Interviews

Né en 1925 à Vilnius, le YIVO – Institut scientifique juif – voulait être le « toit » de la culture yiddish. Cent ans plus tard, installé à New York, il reste la référence mondiale pour l’étude et la transmission de l’univers ashkénaze. À l’occasion de ce centenaire, nous avons rencontré l’historienne Cécile Kuznitz, qui retrace pour nous l’aventure intellectuelle et politique de cette institution unique.

The Institute for Jewish Policy Research is a British institute whose mission is to study and support Jewish life in Europe. In this interview, Jonathan Boyd, its director, discusses the major challenges facing European Judaism in the midst of change, and considers how to measure and understand the rise of antisemitism.

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.

Historian Deborah Lipstadt was the special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism under the Biden administration. In this interview, she shares her perception of the debates rocking the United States on this issue, between fears that Trump will exploit the fight against antisemitism and the progressive camp’s refusal to clean house.

This summer, K. invites you to rediscover a selection of five articles that have already appeared in the magazine. To kick things off, we have chosen the most read articles since the beginning of 2025: a diverse selection, but one that reflects the concerns of our readers. With texts by Benjamin Wexler, Jonathan Safran Foer, Stéphane Bou and interviews with Eva Illouz and Etgar Keret.

The spectacle of extreme polarization that is inflaming American society, particularly with regard to its university system, could make us forget the importance of the old tradition of liberal pragmatism. The interview we had with historian David Bell, professor at Princeton, reminds us of this, by refusing to exaggerate or euphemize the deeply divisive issue of antisemitism on campus. As Trump and the most radical fringes of campus progressivism battle for the right to sabotage the American university, David Bell points to the place where the fight against antisemitism and the defense of the university are intertwined.

In this interview with Danny Trom, Yehudah Mirsky looks back at the intellectual and spiritual roots of religious Zionism, from its internal tensions to its contemporary manifestations. Underlying this is the figure of Rav Kook, a mystic and visionary who is now claimed by the most opposing factions of the Israeli religious Zionist scene. One question arises out of this exploration: how did a movement born of an ideal of reconciliation between tradition and modernity partly derive into becoming the vehicle for an aggressive nationalist messianism.

While certain historical truths are too often silenced, stating them does not necessarily mean taking on the role of demystifier. The great merit of this interview with Benny Morris, first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 20, 2025 [on the eve of the US attack], is that it illustrates how accurate and lucid historical work can lead to salutary political clarifications. As the war with Iran raged, the Israeli historian, a leading figure among the “new historians” of the 1980s and author of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 – a pioneering work on the causes of the Palestinian exodus – revisited the roots of the Middle East conflict and the myths surrounding it.

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