Jewish Questions

At the 2025 Primo Levi Prize award ceremony in Genoa, the great American writer Jonathan Safran Foer delivered a powerful speech on memory, responsibility, and contemporary indifference. In a clear nod to Levi’s thinking, he evoked Gaza, called for moral vigilance in the face of global suffering, urged us to turn turmoil into ethical strength rather than weakness, and warned against becoming shadows of ourselves.

Who is invited to share the meal of liberated humanity, and what is there to eat? Through a comparison between the Seder and the Greco-Roman banquet, Ivan Segré highlights a specifically Jewish conception of liberation, and what it implies. For what is shared during this Jewish “feast of words” is the story of a liberation that took place but which, in order to be effective, must be re-enacted for each human being: “where do you stand, individually, with the story of your own exodus from Egypt?”

In the name of what promise, and what law, is the conquest of the promised land justified? Ivan Segré proposes a reading of the book of Judges, whose structure reveals the need to put to death the phallic, warmongering impulse that, yesterday as today, alienates Israel from its foundation.

On the occasion of the K. sur scène evening, centered on the theme of The Last of the Jews, Ruben Honigmann invited us to meditate on these never-ending endings. We publish the text of his speech.

Can Jewish religiosity blend with Zionism without ending up in messianism? Through this personal reading of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s latest essay, Mishnaic Consciousness, Biblical Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture, Noémie Issan-Benchimol introduces us to another way of thinking about Jewish existence in the land of Israel: the Safed model, for which there is no outside of exile.

Last February, Gabriel Abensour lamented in our columns the disarray of Franco-Judaism, deploring its lukewarmness and the forgetfulness of its spiritual heritage. After David Haziza, it is now Julien Darmon’s turn to offer a friendly retort. Rather than looking to the German model of the 19th century, or envying the spread of Anglo-Saxon Jewish thinkers, wouldn’t it be better to appreciate and encourage the intellectual creativity of the French Jewish world, in all its specificity?

The October 7 massacre sent shockwaves through the Jewish world, extending far beyond Israel. One year on, we present David Seymour’s concomitant reflections on the consequences of the massacre for Jews in the Diaspora. What if what was revealed was in fact the permanence, in new clothes, of the “Jewish Question”?

Each week this summer, K. brings you a selection of texts that have already appeared in our pages, but have been brought together for the occasion around a few key themes. This week, we invite you to (re)discover K.’s work on the words of conflict. With texts by Bruno Karsenti, Julia Christ, Danny Trom, Diana Muir and David Lemler.

What happens when the carelessness of ritual festivities comes to an end, and the merciless course of history takes over? In this text, Ruben Honigmann gives us an intimate account of the weekend of October 7-8, a weekend where the full extent of the event is not realized until the cell phones are switched back on. He makes this temporal and existential time lag an integral part of the turmoil of the Jews, who are condemned to limp along until the dawn of the 9th.