Culture

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.

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.