History

“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.

To keep the memory alive of the great historian Pierre Nora, who passed away on Monday, June 2, alive, we are republishing a text by Danny Trom—originally published in La France en récits—which explores the echoes between Nora’s Rethinking France project and Yerushalmi’s Zakhor. Two fundamentally different, even opposing, approaches to memory, yet both addressing the question of Jewish emancipation in the modern nation and what remains of their historical consciousness when the Republic fails to keep its promises.

How did a classic work of Jewish thought written in Arabic in the 12th century, which claims the absolute superiority of Jews and Hebrew, come to be cited by both the Israeli far right and the most radical fringes of anti-Zionism? To dispel this mystery and the misreadings of this text, David Lemler immersed himself in Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari. His interpretation reveals an unexpected utopia, that of the Jewish state of the Khazars, whose critical function could help us escape contemporary aporias.