Throughout the summer, K. has brought you a weekly feature compiling five articles previously published in the magazine. To conclude this series and mark the start of the new season, we bring you some of the great interviews featured in the magazine this year: with David Nirenberg, Anna Zawadzka, Ruth Beckermann, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Steven J. Zipperstein.
David Nirenberg: ‘Anti-Judaism Is a Means of Thinking the World’
David Haziza – Published September 15, 2022
David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition proved an instant classic of Jewish studies on its publication a decade ago. Nirenberg, a scholar of the Middle Ages and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, presents anti-Judaism as a structural discourse in the history of the West (and arguably in the history of the world at large). The figure of the “Jew,” and the bugbear of “Judaism,” he maintains, have served as epistemic tools for philosophers and theologians to define themselves – and Western civilization – over and against. In such a scheme, Judaism morphs from religion into foil, the Jew from living being into abstraction; and even societies hosting few or no Jews can entertain “Jewish questions.” Nirenberg’s study starts in the Egypt of the Hellenistic Period and ends in our own time.
>>> Read the interview with David Nirenberg by David Haziza
Poland’s Jewish (and Communist) Problem
Arlene Stein – Published October 2, 2024
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.
>>> Read the interview with Anna Zawadzka by Arlene Stein
“Talking About Jews Was Taboo”: An Interview with Ruth Beckermann
Liam Hoare – Published February 6, 2025
The documentary work of Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952) has played an important role in shaping Austria’s relationship with its past. In this interview with the Viennese filmmaker and writer, Liam Hoare and Beckermann discuss some of the documentaries in her rich filmography, and how they blend political activism and Judaism, in the context of a gradual rise of the far right and a taboo on the fate of Jews during the war.
>>> Read the interview with Ruth Beckermann by Liam Hoare
Cohn-Bendit: “Israelis must be pro-Palestinian and Palestinians pro-Israeli”.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit – Published December 19, 2024
Daniel Cohn-Bendit has just published Memories of a Stateless Person (Souvenirs d’un apatride), with Flammarion. On this occasion, we are republishing the interview that appeared last December, after his column with Raphaël Glucksmann in Le Monde. When asked here about his Judaism, his relationship to Zionism, his perception of pro-Palestinian movements and BDS, as well as Europe and populism, he develops his resolutely critical position of the Israeli government and his support for the recognition of a Palestinian state.
>>> Read the interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit by Julia Christ and Danny Trom
Kichinev, 1903: from pogrom to myth
Steven J. Zipperstein / Stéphane Bou & Elena Guritanu – Published June 12, 2025
In Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, Steven J. Zipperstein revisits the 1903 massacre in Kichinev, a local event that became a global trauma in the modern Jewish consciousness. More than just an account of violence, his investigation reveals how this pogrom—widely reported, interpreted, and mythologized—shaped contemporary Jewish history: it fueled the rise of Zionism, sparked global mobilization, inspired literature and the press, and forged a lasting paradigm of Jewish vulnerability. Using an approach that combines microhistory and cultural analysis, the American historian dismantles simplistic narratives, questions distortions of memory, and reveals how a provincial tragedy crystallized the major political, social, and symbolic tensions of 20th-century Jewry.
>>> Read the interview with Steven J. Zipperstein by Stéphane Bou & Elena Guritanu
