Culture

In our final summer issue, we present you with a selection of texts that have already appeared in our pages, grouped around a key theme. With the end of summer and the soon to be starting new Jewish calendar year, this week we turn our eye to the complexity of Jewish identity and experience and the culture of questioning that accompanies us throughout – with perspectives from Ivan Segré, Mona El Khoury, Ruben Honigmann, Astrid von Busekist and Noémie Issan-Benchimol. 

Every week this summer, K. brings you a selection of six texts that have already appeared in our pages and have been brought together around a few key themes. This week, we invite you to (re)discover K.’s literary texts, with pieces by Moshe Sakal, Berl Kotlerman, Avishag Zafrani, Julia Christ, Stéphane Bou and Maxime Decout.

Each week this summer, K. brings you a selection of six texts that have already appeared in our pages, and have been brought together for the occasion around a few key themes. This week, we invite you to (re)discover K. ‘s work about the realities of and stories to be told from life in Eastern Europe. With texts by Benny Ziffer, Gabriel Rom, Romano Bolkovic, Yeshaya Dalsace, Emmy Barouh and János Gadó.

Every week this summer, K. brings you a selection of six texts that have already appeared in our pages, but have been brought together for the occasion around a few key themes. This week, we invite you to (re)discover some of the first-person accounts written for K. With texts by Ruben Honigmann, Yossef Murciano, Judith Lyon-Caen, Judith Offenberg, Ivan Segré, Gabriel Abensour and Frédéric Brenner.

This week, we invite you to (re)discover K. ‘s texts on Judeo-American symbiosis. And its deterioration? With texts by Mitchell Abidor, Elie Petit, Mona El Khoury, Macha Fogel and Christian Voller.

After having published a review of Motl in America a month ago, Mitchell Abidor returns in his text to this extraordinary tale of Jewish immigration to the United States. Blending his family’s memories with Sholem-Aleichem’s account, Abidor recounts the journey to the “Promised Land”, the new arrivals’ disorientation and their acculturation to American society. Above all, he pays tribute to the unfailing optimism of these Jews who had left “Pogromland”.

“It is the calm after the storm. / It is the calm before the storm. / We know what happened. / We got back to normality. / We know what is yet to come. / We will lose said normality. / War is here, and more is coming.”

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.

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Thanks to the Paris office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their cooperation in the design of the magazine’s website.