Jewish Questions

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.

“One thing never ceases to amaze me about Jews—their ability to marvel at the hostility directed against them. With every antisemitic murder, attack, massacre, or pogrom, we’re stunned. We are offended by the lack of empathy of our usual affable greengrocer; we are outraged by the reaction of the UN Secretary-General; we cannot stand the semantic contortions of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, worthy of the best Yeshiva students; we are revolted by the radical loneliness of the persecuted Jewish people. We rub our eyes every time, as we did the first day when we saw Harvard daddy’s boys denouncing the “genocide underway in Gaza” or the Queers for Palestine tearing down posters of Israeli hostages. But why are we surprised?”

In a short text written in June 1974, Pierre Goldman describes the nature of his relationship with Israel – a fundamental attachment without illusions. Taken from his correspondence with Vladimir Rabinovitch (Rabi), these few unpublished lines have been made public for the first time thanks to his son, Manuel Goldman.

A year ago, K. magazine opened a space for discussion and debate that focuses on the condition of European Jews and uses it as a lens to rethink the European situation. It is founded on the diagnosis of a double crisis, evidenced by antisemitism and concern about the continued presence of Jews in Europe on the one hand, and the difficulty for Europe to define its political horizon on the other. It takes as its starting point the conviction that, without being conflated, the two crises are linked and must be dealt with together. This text is an expanded version of the manifesto published in the first issue.