Interviews

What is the significance of this massive return to the history and memory of the Holocaust as a point of reference since the October 7 massacres, and what is the significance of the proliferation of the word “genocide” to condemn Israel’s war on Gaza? How should we understand speeches that claim that Israel is instrumentalizing the memory of the Holocaust to justify a war that is considered genocidal, echoing the trope that the victims have become the executioners? We asked Tal Bruttmann to shed some light on these questions.

Ber Kotlerman was born in Irkutsk, Soviet Union, in 1971. He grew up in Birobidjan—the “autonomous Jewish region” founded in May 1934 at the edge of the USSR on the Chinese border, with Yiddish as its official language. Ber Kotlerman has lived in Israel for thirty years, where he teaches Yiddish literature and culture at Bar-Ilan University. His novel “Koydervelsh,” which takes the reader from Birobidjan to Tel Aviv, has just been published. This is his fourth book of prose in Yiddish—the first, a collection of short stories, was published in Tel Aviv; the second, a thriller based on rabbinic responsa, in New York; and the third, a family epic, in Buenos Aires. However, he says that everything he writes is in one way or another linked to the region of his childhood, Birobidjan, which is the subject of this interview by Macha Fogel, conducted in Yiddish.

The book by historians Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani – Race and History in Western Societies (15th-18th centuries) – intersects with many issues familiar to readers of Revue K. It recounts the construction of the concept of “race”, as it plays out in racist thought, as a process spanning several centuries, from the imperialist Ancien Régime to the modern period. It thus offers a much richer history of racism than those often limited to the scientistic theories of the late 19th century. Above all, the book places the “Jewish question” at the heart of its history of the concept of race: election, obstinacy and the invisibility of differences are all problems that Christian societies have encountered in their relationship with the Jews, and whose mark racism bears. Interview with the authors.

Ady Walter’s film Shttl, shot in Yiddish and in Ukraine, will be released in the coming months. It offers an opportunity to reflect on Ukrainian Jewish identity, historically and up to the present day. Akadem brought together the director Ady Walter, the historian Thomas Chopard, a specialist in Ukrainian and Eastern European Jews, and Tal Hever-Chybowski, director of the Maison de la culture yiddish in Paris. K. transcribes here the essential part of their discussion, moderated by Macha Fogel.

After publishing a text in K. about her work as a documentary filmmaker on the issue of Jews regaining their Spanish nationality, the journalist Juliette Senik went to Lisbon to meet José Rebeiro e Castro, the policymaker behind the Law granting Portuguese nationality through naturalization to the descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews. Here is an opportunity to read an interview — conducted shortly before the Law was frozen — on the place of the Jews in Europe in the long history of their persecution and the attempts of a country to rewrite it.

In Poland, the traditional conception of the nation is based on the idea that Polishness is inherently linked to Catholicism. In her latest book, sociologist Geneviève Zubrzycki examines the outlines of what is regularly called a “Jewish revival” in Poland. She explains how the philosemitism of progressive Poles is a manifestation of their attempts to break down the equation between Polishness and Catholicism in order to define a more inclusive and pluralist conception of national identity.

Continuation of Avishag Zafrani’s interview with the philosophers Gérard Bensussan and Ivan Segré on the political uses of the Jewish tradition within the modern revolutionary tradition. How can we think about the processes of secularization of elements of the prophetic or messianic tradition at work on the extreme left, and their participation in the ideas of emancipation and redemption of the world? Why this permanence of a theological-political impulse in the context of our European political modernity?

How can we understand the emergence of a political use of Jewish tradition within a certain radical left? Is this use paradoxical, ideologically overdetermined, or does it proceed from a real interest in certain religious sources, susceptible of reviving a revolutionary messianism? We put the question to philosophers Ivan Segré and Gérard Bensussan, who know both the Jewish tradition and that of the revolutionary left.

As of this summer, Pinchas Goldschmidt is no longer the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, a position he held for almost thirty years. Born in Zurich, he arrived in Russia in 1988, during the Gorbachev era, to work on restoring Jewish life at the time of perestroika. He decided to leave his adopted country after the invasion of Ukraine, when he was pressured to support the war. K. met him while in Paris for a meeting of the Institute for Religious Freedom and Security in Europe (IFFSE), of which he is a founding member, as President of the Conference of European Rabbis.