Among the articles in this week’s issue of K., most of them long in the works, there is one written right before press time in response to breaking news. Despite the fact that ours is not a review destined to deal with hot-off-the-press events, sometimes those events must be addressed in real time. Avishag Zafrani, in a brief piece, written at post-haste and imbued with the urgencency of the moment, reflects on a trial that is not to be. In the wake of the French courts’ decision on April 14 concerning the death of Sarah Halimi, she examines the continuities and discontinuities between Kafka’s The Trial and our present: on one hand, an innocent man who is condemned, and on the other, a murderer who will not be tried. The turn of events has left us dumbfounded. The principle of insanity has precluded criminal responsibility for the murderer, and this arouses the feeling that justice itself has stopped and shut itself up, a sentiment that accompanies a well-founded belief that anti-Semitism is not combatted as it should be: that is, as a social ill. When justice does not judge, when it claims to be impotent, is there but one solution, as Zafrani suggests. « questioning the void?»
Another void? Jean-Claude Kuperminc, inspired by two recently-published books (Les Juifs, une tache aveugle dans le récit national (Jews, a Blindspot in the National Story), untranslated, edited by Paul Salmona and Claire Soussen, and Aux sources juives de l’histoire de France (To the Jewish Sources of French History, untranslated) by Mathias Dreyfuss) assesses the perhaps-belated debate that the works evoke on the place given to Jews in the history of France. Are Jews absent from the historical memory of France? Has their presence in the national story been erased or occluded?
And finally, in the midst of this silence, come words strong and clear: from a Jewish voice in a city to which K. will will likely make a stop-over in the future. Tobia Zevi, running for the position of mayor of Rome, is interviewed by Italian journalist Simone Disesgni, and he reflects on the origins of his public career, as well as the manner in which Italian Jewish institutions prepared him for a larger stage. He also meditates on the challenges and stakes of the Italian Jewish community today, which once was the country’s « minority par excellence » but now has become « one minority among the minorities,» a reality that should help them « better consider the question of immigration and integration». Tobia Zevi relates how Jewishness has influenced his political engagement, from such varied topics on the value of speech to the situation of Europe.
