Politics - Anti-semitism

On Friday 3 June, Danielle Simonnet, a figure from French political party La France Insoumise, welcomed the support of Jeremy Corbyn, who came from London to beat the pavement in the fifteenth constituency of Paris where she is running for the NUPES (the alliance of the left parties) in the upcoming legislative elections. There was an immediate and legitimate indignation from those who do not have a short memory: they remember Labour’s complacency towards antisemitism when Corbyn was its boss. Danielle Simonnet spoke out: for her, Corbyn is only the “victim of a crude manipulation”. Milo Lévy-Bruhl – who with Adrien Zirah had already analysed in K. the EHRC report on anti-Semitism within the English left-wing party – returns to it this week for Danielle Simonnet’s good information. He takes the opportunity to reflect on the fate of a union of the left, which is undoubtedly desirable today, provided that some of those who lead it no longer deny the reality of the resurgence of anti-Semitism, including on the left.

The plethora of charges made against Jews requires a constant reworking of the concepts used to characterize these phenomena. In recent years, the notion of “secondary anti-Semitism” or “guilt-rejecting anti-Semitism” has thus been invoked to characterize new forms of anti-Jewish hostility that relate to the Holocaust in order to deny it, relativize it, reverse the responsibility for it, etc.

On October 20, Cassandre Fristot’s judgment was rendered by the French Court. So we wanted to go back to the rhetoric of the poster, and its “Who?”, brandished by this far-right activist during a demonstration against the health pass. The image quickly went viral in France. It provides a model of anti-Semitism to be decoded, where the speaker has to say what he thinks while hiding and encoding the violence of his words in order to make them circulate in the public space.

The controversy set off by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism is curious and sometimes befuddling. What motivated the Jerusalem Declaration on antisemitism issued last March?

Last November, 122 Palestinian and Arab intellectuals issued a “Declaration on Antisemitism”. At its core are two assertions: that antisemitism must be recognized and fought; and that criticism of Israel…

At regular intervals, Rudy Reichstadt, the director of the Internet website Conspiracy Watch, will write for K. a column on anti-Jewish conspiracy theories in Europe. First of all, let’s take a look at the frequency with which anti-Semitic motifs appear in contemporary conspiracy culture.

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Thanks to the Paris office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their cooperation in the design of the magazine’s website.