Article by Danny Trom

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 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?

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.

What is the “it” whose repetition the slogan “Never again” seeks to ward off? At a time when the use of this phrase is becoming commonplace, to the point where some are turning it against the State of Israel, Danny Trom traces its genesis, beyond the reference to the Holocaust. Questioning the way in which Zionist pioneers appropriated the story of the fortress of Masada’s heroic resistance to the Roman legions, he sheds light on how the slogan relates to the Jewish condition, and how it can still inform our perspective on the current situation.

The longer Israel’s military response in Gaza drags on, the more the memory of October 7 seems to fade in international public opinion. In this text, Danny Trom draws the consequences of such a development—the emergence of a clear divide between those for whom the event has passed and those who, increasingly isolated, keep it firmly in mind.

“Israel faces the vertigo of vengeance” was the headline of an article published in Le Monde a week after 7 October. But to imagine that Israel will act in this way is to delude oneself. Danny Trom explains why Israel will not and cannot avenge itself by deciphering what this omnipresent warning imperceptibly conveys.

Daniel Boyarin, Professor of History of Religions and a renowned specialist in Talmudic Culture and Ancient Judaism, has published this year The No-State Solution. A Jewish Manifesto [Yale University Press], which claims on its back cover to be a “provocative book”. “provocative book”. Danny Trom discusses the anti-Zionism and “diasporic nationalism” that Boyarin promotes.

Confronted with the illiberal temptations of the Netanyahu government, how can we sort out the criticisms of Israel that aim to find a solution by recalling what was the main intention of this state and those that aim to destroy it ? And, in particular, how can the criticism from Jews in the Diaspora, especially from Europe, free itself from its inhibitions and fears of being misused in order to assert its singular position?

In Communist Romania, Jews were traded for pigs, calves or cows. This is how Sonia Devillers’ grandparents – as she recounts in Les Exportés (Flammarion, September 2022, not yet translated into English) – were able to pass to the West. A picture of blood and guts emerges from Romania: after being slaughtered by hand, the surviving Jews were worth just about the price of the animals for which they were exchanged.