Two weeks ago, K. dedicated its issue to the event represented by the petition “The Elephant in the Room” – an event in the sense that the criticism of the State of Israel as an apartheid regime brought together both the traditional anti-Zionist academics and, for the first time, representatives of the Zionist camp, who are generally more cautious about using such a stigma. “Apartheid”… Should criticism of Israel, which is at a turning point in its history since the crisis that is dividing the country and mobilising part of the Diaspora, be forced to resort to this infamous term in order to combat the path taken by the current government of Benjamin Netanyahu? Does this use of the category really strengthen the legitimate cause of defending the Palestinians and opposing israeli government’s policies? We don’t think so. The text signed this week by Bruno Karsenti and Danny Trom argues that the apartheid lens frames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a fundamentally flawed way and is detrimental to understanding it. Above all, and by this very fact, it distances us from any real political solution to the conflict.
On the occasion of the release of Cédric Kahn’s fascinating film Le Procès Goldman, philosopher Gérard Bensussan looks back at what the figure of Pierre Goldman represented in his youth – a revolutionary activist arrested for robbery and suspected of murder, author of a cult book written in prison, Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France (Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France) – which has remained legendary for many but has been largely forgotten. “I remember, as if it were yesterday, the news that Pierre Goldman had been murdered by a far-right commando while I was in the middle of an editorial meeting for a long-gone review, Dialectiques. We were all stunned. Goldman was a key figure in the whole of the far left and its broader movements…” writes Gérard Bensussan in a text that is both intimate and meticulous in its analysis of the political careers of young Jewish revolutionaries in France in the 1970s. In many ways, Pierre Goldman was the one who said out loud how much their commitment to the far left in those years had to do with their Jewish heritage.
To mark the holiday of Sukkot, we are republishing “My Father’s Sukkah”, a text by Ruben Honigmann in which he recalls the place of this holiday in his family history, the tête-à-tête with his father that it made possible and the often comical moments of promiscuity in the communal sukkah. He is amused by the 50 different Jewish practices that Sukkot gives rise to. “A sukkah that flies away without collapsing, fragile but enduring, an onion – the human heart – pierced but out of reach, my father’s sukkah contains what is essential: the Jewish condition in exile, precarious but tenacious.
