In light of recent elections across Europe, the issue of antisemitism along the political spectrum is fresh in our minds and begs the question if elected officials will be able to tackle it amongst their own ranks. Our firmest commitment is to ensure that they cannot evade this accountability – for their sake, for the sake of the Jews, and for the sake of Europe as a whole. Because the problem is a European one, that’s where we wanted to place ourselves in K. magazine from the outset. That of a Europe which, as the post-October 7 period has made abundantly clear, has no other way of rethinking itself today than through the prism of the fate of the Jews.
That’s what this issue is all about. Europe, as an entity and as an idea, is the breeding ground for modern nation-states, which are interrelated and in constant transformation. But how is the term “nation-state” to be understood? Is the hyphen the mark of a successful synthesis, or of an eternally recurring problem? It all depends on how you look at it. For while we usually consider that a nation exists insofar as it has endowed itself with a state, certain borderline cases call this classic scheme into question. This week, Danny Trom – paying homage to Milan Kundera, who died just over a year ago – looks at how the Dissidence movement articulated one such borderline experience. Under Soviet domination, the state is not what sustains national existence, but rather what stifles it. This raises the question of how to ensure the continuity of the nation independently of, or even against, the state. According to Danny Trom, the critical conceptions born of the cultural resistance of Dissidence work from within the European mind, and its relationship to nationalism. This is why they apply with particular acuity to Israel, which Kundera described as “the true heart of Europe, a strange heart placed beyond the body”.
Fortunately, there are also a handful of countries where Jews, if not at home, have always been welcomed. This week, Clément Girardot and Yoann Morvan give us an insight into the surprising case of Georgia, a small country between Europe and Asia that never harbored antisemitism, and early on regarded Jews as an integral part of the nation. What are the origins of this philosemitic exception? And why is the Georgian Jewish community still alive and well today, but on the verge of extinction? To answer these questions, we invite you to embark on a journey of Georgian Jewry.
The recently concluded elections in France have given us the strange feeling of emerging from a narrowly averted peril, but with no real sense of relief. The fact that the Left, whose unity was not produced from within, but only through a just oppositional cause, has recovered electorally only reassures those who prefer to ignore what is most unacceptable about it. In this respect, eradicating its antisemitism is one of the great tasks of the day. Will the Left be able to face up to it outside an electoral emergency? Elisheva Gottfarstein deconstructs the efforts of organic intellectuals in France’s far-left party LFI’s recent statements and how they are tainted by an antisemitism that is impossible to sweep under the carpet.
Wishing you a good summer!
