October 7

Introduction: The massacre of October 7, 2023, caused an earthquake whose shockwaves continue to reverberate throughout the Jewish world. In Israel, it reactivated the specter of pogroms, which the state was supposed to have made impossible; in the diaspora, it revealed the fragility of a security that was thought to be guaranteed. In this lecture given in Bern on October 9, historian Jacques Ehrenfreund examines what this event says about our times: the end of the post-Shoah era, the dissolution of European moral standards, and the persistence of a hostility that history seemed to have disqualified.

What is “traumatic invalidation”? According to psychologists Miri Bar-Halpern and Jaclyn Wolfman, it is a concept that could adequately describe the subjective effects of October 7 on the psyche of many Jews. Their important work is presented here by clinical psychologist Céline Masson.

October 7 did not only reopen the wound of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it also revived a fault line buried in the Western consciousness, particularly in Europe. The event laid bare the link between the history of the Middle East and that of the continent that scrutinizes its explosions. For October 7 was not only imported into the debates: it was reflected upon, revealing the internal crisis of a Europe uncertain of its post-Shoah and post-colonial legacy, and now divided between three irreconcilable narratives—the Western-oriented, the anti-colonial, and specifically the European. At the heart of this divide are two haunting questions: What remains of Europe if it can no longer recognize what the resurgence of antisemitism means, here and there? But also, what remains of Zionism as a European project if its response to antisemitism in terms of the rights of peoples eludes it just as much?

Throughout the summer, K. has brought you a weekly feature compiling five articles previously published in the magazine. To conclude this series and mark the start of the new season, we bring you some of the great interviews featured in the magazine this year: with David Nirenberg, Anna Zawadzka, Ruth Beckermann, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Steven J. Zipperstein.

This summer, K. invites you to rediscover a selection of five articles that have already appeared in the magazine. To kick things off, we have chosen the most read articles since the beginning of 2025: a diverse selection, but one that reflects the concerns of our readers. With texts by Benjamin Wexler, Jonathan Safran Foer, Stéphane Bou and interviews with Eva Illouz and Etgar Keret.

Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were buried yesterday, Wednesday, February 26, 2025. What hope did the Bibas family represent? What was at stake in the act of tearing down the posters showing the faces of the hostages in the public space? As pain mingles with rage at the discovery of the murder of the Bibas children and their mother, Bruno Karsenti examines their fate in the context of the persistence of Jewish life, and the struggle that it entails.

For the first issue of 2025, we invite you to read or re-read the 7 most popular articles of the past year.   The Eternal Settler Benjamin Wexler – Published…

The discovery of the bodies of the six hostages killed by Hamas, as the IDF approached the hideout where they were being held, has a profoundly contradictory meaning.
On the one hand, it shows the kind of enemy Israel is actually fighting: a movement whose aim is to murder Jews, one by one and as many as possible…

This week, we invite you to (re)discover K. ‘s texts on Judeo-American symbiosis. And its deterioration? With texts by Mitchell Abidor, Elie Petit, Mona El Khoury, Macha Fogel and Christian Voller.