Interviews

For the first issue of 2025, we invite you to read or re-read the 7 most popular articles of the past year.   The Eternal Settler Benjamin Wexler – Published…

Following his op-ed piece with Raphaël Glucksmann in the columns of Le Monde, the K. editorial team wanted to give Daniel Cohn-Bendit the opportunity to expand on his resolutely critical stance towards the Israeli government and his support for recognition of a Palestinian state. In this interview, Julia Christ and Danny Trom ask him about his Judaism, his relationship with Zionism, how he perceives the pro-Palestinian movements and BDS, as well as Europe and populism…

How do Israeli academics react to the call for a boycott of their universities, and to the idea that they support the policies of the Hebrew state? What is their relationship with the Netanyahu government, and how has the war affected their academic freedom? To shed light on these questions, K. went to interview them directly. We publish the answers of Professors Itaï Ater and Alon Korngreen, members of the “Academics for Israeli Democracy” group, as well as those of Professor Eyal Benvenisti, member of the “Forum of Israeli Law Professors for Democracy”.

Is contemporary anti-Zionism a new version of “idiot socialism”? How can it be criticized from a left-wing perspective, without giving in to the sirens of reaction? In this interview, Mitchell Cohen, former editor-in-chief of Dissent magazine , gives us a few ways out of contemporary aporias. In the wake of the Trump victory, we also asked him to answer a few questions that might enlighten European readers about the American political situation.

What are the implications of the arrest warrants issued by the ICC against Netanyahu and Gallant? Should they be seen as a political judgment? To clarify the legal implications of this decision, K. went to interview legal expert Yann Jurovics – whom we had already interviewed about South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice, as well as about the request to issue arrest warrants before the ICC last May.

How did American Jews and their organizations position themselves during the presidential campaign, and what role did the Israel-Palestine conflict play in it? In this interview, conducted on the eve of Presidential Election Day, journalist and essayist Dara Horn sheds light on the political cleavages within the American Jewish world, and how they are at times instrumentalized.

In the West we tend to see the fall of communism as ushering in greater freedom for religious and other minorities. It’s true that after decades of post-war silence, Poland’s Jewish heritage industry, which includes a gleaming museum in the center of Warsaw, an annual Jewish culture festival in Krakow, and thousands of local efforts to excavate history, is flowering. But does this mean that Poland is overcoming its Jewish problem? Arlene Stein spoke to Anna Zawadzka, Polish sociologist, who examines the changing forms of antisemitism in Polish culture in a new book More than a Stereotype , cautioning us against such facile conclusions. 

Every 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 interviews with Etgar Keret, Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani, Tal Bruttmann, Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski, David Nirenberg and André Markowicz.

Some people claim that the French far-right party Rassemblement National (RN) is no longer antisemitic, and that the vast majority of Jews would vote for Bardella. To discuss these two dubious assertions, we spoke to film director and essayist Jonathan Hayoun– notably the author, with Judith Cohen-Solal, of La main du diable : Comment l’extrême droite a voulu séduire les Juifs de France (Grasset,2019) [TN:The Devil’s Hand: How the far right tried to seduce the Jews of France] –, and Johan Weisz, journalist and editor-in-chief and committed founder of the online media StreetPress. Interviewed by Elie Petit, they question the idea that, beyond the communication strategy, there would be a real normalization of the RN, while questioning the feeling of danger in which the Jews of France live, and its political consequences.