On the eve of World War II, three million Jews lived in Poland. The vast majority were murdered by the Nazis. Most of those who survived in hiding or, more likely, in exile in the Soviet Union, emigrated to the West. Many of those who had been communists before the war returned to Poland to try to build an egalitarian society. Yet the Party failed to combat deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes, and at times exploited them for political gain, leading to successive waves of out-migration. The result is that perhaps 15,000 Jews live in Poland today, one of the most ethnically and religiously homogeneous societies in the world. Arlene Stein spoke to Anna Zawadzka, Polish sociologist, who examines the changing forms of antisemitism in Polish culture and how Poland’s history of antisemitism is a key element of the contemporary political culture.
Do you remember Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes? Recently, in Israel, reality caught up with the fairy tale. Benjamin Netanyahu, who thought he could improve his image after the hostages’ deaths by appearing alongside the bereaved parents, experienced what it’s like to be a naked king in public. For a moment, the father of a deceased hostage shattered the dignity in which Netanyahu was trying so hard to drape himself, by reminding him of his responsibility for the tragedy facing Israel. This week, Noémie Issan-Benchimol analyzes this political event, which, although microscopic, nonetheless reveals the cleavages running through Israeli society, and the way in which the legitimacy of…
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In the West we tend to see the fall of communism as ushering in greater freedom for religious and other minorities. It’s true that after decades of post-war silence, Poland’s Jewish heritage industry, which includes a gleaming museum in the center of Warsaw, an annual Jewish culture festival in Krakow, and thousands of local efforts to excavate history, is flowering. But does this mean that Poland is overcoming its Jewish problem? Arlene Stein spoke to Anna Zawadzka, Polish sociologist, who examines the changing forms of antisemitism in Polish culture in a new book More than a Stereotype , cautioning us against such facile conclusions.
While the immediate focus is on the ground incursion into Lebanon, military operations and targeted assassinations, and the regional and even global balance, Noémie Issan-Benchimol, in this letter from Jerusalem, wants to bring us back to the more modest scale of the political emotions and wounds of Israeli society, starting with the still-open wound of the hostages, which is not without drawing a deep fault line between the advocates of the citizen's social contract and the supporters of deterrence. Taking the opportunity of a political micro-event, she offers us here a meditation on power and an insight into that part of the Israeli people that opposes the Netanyahu government and its way of waging war without preparing for peace.
Paying tribute to Joann Sfar's comic strip The Rabbi's Cat (Le Chat du Rabbin), Ewa Tartakowsky takes the opportunity to question certain "Ashkenazi-centric" prejudices. Isn't there a tendency to relate to Maghrebian Jewishness while ignoring its specificities, thereby retaining something of the colonial legacy? In this respect, Sfar's work, driven by the caustic lucidity of The Cat, is a valuable remedy for appreciating the subtleties of a mixed European Judaism.
The priest Abbé Pierre, “French Maria Theresa”, has definitely fallen out of favor, and for good reason. Danny Trom, however, was keen to drive the point home, reminding us that the sexual impulse is not the only one that the Abbé’s well-ordered charity proved unable to control.
What if anti-Judaism were not just an irrational prejudice against Jews, but a fundamental structure of Western thought? This is the thesis defended by David Nirenberg in Anti-Judaism, which the Collège de France conference presented in June 2023 on the occasion of its translation into French. In it, we discover a vertiginous problem: the dependence of our moral, philosophical and critical systems on a repulsive figure of the imaginary Jew.
After the sad period of Bolsonarism, Brazilian Jews, most of whom are progressive, were looking forward to a new term under Lula. But the new president’s virulent anti-Zionism seems to have disappointed them. Renan Antônio da Silva and Eric Heinze guide us through this affair, from the long history of Brazilian Jewry to the open secret of the elites’ longstanding antisemitic wanderings.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stands out for his systematic opposition to the EU’s dominant values and policies. So it’s hardly surprising that, since October 7, he has stepped up his support for the Israeli state, not hesitating to label the slightest criticism from his European partners as antisemitic. Here, János Gadó lucidly analyzes the paradoxes of a government which, while trying to pass itself off as a friend of the Jews, traffics in the memory of the Holocaust and recycles the most hackneyed antisemitic tropes.
Did you know that Israel was responsible for the climate crisis, and Hamas an inspiration for environmental activism? In this article, sociologist Sylvaine Bulle describes the strange juxtaposition of anti-Zionism and political ecology by Andreas Malm, the charming intellectual of radical ecological criticism.
Our dear collaborator Karl Kraus has entrusted us with the fruit of his summer labors: two short texts inspired by events whose banality seemed to him to be fraught with meaning. From a Viennese park to a Parisian kosher supermarket, a short sentence is sometimes enough to bear witness to the stupidity of the times, or, on the contrary, to aptly express their grueling nature.
How can we escape the sterile confrontation between messianic Zionism and obsessive anti-Zionism? In this diagnostic text, Noémie Issan-Benchimol and Gabriel Abensour suggest a way out of this fatal alternative. What is at stake? Reinscribing the State of Israel in the exilic condition, and thus stripping it of its exceptional character that inflames radical passions.
In our final summer issue, we present you with a selection of texts that have already appeared in our pages, grouped around a key theme. With the end of summer and the soon to be starting new Jewish calendar year, this week we turn our eye to the complexity of Jewish identity and experience and the culture of questioning that accompanies us throughout – with perspectives from Ivan Segré, Mona El Khoury, Ruben Honigmann, Astrid von Busekist and Noémie Issan-Benchimol.
The discovery of the bodies of the six hostages killed by Hamas, as the IDF approached the hideout where they were being held, has a profoundly contradictory meaning.
On the one hand, it shows the kind of enemy Israel is actually fighting: a movement whose aim is to murder Jews, one by one and as many as possible…
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