Testimony

Danny Trom’s article “Holy Week on Xanax” sparked numerous reactions. Among the letters, some more constructive than others, one stood out: the response from anthropologist and historian Leopoldo Iribarren, which the editorial staff of K. unanimously decided to publish. Danny Trom, having come to his senses but far from repenting, responds to his colleague’s friendly challenge.

Keith Kahn-Harris, author of Everyday Jews: Why the Jewish people are not who you think they are, questions, with a hint of provocation, this strange and alienating Jewish tendency to want to make themselves indispensable to the world. What if the best response to antisemitism was ultimately to claim the right to frivolity, to allow oneself a perfectly superfluous existence?

From the Iran-Iraq War to the bloody suppression of uprisings, to the current war, which has buried the Mullahs’ nuclear hopes, the memory of violence runs through an entire generation of Iranians. Iranian poet Atefe Asadi, now a refugee in Germany, shared her story with us. She questions the ethics of states faced with a criminal regime that has gone unpunished for decades. Between traumatic memories, lucid anger, and unyielding hope, she paints a portrait of an abandoned people. She looks back on the bloody repression, the lost illusions, and the ongoing war—and yet continues to dream of a free Iran.

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Three biographical excerpts from a Jewish lineage, transplanted between Algeria and France, are what philosopher François-David Sebbah offers us here. He himself is at the end of the story, in the guise of a child. It is by becoming a child again that he has written the book “His Lives in Africa”, from which these few pages are taken. He did so in order to better understand and reveal what has been secretly preserved and displaced within him from his eminently French Sephardic memory. We see that he himself is suspended in the manner of a paragraph attached to a longer text, impossible to unify, however, and therefore destined to appear in fragments.

From the unpaved streets of Sziget to the affluent suburbs of Manchester, Stephen Pogany traces the remarkable, often harrowing journey of Nóra Platschek, a Jewish woman whose quiet resilience defied war, exile, and loss. Through family records, personal memories, and historical insight, this deeply human narrative challenges antisemitic myths and reclaims the dignity of ordinary lives swept up in extraordinary times.

By coincidence, Danny Trom had planned his family vacation in Seville during Holy Week. Lost amid the processions of penitents, and with Xanax proving insufficient to counteract what was undoubtedly an atavistic Jewish anxiety, he improvised himself as a journalist covering this archaic experience of Catholicism.

For International Women’s Rights Day, K. is publishing a text that is a departure from its usual line. A young Jewish woman sent us a manuscript that, pastiching the famous SCUM Manifesto (1967) by radical feminist activist Valerie Solanas, virulently expresses her anger at the Jewish world’s deafness to the demands for women’s emancipation. This anger is the political expression we get from bottling up what’s ready to explode.

Among all the more or less pleasant letters sent to the K. editorial team , one in particular warmed our hearts, so much so that Julia Christ read it out at our K. on stage evening in Paris in December. It comes from one of our most esteemed contributors who, paradoxically, has just discovered that he writes for the magazine.