History

The comments, that were made by the Minister for Equal Opportunities in the Meloni government questioning school trips to Auschwitz, have reignited an old debate about the memory of the Shoah in the Italian public sphere. Serena Di Nepi, a historian specializing in the Jewish diaspora, explains why she has never taken part in these “ Remembrance Trips,” even though they have become a central civic ritual. Between family history, intimate transmission, and institutional ceremony, she explores the profound disconnect between Jewish memory and national memory, and how Judaism continues to express itself in Italy outside of official commemorative frameworks.

For historian Omer Bartov, the memory of the Shoah has overshadowed the Nakba and contributes to the continuation of the Palestinian catastrophe: in his latest book, he seeks to place them within the same historical and moral context. Eva Illouz offers us her interpretation of this endeavor, which questions Bartov’s political blinders: to what extent is comparison reasonable and does not distort the subjects it seeks to compare?

“Betrayal” is the appropriate word to describe what the ruling coalition in Israel is doing to the spirit of Zionism. While we hope that the end of the war in Gaza will be an opportunity for Israel to get off this slippery slope, German historian of Zionism Michael Brenner reminds us here what the founding fathers, across the political spectrum, had in mind when they envisioned the creation of a democratic Jewish state.

In March 1973, Robert Badinter — the French lawyer, humanist, and future justice minister who would later lead the fight to abolish the death penalty — delivered a little-known but crucial courtroom plea during the first trial brought under France’s newly enacted Pleven Law, which criminalized incitement to racial hatred. The case centered on a piece of Soviet propaganda in which antisemitism hid behind the mask of anti-Zionism. In his argument, Badinter wove together law, history, and Jewish memory with remarkable moral clarity.
To mark his recent induction into the Panthéon, France’s secular temple to its national heroes, K. publishes the full text of this 1973 plea — a powerful early example of Badinter’s lifelong fight against antisemitism and his commitment to socialist and humanist principles. The document is introduced and annotated by historian editor-in-chief of Droit de vivre Emmanuel Debono.

While the Polish state continues to systematically deny Polish responsibility for the Holocaust and engages in a continuous effort to distort memory, two eminent specialists on these issues, Jan and Katarzyna Grabowski, are sounding the alarm and calling for transparency in memory policy.

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.

This summer, K. invites you to rediscover, in each of its weekly issues, a feature consisting of five articles previously published in the magazine. This week with five pieces by…

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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.