Politics

The large demonstrations that took place last year in Malmö against Israel’s participation in Eurovision, and the tone of the rhetoric, gave good reason to be concerned about Swedish antisemitism. But what is the true extent of this scourge, its impact on Sweden’s Jewish community, and how is it being addressed by the authorities? By placing these issues in a broader historical context, David Stavrou’s investigation, which we are publishing as part of our partnership with the DILCRAH, seeks to answer these questions.

The contemporary anti-Zionist left has decided to reject the idea that one can be both Zionist and left-wing. Yet this possibility is clearly attested to by a whole section of Israel’s political history, as well as by the political movements to which many Jews in the diaspora adhere. Julien Chanet, drawing on sources and references found in Paris and Brussels, examines the causes and consequences of this “anti-Zionist truism” that insists that “left-wing Zionism” is an oxymoron. By choosing to denigrate this reality rather than consider it, anti-Zionism not only aims to make Jews a little more alien to the left, but paradoxically becomes the objective ally of reactionary Zionism, blocking any prospect of a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

How does the most “critical” fringe of French universities justify its desire to boycott Israeli higher education institutions? Our resident watchdog, Karl Kraus, has looked into the report commissioned by a number of lecturers and students at Sciences Po Strasbourg to assert the need to break off all partnerships with Reichmann University. All he discovered was the frustration of searching for guilt without finding it, and the perfidy of maintaining the initial bias despite everything.

The aftermath of October 7 has profoundly reshaped Jewish identity and community practices, as well as how they are perceived by the rest of Western societies. In this article, demographer Sergio DellaPergola offers a general assessment of these changes from an Israeli perspective, highlighting what he believes are the major issues facing the future of the Jewish people.

Hadas Ragolsky, former journalist, activist and founder of the Women in Red movement, met twice with K., the first time in her office in Tel Aviv City Hall in June 2024, and the second time this past week to talk about the repeated assaults on democracy and on the opposition resistance as well as women’s rights while part of the Israeli society is marching against Benyamin Netanyahu’s government dangerous actions. A strong call for a Diaspora support to the movements of protests.

Faced with the collective experience of modern powerlessness, democracies are doubting and populists across the board are promising to regain control by ‘taking action’. Goethe’s Faust and Walter White, the hero of Breaking Bad, paradigmatic figures separated by two centuries, embody this headlong rush: when understanding the world is no longer easy, we destroy and rebuild it. But always, in the shadow of these stories, a Jewish figure accompanies the destructive impulse, embodies negation, or bears the blame. In moments when modernity cracks, what becomes of the Jewish minority, asks the philosopher Julia Christ? While large sections of our societies are listening to the whispers that promise an immediate way out of powerlessness, she reminds us that only the possibility of building solidarity can guarantee minorities against the tyranny of majority desire.

David Hirsh was invited, in his capacity as academic director of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, to the International Conference on Combating Antisemitism organized by the Israeli Ministry of the Diaspora. In this text, he explains why he chose not to participate in this initiative which, by giving pride of place to the extreme right, discredits the fight against antisemitism and endangers Jews in the diaspora.

Can the fight against antisemitism be anything other than a parody when it is organized by the far right? By inviting members of Europe’s authoritarian and xenophobic right to parade on the stage of its “International Conference on Combating Antisemitism”, the Israeli Ministry of the Diaspora has committed a serious political error, which rings like a betrayal of its mission. Here, Michael Brenner reports on the drift represented by this move and the trap into which it is locking Jews.

Hatred of mediation and language, abolition of differences in an all-or-nothing logic, a solipsistic dream in which the world disappears: in this aphoristic text, the philosopher Gérard Bensussan proposes a conceptual approach to nihilism. This pathology of reason appears, beyond the diversity of its manifestations, as that which threatens thought as soon as it forgets its outside – a slope on which the critical gesture easily slides, and where the old Jewish question is encountered.