History

France was the first of the European countries to emancipate the Jews. The revolutionaries’ promise of freedom and equality for every Jew was not always honored. The Jews suffered for…

Nicknamed the ‘Je Sais Tout’ brothers, Joseph, Salomon and Théodore Reinach represent both the academic excellence and the extreme assimilation of French Jews at the turn of the 20th century….

The anti-vax and anti-sanitary pass demonstrations, where yellow stars flourish, are the social movement of the summer, in France as in Europe. For Julia Christ, it is not the “anti-system” rear-guard of society that is expressing itself through the gesture of hijacking this historical symbol, but rather a kind of hyper-individualist and ultra-liberal avant-garde.

Following the Euro 2020 final, K. opens its columns to SoFoot, republishing an article which has just received the Franco-German Journalism Prize in the Young Talents category. Adrien Candau and Julien Duez tell the story of Emmanuel Schaffer, born in Ukraine but raised in Germany, a survivor of the Holocaust who became the mythical coach of the Israeli team. After making Aliyah, Schaffer returned to the country of his childhood in the late 1950s to learn their methods of play. Criticized for this choice, he gave the Jewish state a winning team and led the country’s soccer team to its one and only World Cup appearance.

How did Jews come to be defined as white? The answer can be found in a relatively new form of critical discourse, presently in vogue, in which ‘whiteness’ functions not as an empirical descriptor, but a politico-moral distinction. Read the second part of Balázs Berkovits’ essay on the implications of this shift, “What Color Are the Jews?”

How did Jews come to be defined as “white” by a critical discourse in vogue today? Why do we label Jews as dominant or privileged – and Israel as a colonial entity practicing apartheid motivated by Jewish and white supremacism? Part one of an essay by Balázs Berkovits on the supposed color of Jews…

Would the prohibition of ritual slaughter jeopardize the very existence of a European Judaism? What is at stake goes beyond the simple comfort of the Jewish community: it is the durability of the pact linking Jews to the continent that is at stake. Beyond that, the identity of Europe and the place it intends to give, in the twenty-first century, to its own Hebrew roots are at stake. Here is the second part of David Haziza’s essay on ‘shehita’ in Europe.

How do we explain the return of pogrom imagery as Israel grapples with interethnic violence between Jews and Arabs? More than seven decades after the state’s founding and the end of the British Mandate, why does such language persist? Examining the spate of Jewish-Arab clashes, Danny Trom reflects on the political dimension of majority-minority relations in Israel.

The Humboldt Forum’s vocation is to host exhibitions on non-European cultures. But this ethnographic museum is now at the center of a controversy over the ownership of artworks and objects obtained during the German colonial empire in Africa and Asia. In this interview with the art historian Horst Bredekamp, we wanted to learn more about a forgotten German ethnographic tradition – and in particular about the contribution of Jewish scholars and collectors within this tradition.