Culture

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.

In this text, Anne Simon examines the imagery conjured up by the massacres of 7 October: between the reference to the pogrom that was employed by many Jews to understand them, and the way in which they have been described by Hamas, i.e. as a flood. At the heart of this exploration is the motif of the ark, of a refuge that opens up the possibility of a future, but always runs the risk of proving more fragile than promised.

Gabriel Abensour believes that Franco-Judaism has forgotten its spiritual heritage. Deploring the adoption of an ultra-Orthodoxy that rigidifies practices and minds, and criticizing the lack of audacity of the institutions representing the Jewish community, he calls for a revival of a Judaism that knows both the value of revolutionary universalism and the intellectual richness of Sephardic civilization.

Is it possible to tell the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “in 600 words or less”, as an American media editor asked the Israeli writer Etgar Keret? Today, Keret says he feels unable to write. Although… By presenting, as he does today, a text – 600 words long – written 22 years ago, he demonstrates, in the “midst of the deterioration” of which we are contemporaries, the persistent feeling of being misunderstood by Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Filmmaker Ady Walter will be at the Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival in November to present Shttl. At the same screening will be The Boy, set in the Kfar Aza kibbutz where its director, Yahav Winner, spent his life. He was murdered there on 7 October. Reading the text that Yahav Winner wrote to present his film – and which Ady Walter will introduce – you will understand that Hamas has also massacred people who were concerned about the misery in Gaza and who wanted the peace process to be revived.

In 1903, in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom, Haïm Nahman Bialik left Odessa and went to the scene of the massacre to gather evidence from the survivors. He wrote a poem which, powerfully expressing his horror and anguish at the situation of the Jews of Eastern Europe at that moment in European history, immediately found a considerable echo in the Jewish world.

The release in French cinemas of The Goldman Trial raised questions for the editors of K. What mark has the activist left on French Jewish consciousness, particularly on the left? And what impact did he leave on the left after his assassination? It seemed obvious to us to turn to the philosopher Gérard Bensussan, who after seeing Cédric Kahn’s film entrusted us with this text in which he breaks down the figure of Pierre Goldman, caught up in his Jewish condition.

Each week this summer, K. brings you a selection of four articles that have already appeared in our pages, but which have been brought together for the occasion around a few key themes. This week: four first-person essays by Ruben Honigmann, Mona El Khoury, Danny Trom and Grigory Kanovitch.

A major figure in global intellectual debate, Jürgen Habermas is the author of a monumental body of philosophical work that can be read as the theoretical basis of the European political ideal since the Second World War. The consciousness of German crime and the Jewish contribution to European philosophy over its long history occupy a fundamental place in his thinking. This is what recalls this essay by philosopher Bruno Karsenti, conceived as a tribute. It is also a tribute to what the European spirit, as extended by Habermas, can still bring to today’s Jews.