What if Israel had not been founded in 1948 in the Middle East? What if, after World War II, a state for the Jews had actually been created in Austria? These are the intriguing questions raised by journalist and novelist Guy Konopnicki in his uchronistic serial Israel on the Danube. The first episode, which immerses us in Winston Churchill’s post-war political torments, is entitled: “With the agreement of our great comrade Stalin, I have come to propose that you give Austria to the Jews to build their state“.
Each weekly installment of our summer novel will be accompanied by a series of four articles, previously published in our pages, but brought together for the occasion around a few key themes. This week, focusing on the Left, Jews and Antisemitism today. Two texts examine the increasingly complicated relationship between Jews and the left – with the latter’s blindness to, or lack of interest in, the progress of Antisemitism – as well as the implicit Jewish references that influence some of the most influential contemporary radical left-wing doctrines.
In “The Future of the Left and the Battle Against Antisemitism”, Milo Lévy-Bruhl offers a reflection, on behalf of the left, on the need to stop burying our heads in the sand over the reality of a general resurgence of antisemitism that does not spare the left itself. In “From silence to fighting antisemitism: the turn of a radical left-wing Jew“, Jonas Pardo looks back on his history and, deciding to stop letting the antisemitism that sometimes manifests itself in his political camp pass, describes the new activity he has decided to embrace. For several months now, he has been organizing training courses in the fight against antisemitism, tailored to a very specific audience that he knows well: activists in associations, politics, anti-racism and trade unions, as well as left-wing journalists, artists and academics… In “Jewish anarchism and its contemporary ecological resurgence”, Sylvaine Bulle tells us about a little-known moment in modern Jewish thought, despite its place in the emancipatory Jewish thought of the Haskalah: “anarcho-judaism”. Behind this syntagm, the sociologist designates the coherence of a theoretical current developed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by intellectuals, and sometimes rabbis, educated for the most part in the yeshivot of Eastern Europe. Finally, Hugo Latzer’s “Jewish Esotericism in the Theories and Practices of Emancipation: The Case of the Ephemeral Journal Tiqqun” traces the genealogy of the emergence of Jewish and kabbalistic signifiers and references within a far-left movement: the Tarnac group.
