Each week this summer, K. brings you a selection of four articles that have already appeared in our pages, but which have been brought together for the occasion around a few key themes. This week: a dossier on the Left, Jews and antisemitism today, with articles by Milo Lévy-Bruhl, Jonas Pardo, Sylvaine Bulle and Hugo Latzer.
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The Future of the Left and the Battle Against Antisemitism
By Milo Lévy-Bruhl – Published on June 8 2022
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.
>>> Read Milo Lévy-Bruhl’s text
From silence to fighting antisemitism: the turn of a radical left-wing Jew
By Jonas Pardo – Published on November 2 2022
Jonas Pardo has been an activist for several years within the radical left, where he has long hidden his Judaism. Following the attack on the Hyper Cacher, he decided, with a handful of other activists, not to let the anti-Semitism that sometimes manifests itself and the denial that often surrounds it continue. This was the first step in a process that would lead him to create a training course on the fight against antisemitism specifically designed to address the left. In this article for K. he tells his story, details his training workshop and the various reactions it provokes.
Jewish anarchism and its contemporary ecological resurgence
By Sylvaine Bulle – Published on November 23 2022
Ecology, as well as anti-capitalist and communalist alternatives, are increasingly popular with activists and researchers committed to social criticism. These audiences sometimes refer to Gustave Landauer (1870-1919), Emma Goldman (1869-1940), Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), or even Martin Buber (1878-1965), Jewish thinkers who can be described as anarchists or libertarian socialists. Their utopian visions prefigured an agrarian socialism or an everyday communism, of which certain initiatives in France – such as the zones to be defended or the alternative and ecological collectives – are reactivations. Sylvaine Bulle returns to the Jewish origins of these reference authors; origins that remain silent by those who analyse and defend their thought.
>>> Read Sylvaine Bulle’s text
Jewish Esotericism in the Theories and Practices of Emancipation: The Case of the Ephemeral Journal Tiqqun (1999-2001)
By Hugo Latzer – Published on February 1 2023
In the early 2000s, a radical left-wing magazine referred to the Kabbalah tradition and took a Hebrew name: Tiqqun. The magazine only had two issues, but it constituted the matrix of the Invisible Committee (collective author of The Coming Insurrection) of which Julien Coupat, arrested during the Tarnac affair, was a central figure. How did a virulent critique of liberal democracy and capitalism originate in a tradition of Jewish esotericism?
