The paradoxes of today’s antisemitism
How can we explain the disarray of the European conscience in the face of the rise of antisemitism it promised itself it would “never again”...
Category: Memory/History
Memory/History does not merely integrate Jews into Europe through the memory of their persecution, reduced to victims to be commemorated. It also seeks to examine what European history becomes when told from the Jewish experience itself: not only the violence suffered, the abandonment and failure of states, but also the way in which a minority has navigated the promises of emancipation, exclusions, and political recompositions of the continent.
This Jewish perspective on history is not limited to commenting on the history of others: it also implies a distinct Jewish history, with its continuities, ruptures, internal debates, and ways of life and thought. To think about the relationship between Memory and History is to move from a narrative that “includes” Jews to a narrative displaced by this dual perspective – Jewish and European – which forces us to reinterpret the 20th century and contemporary forms of politics. The texts gathered here explore this shift: from commemoration to analysis, from an assigned memory to a history in which the Jewish experience becomes a decisive vantage point from which to observe European impasses and renunciations.
From 1791 to the present day: French Jews, a Republican passion
The Jews, “ Happy as God in France ”? In this lecture, given at the CRIF symposium “ The Jews in the Republic”, historian Pierre...
Last Words
In Last Words, Philip Schlesinger weaves a deeply personal narrative about the final moments of his parents' lives, Béla and Martha Schlesinger, Jewish refugees who...
Anti-Judaism, critical thinking and the possibility of history
What if anti-Judaism were not just an irrational prejudice against Jews, but a fundamental structure of Western thought? This is the thesis defended by David...
