous formulation. Zemmour adds: the burial does not lie, it seals the identity of the deceased. The Jews of France, as everywhere else in Europe, have always buried their people where they lived. The only thing they have to do, wherever they live, is to obtain a perpetual plot. Such is the tradition. There is another ancient idea, which has become customary, of Jerusalem as the ideal place to be buried. This idea in the modern world is suddenly feasible and Jerusalem has become a real place where it can be realized. But Jerusalem is not a state or a political entity. Jerusalem is an ideality shrouded in messianic hope, even though it is on earth. The fact that Jerusalem is today located in the State of Israel does not change this. So much so that the burial of a French Jew in Jerusalem in no way means that he was torn between two nationalities, between two nation-states, and finally chose the foreigner. It is almost the opposite >>> [read more]
Frédéric Brenner has spent the last three years exploring Berlin -- a stage for a vast spectrum of expressions and performances of Judaism. 'Zerheilt: Healed to Pieces' is the name of the recently opened exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the book that comes with it. It features images of equally fascinating and emblematic figures of a strangeness of the Jewish presence in Berlin today.
American writer Abe Silberstein was struck, during the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian violence last May, by a peculiar expression of anti-Semitism. His text reflects his concerns and an atmosphere that makes him fear that something similar to the European situation might be taking hold in the United States.
Through Moses Mendelssohn, the greatest figure of the Haskala, the Jews ceased to be intruders and became distinguished guests. Today, as Europe seeks to reconnect with the Enlightenment, Mendelssohn may well become our contemporary again. He will return, however, in a different guise than the one he wore in the era of emancipation...
While anti-Semitism is rampant throughout the world, the Holocaust memory is increasingly interrogated in the name of post-colonial ideas. The latest attack is signed by the Australian historian Dirk Moses. The great historian of the Holocaust Saul Friedländer, in an article originally published in Die Zeit, counters: “‘Auschwitz’ was something completely different from the colonial atrocities of the West.
Last week, Ewa Tartakowsky told us about the conditions under which a school visit like the one to the “Museum of the Poles Who Saved Jews During the Second World War – Ulma family” in Markowa takes place today, in the era of the PiS, Poland’s right-wing nationalist governing party. Here is the second and final part of this brush withg a biased, ethno-religious account of the history of relations between non-Jewish Poles and Jews in Poland.
The doctor whom Picard had come to see to get checked out in order to be reinstated at the helm of a Starfleet ship, that old friend he had met more than half a century before aboard the Stargazer, was named Moritz Benayoun. “Benayoun?!” exclaimed Hayon. His astonishment was twofold. First, Star Trek suggested that, in less than four centuries, the Jews of the future would include space Sephardim. But above all, he was amazed that this Dr. Benayoun had the same name as he did. Or rather, the name that, more or less, he could have had.
A group of students enrolled in a course on the Polish Righteous Among Nations went to Markowa, in the Subcarpathian region, to visit the “Museum of Poles Saving Jews during the Second World War – Ulma Family.” Ewa Tartakowsky accompanied this visit. She explains how the discourse that accompanies it resonates with the memorial policies promoted by the PiS government. Excerpts from a field diary, part one.
After having read Philippe Sands’ essay East West Street, Danny Trom visited Lemberg, once Polish and now Ukrainian, the town at the center of the book and toured in Galicia on the trail of his own heritage. The path of Lemkin and Lauterpacht, the two heroes of Sands’ bestseller, overlaps with those of Trom’s grandfather. Galicia, this was a land of crime and the epicenter of nascent international law. But why does Sands occlude the fact that this was also the birthplace of the Zionist dream, expressed in Yiddish?
France was the first of the European countries to emancipate the Jews. The revolutionaries’ promise of freedom and equality for every Jew was not always honored. The Jews suffered for…
Nicknamed the ‘Je Sais Tout’ brothers, Joseph, Salomon and Théodore Reinach represent both the academic excellence and the extreme assimilation of French Jews at the turn of the 20th century….
Fifty-five years ago, in 1966, Jean Améry published ‘At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities’. In the preface he speaks of the “a gloomy spell” that prevented him from speaking for two decades, until the moment when “suddenly everything demanded telling.” This “everything” that wanted to be said is first of all a powerlessness: that of culture and spirit in the face of Auschwitz.
The anti-vax and anti-sanitary pass demonstrations, where yellow stars flourish, are the social movement of the summer, in France as in Europe. For Julia Christ, it is not the “anti-system” rear-guard of society that is expressing itself through the gesture of hijacking this historical symbol, but rather a kind of hyper-individualist and ultra-liberal avant-garde.
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