The film The Boy tells the story of Avinoam and Barak, a father and son living on Kibbutz Kfar Aza, on the border with the Gaza Strip, as they face yet another barrage of rocket fire. The 36-year-old director, Yahav Winner, was murdered by Hamas killers in his home in kibbutz on 7 October 2023. Ady Walter, director of Shttl – whom we interviewed in an earlier issue of K. – was looking forward to meeting him at the Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival in November. Their respective films will be screened together. Ady Walter sent us an account of an imaginary meeting with Yahav Winner at the festival. This story serves as an introduction to a short text that Winner has left behind, written specifically for the presentation of his film. In it, the director describes how, from the point of view of an Israeli for whom the Palestinian question is both legitimate and acute, “there is a constant conflict inside you when you look over the fence at what is happening in Gaza”.
Three weeks ago, on the occasion of the release of Cédric Kahn’s film The Goldman Trial, we published an article by Gérard Bensussan, which highlighted the singularity of Pierre Goldman’s claim to Jewishness in the context of the revolutionary left of the 1970s, already politically undermined by systematic anti-Zionism in the wake of the Six-Day War. Pierre Goldman’s story was in part the painful and violent expression of a metabolisation of the immeasurable wound of the Shoah, but also of the resistance to Nazism embodied by his Polish parents, Jews and Communists. Today we are publishing an unpublished manuscript by Pierre Goldman, given to us by his son Manuel Goldman. In a few intense lines, it describes the emotional and historical link that Pierre Goldman felt between the Jewish question and Israel. “Israel is a place of diaspora, of exile,” he wrote in 1974. This statement is not contradictory, in that it reveals the extension of the minority condition experienced by the Jews during their exile in the Land of Israel itself. But it also points, in a subtle way, to the waywardness of the Left when, by ignoring the cause of the Jews and their political autonomy, it sees them as an obstacle in the pursuit of its struggle against the structures of domination.
Sergey Lagodinsky is a German lawyer, journalist and politician (Greens) of Russian-Jewish origin who has been a member of the European Parliament since 2019. He was one of the directors of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which has supported our magazine since its inception. The day after the Hamas attacks, he published an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled ‘We have all been attacked’, which we are pleased to be able to translate for our French readers. In it, Sergey Lagodinsky talks about leaving Russia and arriving in Germany, where he has been “living a Jewish dream for thirty years”. A dream in danger of being shattered? His text, which sketches the image of the Europe he wants, is moved by indifference and silence, by complacency and the desire to forget the past, and above all by the refusal of some to condemn terror. “This combination of violence and inaction in the face of violence is the deadly mix of our times. For us, the people affected, it means the feeling that, just in case, no one will come to our aid, or worse, that the attack on us will soon be transformed into a justified or even legitimate attack. This combination is the explosive that shatters dreams and destroys the future. And it affects not only Jews, but all those who dare to dream of democracy and reflexivity”.
