Article by Julia Christ

Faced with the collective experience of modern powerlessness, democracies are doubting and populists across the board are promising to regain control by ‘taking action’. Goethe’s Faust and Walter White, the hero of Breaking Bad, paradigmatic figures separated by two centuries, embody this headlong rush: when understanding the world is no longer easy, we destroy and rebuild it. But always, in the shadow of these stories, a Jewish figure accompanies the destructive impulse, embodies negation, or bears the blame. In moments when modernity cracks, what becomes of the Jewish minority, asks the philosopher Julia Christ? While large sections of our societies are listening to the whispers that promise an immediate way out of powerlessness, she reminds us that only the possibility of building solidarity can guarantee minorities against the tyranny of majority desire.

How do Israeli academics react to the call for a boycott of their universities, and to the idea that they support the policies of the Hebrew state? What is their relationship with the Netanyahu government, and how has the war affected their academic freedom? To shed light on these questions, K. went to interview them directly. We publish the answers of Professors Itaï Ater and Alon Korngreen, members of the “Academics for Israeli Democracy” group, as well as those of Professor Eyal Benvenisti, member of the “Forum of Israeli Law Professors for Democracy”.

What are the implications of the arrest warrants issued by the ICC against Netanyahu and Gallant? Should they be seen as a political judgment? To clarify the legal implications of this decision, K. went to interview legal expert Yann Jurovics – whom we had already interviewed about South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice, as well as about the request to issue arrest warrants before the ICC last May.

We know without a shadow of a doubt that the far right is structurally antisemitic. We even know it so well that we sometimes forget that antisemitism is not structurally extreme right-wing. In this text, Julia Christ examines the deleterious effects of this discrepancy between what is known, and what does not want to be known. Without changing its ideological matrix, the far right has turned suspicion into strength – the ability to assume what it does and control what it says – aided and abetted by opponents who, rather than assuming their political responsibility, take refuge in childish posturing: “we didn’t know…”.

“We have to differentiate between anti-Zionism and antisemitism”, say those who don’t like being called antisemitic. On the face of it, there’s nothing foolish about this demand: it’s necessary to distinguish between legitimate criticism of the Jewish state and dubious feelings towards Jews. But is it really necessary to invent a specific word for this criticism? Philosopher Julia Christ traces the various possible uses of the notion of “anti-Zionism” and asks under what conditions, and in what context, criticism of the State of Israel can legitimately be called anti-Zionist. This brief analysis of state criticism and its modalities provides a clearer picture of when anti-Zionism is just another word for antisemitism.

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?

In the aftermath of the 7 October massacre, the Israeli left saw how a section of the global left in the United States and Europe refused to condemn the murder of 1,200 men, women and children, most of them Jewish. Within the extreme left, some even glorified the pogrom as a decolonising event and expressed no hesitation in their objective support for Hamas. Adam Raz – interviewed in K. this week- was one of the authors of the open letter expressing his ‘concern at the inadequate response of someAmerican and European progressives to Hamas’s targeting of Israeli civilians, a response that reflects a disturbing trend in the political culture of the global left’. Julia Christ looks back at the disillusionment of the Israeli left and sets out the political lessons to be learned from the rift that has emerged between the Israeli left and part of the global left. 

European and American universities, once considered politically neutral, have gradually become involved in political statements in solidarity with victims of injustice. However, when it comes to events related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these same universities, without consulting each other, have generally remained silent, tacitly and collectively. They have thus revealed their fundamental reluctance to take a stand on any issue concerning the Jews, especially when the issue is their mass murder as Jews and in the most important Jewish centre in the world, Israel. Why is this so? What does it mean, in particular, that the majority of the social sciences have become incapable of studying the Jewish condition from an objective point of view, whether in the Diaspora or in Israel, and seem to have an irresistible tendency, without admitting it, to place “the Jews” in the camp of the “dominant”?

On 30 January 1933, ninety years ago this week, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich. Faced with this event, the whole of Europe was waiting for one person to speak: Karl Kraus, a Viennese Jew, a radical pamphleteer and universally feared polemicist who had founded The Torch in 1899, a newspaper of which he was the sole editor from 1911 and from the arrows of which few of his contemporaries escaped. But Karl Kraus refuses to speak. Instead of commenting on the ‘event’, he tries to make all those who want to ‘talk about it’ understand why there is nothing more to say. Julia Christ examines the silence of the man who until then had always found something to talk about and gives an account of its significance for the history of Europe.