In 1941, almost 600,000 Jews were living in Eastern Galicia – a territory that corresponds to today’s Western Ukraine. From the start of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, genocidal violence raged in the region. In Le pacte antisémite.[Not yet translated], Marie Moutier-Bitan seeks to grasp the logic of a moment when everything shifted dramatically in just a few weeks. Concentrated in space and time, the book studies the mechanisms that immediately led to the extermination in this region and leaves the reader dumbfounded by the speed of the act – made possible by the initiative left to the local population, free to participate or not in the massacre of the Jews. The investigation, which is conducted “at man’s level, down to the ground”, continues right up to the present day. The historian, with whom we speak in K. this week, has made around 25 trips to meet the last witnesses, mainly former “neighbours” who still live in the villages where the Jews were murdered. In her book, the account of yesterday’s events is reflected in the local memory, which is fragmented and is constantly changing and being used to suit the political events that are currently shaking the region.
Historically, Jews have been able to live under two sets of laws, their own law, known as halakha, and the law of the country in which they live. The adage “The law of the Kingdom is the law” formulated in the Mishnah was an early warning of the need for Jews to submit to the law enacted by the foreign king, sovereign in his domain, and the law of Moses with which they could not compromise. The accommodation, sometimes unstable, since the advent of political modernity, since a single civil law has been imposed on everyone, including Jews who are now citizens of their States, has only served to exacerbate the potential contradictions between the two spheres…
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Between 2009 and 2020, Marie Moutier-Bitan made around 25 trips to the former territories of the Soviet Union with the Yahad-in Unum association. Her fieldwork focused in particular on Eastern Galicia, now Western Ukraine, where the author of Le Pacte Antisémite (untranslated from French) attempted to identify the mechanisms that led to the extermination of the Jews in this region, transforming, in the space of a few weeks, the Jews into victims and their neighbours into executioners.
The get, the centrepiece of traditional divorce, is a particularly sensitive legal act which today seems to be the focus of the greatest tension between civil law and Jewish law. Is it a place of confrontation? Astrid von Busekist sees it more as a place where a legal pluralism is formed, capable of honouring freedom of religious practice while bending it towards recognition of the general principle of equality for all.
The departure of the Jews from Tunisia, generally associated with the consequences of the Six Day War, was in fact rooted in a Tunisian-French conflict known as the Bizerte Crisis, which took place five years earlier. The accusation of treason leveled against the Jews of Bizerte, and their consequent rescue by Israel, marked the beginning of the rapid disappearance of any Jewish presence in Tunisia. Writing for K., Agnès Bensimon, a specialist in the history of the Jews in North Africa, tells us about the last days of the Jewish community of Bizerte.
Historians Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski have published an important article on the distortions of the history of the Holocaust – particularly in Poland – present on a large number of Wikipedia pages. They analyze the practices of certain Wikipedians, those volunteers who contribute to the editing of the open encyclopedia, who aim to minimize, omit or even deny a series of historical facts; in particular those that affect the image of a victimized and heroic Poland, with a large number of Righteous who saved Jews during the war.
An open letter entitled The Elephant in the Room was launched in mid-August to “call attention to the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” To date, it has been signed by just over 2,300 people—most of them academics (including eminent figures in Jewish history research) and personalities from Israel and the American diaspora—and has the dual characteristic of qualifying Israel as an “apartheid regime” and bringing together signatories who generally disagree with that qualification.
Nearly 2,800 public figures, most of them Israeli and American (including a very large number of academics), have signed an open letter, The Elephant in the Room, calling on them to speak out against the “ultimate goal” of the judicial reform proposed by the current Israeli government: the maintenance of the “apartheid regime”. This last qualification is debatable – and even contested by some of the petition’s signatories. So why did they sign it? This is Joel Whitebook’s response.
Nearly 2,800 public figures, most of them Israeli and American (including a very large number of academics), have signed an open letter, The Elephant in the Room, calling on them to speak out against the “ultimate goal” of the judicial reform proposed by the current Israeli government: the maintenance of the “apartheid regime”. This last qualification is debatable – and even contested by some of the petition’s signatories. So why did they sign it? This is Sarah and Guy Stroumsa’s response.
Nearly 2,800 public figures, most of them Israeli and American (including a very large number of academics), have signed an open letter, The Elephant in the Room, calling on them to speak out against the “ultimate goal” of the judicial reform proposed by the current Israeli government: the maintenance of the “apartheid regime”. This last qualification is debatable – and even contested by some of the petition’s signatories. So why did they sign it? This is Abe Silberstein’s response.
Nearly 2,800 public figures, most of them Israeli and American (including a very large number of academics), have signed an open letter, The Elephant in the Room, calling on them to speak out against the “ultimate goal” of the judicial reform proposed by the current Israeli government: the maintenance of the “apartheid regime”. This last qualification is debatable – and even contested by some of the petition’s signatories. So why did they sign it? This is Dan Diner’s answer.
90 years after Hitler’s ascension to power, philosopher Julia Christ takes stock of German memory. Alongside the undeniable work of reparation and repentance that has been carried out in Germany, she points out the blind spots, loopholes and memory impasses that distort the way in which the Nazi past is viewed, and the gradual erosion of the sense of guilt that ensues. Interview conducted by Rafaël Amselem in partnership with Akadem.
What exactly do Giorgia Meloni’s right-wingers mean by Homeland and Nation? What kind of Italy is it dreaming of when it hammers home these two concepts today? Simone Disegni explores this question by looking back at two stories of Italian Jewish children: that of Edgardo Mortara, taken from his family by the Vatican in 1858, and that of Franco Cesana, a partisan who died in combat in 1944 at the age of 13.
Each week this summer, K. brings you a selection of four articles that have already appeared in our pages, but which have been brought together for the occasion around a few key themes. This week : articles by Cléo Cohen, Joseph Benamour and Anshel Pfeffer.
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