Because K. is a space where concepts and affects intermingle without contradiction, this week’s issue of our magazine features a long read on political philosophy and a poem. Two texts of a very different nature, but both intended to provide us with the intellectual resources we need more and more in these dark times.
In “Anti-Zionism: a realistic option?”, Julia Christ meticulously analyzes the issues involved in distinguishing anti-Zionism from antisemitism. As we know, the stakes are high, given the opposition between those who believe that one can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic, and those who believe that all anti-Zionism is constituted by hatred of Jews. In the current political situation, clarifying this debate means taking it back to its principles, i.e. the fundamental political conceptions involved. In public debate, however, very little light has so far been shed on this subject. No matter how many times “antisemitism” and “anti-Zionism” are pitted against each other, no doubt in the hope of creating some friction, the intellectual distinction between the two struggles to emerge. To change this, it is necessary, as Julia Christ does here, to identify as closely as possible the kind of state criticism that justifies the creation of an ad hoc term for the singular case of the State of Israel. For it is by distinguishing anti-Zionism on the level of political semantics that its exact link to antisemitism can be understood, and at the same time unmasked.
In The Other Shoe, Judith Offenberg shares some news with us from Israel, all the way from Tel Aviv, in the form of a poem. How is a normal life possible in the atmosphere of a country at war? And how is it possible not to succumb to the temptation of carrying on as if nothing had happened? That nothing is possible, and yet it must be, is what our young poet tries to capture.
