Edito

The very nature of horror is to be questioned only with difficulty. Whether it fascinates the captive (and therefore blind) gaze, or forces us to avert our eyes, horror seems to thwart our capacity for comprehension, as if it had reached its limit. As a video of Israeli hostage Liri Albag was broadcast last week by Hamas, reactivating the original horror of the event, the question once again arises: what should we do with these images, which bear witness to the unbearable nature of the crimes of October 7, and which Hamas terrorists have sought to propagate? For Emmanuel Taïeb, whose text invites us to reflect on the fate of these images, there is no other way but to look at them lucidly, provided we shift the focus to their uses. For the use of these images for memorial purposes or political mobilization, against the initial intention of those who took them, bears witness to their reversibility. Refusing to confront horror would mean letting the horrific have the last word in history.

Pivoting over to New York, the current exhibition of The Morgan Library and Museum is celebrating Franz Kafka with a profound exploration of his manuscripts, letters, and diaries, offering an unparalleled glimpse into the creative mind that reshaped modern literature. Mitchell Abidor intricately examines Kafka’s impact, particularly his influence on Philip Roth, who reimagined Kafka’s struggles with identity, family, and Jewishness through the lens of American immigrant life. Through this dialogue between two literary titans, we are invited to reconsider the Kafkaesque not merely as a symbol of bureaucratic absurdity, but as a deeply human confrontation with love, alienation, and cultural dislocation.

To mark the magazine’s 200th issue, we are republishing the ‘manifesto’ that accompanied its creation. Nearly four years have gone by, with their share of upheavals and recompositions, but the diagnosis we made in it still seems relevant today: it is also because Europe has lost sight of its “Jewish question” that it is languishing, and it is from the unstable position that Jews occupy within it that a future can be paved.

Ten years ago, Islamist terrorism struck the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher at Porte de Vincennes, also killing police officers. To commemorate these attacks, the CRIF and Charlie Hebdo are organizing a joint evening of debate and tribute to the victims on January 9. But does this alliance, under the slogan “We are the Republic”, between the institution that represents Jewish associative life and a bastion of militant secularism make sense, beyond the tragic ordeal we have both been through? According to Bruno Karsenti, who points out that the emancipation of Jews and their conversion to the modern political condition depends on a society that is itself emancipated, it intrinsically does. But only if “Republic” is understood in a particular sense, which must resist all dogmatization.

In an era when names like Auschwitz and Dachau evoke Europe’s darkest chapters, Marta Caraion’s Geography of Darkness: Bucharest-Transnistria-Odessa, 1941–1981 sheds light on a lesser-known axis of terror. Through a deeply personal and meticulously researched narrative, Caraion uncovers Transnistria’s haunting legacy—a region transformed by Marshal Antonescu’s Romania into a nightmarish experiment in ethnic cleansing. Elena Guritanu interviewed Caraion for K. This poignant family saga of survival and exile not only illuminates the hidden memory of the Romanian Shoah but also challenges us to confront the unspoken geographies of atrocity.

To coincide with the theatrical adaptation of Katharina Volckmer’s Jewish Cock (“The Appointment”, Camille Cottin and Jonathan Capdevielle, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, January 7-25, 2025), we are republishing Julia Christ’s article on the novel. It discusses the possibility of a circumcised object plugging the hole of German guilt, and the Jew one must fantasize about to continue living after the Shoah.

The magazine’s editorial team would like to thank all those who are contributing to its campaign to support its continuation and development in 2025.

To begin the year on a high note, we offer you a selection of the seven most popular articles in a period marked by the need to combat the rise of antisemitism in Europe, and the questioning of Israel’s future. This is your chance to delve, or dive back, into the publications that have been the most widely read and shared: Ben Wexler on the curious variation of anti-Zionist formulas taking shape in Canada; Eva Illouz responds to Didier Fassin on whether Israel is committing a genocide; writer Etgar Keret’s interview on the loss of consistency in the reality experienced by Israelis; Balazs Berkovits on the October 7th pogrom as a non-event on the Western left; interview with Dara Horn on her book and the question it bring up on why ‘People love dead Jews’; Noémie Issan-Benchimol and Elie Beressi on the concept of the “Arab Jew” and its political uses; and finally, a two-part series by Balazs Berkovits on ‘What color are the Jews?’. 

Since the time for good resolutions is fast approaching, we’re taking advantage of a strange letter received from the depths of eternity to make our own. This letter, read on stage last month by Julia Christ at our K. event in Paris, was sent to us by an esteemed contributor to the magazine, whose sharp pen is unrivalled when it comes to ferreting out stupidity. In it, he aptly captures the sense of the struggle that has breathed life into the magazine for almost 4 years, and to which we have not finished devoting our energies: not to let the link that unites Jews to Europe fade away.

The end-of-year festivities are here, and with them their procession of epinal images. In the streets, the good people, who have never lost their childlike spirit, marvel at the brilliant decorations and rush to buy gifts and treats. In thatched cottages, a delicate aroma wafts from the kitchen, while the air is filled with the clink of glasses being toasted, laughter and the cries of overexcited kids. Everything is perfectly in place. However, we all know that this ideal image that families strive to create has its downside: just as a liver attack reminds us of the reality of what we thought was a bottomless stomach, the eruption of a political or religious rift can reveal the illusory nature of family harmony at any moment. In the collective imagination, the figure of the racist uncle has come to embody this threat of internal rupture, which can never be entirely averted. There’s no doubt that some of our readers will have come face to face with this during the many end-of-year meals… As for the others, they will be able to live the holiday spirit to the full by discovering O. Bouquet’s personal account of his antisemitic uncle, and the dilemmas facing the man whose children are Jewish in an old Catholic family.

Because the best remedy against indigestion of good feelings is still bad wit, we are also republishing Danny Trom’s analysis of Steven Spielberg and Joe Dante’s Gremlins. In this film, Christmas, and with it the cosmic order, are turned upside down: does this parodic detour belong to a specific genre, that of the Jewish Christmas movie?

Last but not least, in the spirit of reflections on the year gone past, we are also resharing Ruben Honigmann’s text on solitude, never-ending endings and being the penultimate Jew.

Can morality justify stupidity? This is indeed what the recent adoption by the EHESS of a motion calling for the “suspension of cooperation” with Israeli universities leads us to fear, without clearly naming what is being targeted: the boycott. For if it is France’s most prestigious social science institution – to which K. ‘s academics are attached – that places itself in the vanguard of the boycott camp, in defiance of any reflection on the political efficacy of its actions, then docte and sanctimonious stupidity has a bright future ahead of it. Fortunately, within the progressive left, the voice of European political and historical responsibility has not yet been silenced. At the end of November, Raphaël Glucksmann and Daniel Cohn-Bendit made their voices heard in the columns of Le Monde, with an article condemning the form of the war being waged by Israel, and clearly indicating the political course their authors believe should be followed. The editors of K. were keen to give it some echo, and so we are publishing the interview given by Daniel Cohn-Bendit to Julia Christ and Danny Trom. It discusses his relationship as a “non-nationalizable” European Jew to Israel and Zionism, the unbearable situation in the Middle East and its paradoxical echoes here at home, as well as the stumbling blocks of European construction and integration. Above all, it highlights the need to fight against the foolishness to which the left has fallen victim, and of which the desire to boycott institutions that produce knowledge, reflexivity and criticism is only the latest occurrence.

After the success of the K. on stage evening at the Théâtre de la Concorde in Paris two weeks ago, dedicated to The Last Jews of… , we wanted to make the performances available. This week, you can discover or rediscover the text of Ruben Honigmann’s speech, in which he evokes the strange equivocation of Hebrew, which associates the end and the continuation, as if the Jews were never finished.

For our re-run this week, David Nirenberg’s lecture, “Anti-Judaism, Critical Thinking, and the Possibility of History”, examines how anti-Jewish ideas have shaped Western thought and culture over centuries. Nirenberg explores how influential thinkers—from the ancient world to modern times—have used Judaism as a symbol of everything they oppose in their quest for universal truth. By exposing these patterns, Nirenberg challenges historians to recognize the biases that shape historical narratives and to rethink the possibilities of history itself.

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The review’s editorial team would like to thank all those who are contributing to its campaign to support its continuation and development in 2025.

In Poland, an inescapable guilty conscience and an antisemitism that has never been combated prevent recognition of the Polish realities of the Shoah. This denial of responsibility, and the affabulations that accompany it, are perpetuated at state level and in the institutions in charge of remembrance policy. This week we publish “Négationnisme à la polonaise” by Elżbieta Janicka, a specialist in antisemitism and the Shoah, introduced by Jean-Charles Szurek. We discover the exemplary case of the Treblinka site, which, 80 years on, continues to make its money on the backs of the Jews. From the concealment of the sinister trade that took place at the station, to the invention of a false Righteous Man, the Catholicization of the victims and the attribution to the Germans of massacres of Jews committed by Poles, a whole series of narrative special effects are used to transform a shameful history into a source of national pride.

To feel ashamed implies to be exposed to public scrutiny: this is what Polish Holocaust deniers have understood, and they seek to avoid this painful experience by hiding their horrors under the carpet. But does this mean that pointing an accusing finger at others is enough to shame them? This is the strategy employed today by those who claim “Zionists, you should be ashamed”. But is there really anything to be ashamed of, when you know what Zionism means? This week, we publish a reflection by Ariel Colonomos on the way in which anti-Zionist activists seek to shame their opponents, and the deleterious effects of this strategy on university debates. It discusses the paradoxes of approaching a political conflict through the prism of morality, and the deficit of reflexivity that arises when shaming is substituted for criticism.

We are also resharing the interview of Julia Christ with Israeli academics on how they react to the call for a boycott of their universities. The responses of the rector of the Hebrew University Tamir Sheafer have been added for this week’s publication. 

Since the start of the war in Gaza and its extension to Lebanon, several voices have been calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, always specifying that this should target only the universities as institutions and not the people working there. These initiatives claim to be aimed at increasing pressure on Israel to change its policies, end the war and recommit to a peace process with the Palestinians, and are justified by the argument that any Israeli university, by the mere fact of its existence, supports the policies of the Hebrew state. Yet there are serious grounds for doubting both the political effectiveness of these boycott practices and the representations that motivate them. To clarify the relationship between Israeli universities and the Netanyahu government, and to lift the veil on their role and functioning in the current conflict and within Israeli society, K. interviewed Professors Itai Ater and Alon Korngreen, members of the “Academics for Israeli Democracy” group, and Professor Eyal Benvenisti.

For contemporary critics of religious Zionism, its messianic fever is above all a consequence of its religiosity. Thus posed, the problem admits of only one solution: for life in Israel to be a negation neither of exile nor of Palestinian rights, Zionism can only be secular. In this personal reading of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s latest essay, Mishnaic Consciousness, Biblical Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture (Kibbutz Ha-Meuhad and Van Leer Institute Publishing, 2022), Noémie Issan-Benchimol offers another normative support for our critique: the proto-Zionist model of Safed, for whose consciousness exile is lived par excellence in Israel. By pointing to the ideal of an articulation between law and mysticism, another possibility is opened up. Or does it already have the status of a realization?

By what kind of ideological caper is it possible for a nationalist, reactionary discourse to be adopted by the anti-imperialist left? This is the question, unfortunately of current interest, that the first part of Daniel Szeftel’s article left us with two weeks ago. How, indeed, did the ideologues of Arab nationalism manage, after the war, to make people forget their sympathies for European fascism, and make their discourse audible to the Western world? In the continuation of his investigation, Szeftel meticulously studies the process of reformulation that enabled this ideology to become attractive, and the political, academic and international networks that contributed to its dissemination. Accusing Israel of “genocide” against the indigenous Palestinian people appears to have been a decisive factor in this transformation, making it possible to maintain an essentialist conception of national identity, while attributing to the Jews the racist tendencies that flow from it.

Last week, the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant provoked vehement and contrasting reactions within the international community. But beyond the political dimension, what are the legal implications of this decision? K. went to interview legal expert Yann Jurovics – whom we had already interviewed about the proceedings initiated by South Africa before the International Court of Justice, as well as about the request to issue arrest warrants before the ICC last May.

Between the anti-Zionist excesses of the Western left and the reactionary ravings of the Israeli far right, it is no easy task today to assume a coherent critical position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s like walking a tightrope, where every misstep can have serious ideological consequences. Among the talented tightrope walkers of our time is Mitchell Cohen, former editor-in-chief of Dissent magazine, whose interview we are publishing this week. In it, he articulates an uncompromising critique of contemporary anti-Zionism, reminding us that this is not the first time the Left has confused the perspective of emancipation with the defense of oppressive political movements. But he also reminds us of the need for an uncompromising critique of the policies pursued by Israel over the past 30 years, in other words, a questioning of the nature of the society that Zionism aims to realize. As Trump’s victory has come to question the American political situation, we asked Mitchell Cohen about the reasons for his election, and what it means for American Jews.

What’s left of Polish Jewry? Around 10,000 people, and a few well-kept cemeteries. This week, we are publishing the first part of a report by American journalist Gabriel Rom, devoted to the preservation of the burial heritage of Poland’s Jews, and the strange ambivalence of memory that this reflects. The conservative Polish government had devoted substantial sums of money to the restoration of Jewish cemeteries, while at the same time spending years constructing a national narrative that was intended to be free of grey areas. Even going so far as to criminalize the idea that Poland was responsible for the Holocaust. The burden of memory – a memory laden with guilt – is met with silence and denial, with the result that Poland struggles to fully honor its participation in a European Union that has made lucidity about its past a cornerstone of its political identity. But Gabriel Rom’s journey among the tombstones is not limited to well-ordered alleys and heritage-laden names: behind the desire to whitewash history and pretend that Jewishness and Polishness are seamlessly linked, we find moss-covered monuments to the victims of the Holocaust, and plaques whose names have already been almost erased. It is these fragments of a disappearing memory that his report echoes.

It wasn’t long after the start of the Israeli offensive in Gaza that the accusation of genocide against the Jewish state began to emerge. Already on October 7, before any retaliation, the first echoes of it could be heard. For radical anti-Zionists, the genocide has been going on for 75 years, the project to wipe out the indigenous Palestinian people has been unfolding for 75 years, and the genocidal essence of the Zionist state has been asserting itself for 75 years. But where does this “evidence” come from? When, by whom and under what conditions was this implacable equation formulated? And what accounts for its remarkable spread? This week, we begin publication of Daniel Szeftel’s historical investigation of this question, which makes an important contribution to contemporary debates on the notion of settler colonialism. The first part of his diptych deals with the revival of Arab nationalism from the 20s to the 40s, its compromises with European fascism, and the influence of antisemitic Protestant missionaries. For the moment, we are witnessing the structuring of an ideological discourse that, at this stage, openly claims its integral nationalism and eliminationist antisemitism. Next week, we’ll see how, through a curious process of accusatory reversal, this discourse will be hollowed out and reformulated for Western international and academic institutions in the post-war period.

Two Jews who knew each other neither from Eve nor from Adam get on a plane and find themselves sitting next to each other. No, this is not the beginning of a Jewish joke, but a personal account by writer Barbara Honigmann. What could two Jews be talking about when they meet for the first time? And what is at stake in the bond that, for the duration of a flight and despite their differences, is forged between them?

In the mid-1990s, the number of Jews in Algeria did not exceed fifty, whereas 150,000 lived there before independence. And yet… a rumor persists. “Jews in Algeria? There are still some. They are numerous, just about everywhere. They hide. They practice their religion in silence. Without showing themselves. Jews in Algeria? Of course, my grandmother knows some… ” This kind of statement circulates in the Algerian streets, like an urban legend. The Jews are an integral part of Algerian history: Algeria certainly does little to preserve traces of their presence, but in this omission of which the cemeteries are the main clues, the secret is passed on. Joseph Benamour evokes this strange distortion that makes the Jews a fantasized Algerian presence, while they remain untraceable in reality.