Dear readers,
The last week of our summer break is upon us, and we’ll be resuming our usual rhythm of publications with the next issue. However, the editorial team decided at its back-to-school meeting that it needed to express its views on current events in Israel. The discovery of the summary execution of six hostages by Hamas has inflamed the political situation there, leading to a massive mobilization of society against the government’s conduct of the war. In “Israel held hostage”, we look back at what is at stake for Israel at this moment, both as a traumatic repetition of the event that opened the sequence in which it has found itself locked for the past eleven months, and as an injunction to finally give itself the means to get out of it.
Since a return from summer and the soon to be arriving new Jewish year bring a degree of introspection and reflection with it, our latest summer feature looks at the complexity of Jewishness that can be found all around – whether through Ivan Segré’s examination of the bipolarity of Jewish identity, Mona El Khoury’s fiction piece on grappling with history and our past, Ruben Honigmann’s recurring confrontation with amazement at hostility, an analysis of the get (Jewish traditional divorce) and legal pluralism by Astrid von Busekist or Noémie Issan-Benchimol’s analysis of what Jewish thought has to say about hostage redemption, this week’s feature provides a plethora of food for thought and maybe even some answers for ourselves.
