K., as our readers know, is an exceptionally serious publication. However, this week’s issue coincides with two carnival-like celebrations, since they call for rejoicing in the subversion of the usual established order of power and domination, until their overthrow. So what can we do to avoid losing our reputation as killjoys? We have found no other solution than to explore the meaning of these festivals, which, if we want to avoid them being reduced to mere masquerades, they must retain a tangible sense of festivity.
Purim is a festival linked to the political condition of Jews in exile, in the sense that it reflects the central issue at stake: that of their protection as a dispersed people. In principle, the Jewish state – which is dedicated to this task of protection – should make the experience of the tension contained in the Book of Esther inaccessible, and therefore Purim obsolete. Yet Purim continued to be celebrated, even where its meaning was most remote. On October 7, by highlighting the function of the Jewish state and its limitations, this progressive derealization was called into question. So much so that, for this year’s Purim, there are calls for Israeli children to adopt the Batman costume worn by Ariel Bibas. But what exactly does this call to update the diasporic festival par excellence in Israel mean? Danny Trom invites us to consider the meaning of Purim, in its disjointedness depending on whether one is in the diaspora or in Israel, but also in its convergence.
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Isn't the meaning of Purim - the quintessential exile festival that reflects the issue of protecting the dispersed people - bound to fade away once the Jews have given themselves a state charged with preserving them from persecution? This is the question Danny Trom reopens in light of October 7 and its aftermath. How should we understand the circulation, for this year's Purim, of calls for children to adopt Ariel Bibas' Batman costume? Is it not the case that the Jewish political condition in exile remains latent in the realization of the Zionist project, merely awaiting its actualization?
For International Women's Rights Day, K. is publishing a text that is a departure from its usual line. A young Jewish woman sent us a manuscript that, pastiching the famous SCUM Manifesto (1967) by radical feminist activist Valerie Solanas, virulently expresses her anger at the Jewish world's deafness to the demands for women's emancipation. This anger is the political expression we get from bottling up what’s ready to explode.
What can we say about the sexual crimes committed by Hamas men on October 7 - documented a little more each day by the work of an Israeli group of gynecologists, forensic doctors, psychologists and international lawyers? And how are we to understand the concealment of the violence against women on that day by part of world opinion - including supposed "feminists"? Doesn't this concealment amount to inflicting violence on these women a second time, as if their ordeal didn't count and was meaningless?
The Brutalist, which has just won three Oscars, offers a romanticized retelling of the career of a famous Hungarian-Jewish architect who survived the Shoah. A brilliant film, it nevertheless takes the risk, through its approximations and exaggerations, of missing one of the dimensions of this story – the one relating to architecture, which is at the heart of the film. An insight by architect Albert Levy.
Last March, Jean-Claude Milner delivered a disturbing diagnosis in our pages: the rapid American trusteeship of Israel, due to the loss of the illusion that made the Jewish state an “impenetrable and solitary diamond”, a representative of the democratic West in hostile lands. In his text, “Western” meant above all the recognition of American supremacy, WASP values and a doctrine where peace is the rule and war the exception. An alternative was emerging for Jews: either orientalization in a vassalized Israel, or dissolution in the new American Jerusalem. At a time when the Trump presidency seems to be reshuffling the cards by reconnecting with an imperial logic, and Europe seems increasingly marginalized, Milner revisits his diagnosis.
Who is Herbert Kickl, and what political project does he promise Austria? As the far-right FPÖ party, which won the last elections, prepares to take the helm of a coalition government and appoint Kickl as chancellor, Liam Hoare traces the trajectory of this party and its leader with Nazi sympathies.
Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were buried yesterday, Wednesday, February 26, 2025. What hope did the Bibas family represent? What was at stake in the act of tearing down the posters showing the faces of the hostages in the public space? As pain mingles with rage at the discovery of the murder of the Bibas children and their mother, Bruno Karsenti examines their fate in the context of the persistence of Jewish life, and the struggle that it entails.
What has happened to Odessa, once dubbed the “Star of Exile” by Isaac Babel, since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Joseph Roche gives us his account of how the Jewish community is trying to survive there, despite the war and the departures.
The German federal elections – which will take place this Sunday, February 23, 2025 – are of decisive importance for the future of Europe. With this in mind, Monty Ott delivers for K. an investigation into the history of the AfD, which is growing strongly. Now supported by Trump and Musk, and championing Russian interests, since its creation about ten years ago this party has undergone a process of radicalization leading it towards increasingly anti-European and far-right positions. A dive into the networks and ideology of German sovereignism.
The truce concluded between Israel and Hamas has given rise to a deplorable spectacle. On the Hamas side, they are shouting “victory” over a field of ruins and corpses, with no regard for the fate of the Gazan population for whom the group has no other plan than that of martyrdom. On the Israeli side, Netanyahu is delighted with the parodies of “solutions” announced with incredible levity by President Trump. Here, K. shares a Palestinian voice, that of Ihab Hassan, first published in Liberties, who thinks in the only politically viable terms: those of a conflict between two equally just national claims, pointing to the horizon of a two-state solution.
Levinas’ thinking is above all rooted in an ethical concern, which seems to lift him to heights beyond the political fray. Yet at certain key points in his work, we find bold political considerations that can enlighten our action in the present. Here, Jean-François Rey introduces us to this side of the philosopher that is too often overlooked.
An artist, criminal and provocateur who lived and died on the fringes. Mitchell Abidor traces the journey of the Belgian-Jewish artist Stéphane Mandelbaum, who fused his Jewish identity, dyslexia, and obsession with both outcasts and perpetrators into creations that challenge and unsettle.
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