Interviews

Continuation of Revue K.’s interviews and reports from Israel. Julia Christ and Elie Petit met with attorney and founder of the Movement for Quality Government, Eliad Shraga. One of our interviewees called him “the biggest judicial troublemaker in the country”. He is a leading figure in the fight against corruption and for the rule of law. His case for the drafting of ultra-Orthodox into the army will have its final decision on June 2nd and could represent an important threat to the current coalition.

What about the request to issue arrest warrants against the three main leaders of Hamas as well as against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant just announced by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court? While his statement immediately aroused a hubbub of positions, we returned to question Yann Jurovics—a lawyer specializing in crimes against humanity and former expert at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda—for clarity.

How do Israeli universities avoid getting overwhelmed by the conflict? In this interview – the second in our series of reports from Israel – Mona Khoury, the first Arab Vice-President in the history of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, describes the successful efforts made to ensure the continuity of university life after October 7 and in spite of the conflict. All this while taking a critical look at how, elsewhere in the world, campuses have allowed themselves to be overrun by the ideological conflagration.

Dara Horn is a journalist, essayist and professor of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. In this interview, she talks about what prompted her to write People Love Dead Jews in 2021, and the question this book explores: why do dead Jews arouse so much more interest than living Jews? Between the ritualization of a sterilized memory of the Holocaust, fascination with the figure of the Jew reduced to helpless victimhood and denial of the actuality of antisemitism, Dara Horn questions the deeply ambiguous way in which the West, and America in particular, relates to Jews, and to the ghosts they evoke.

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.