Here we are. Trump at the helm of the world’s leading power, tilting towards populist, illiberal nationalism. Israel assumes war as the sole axis of its policy, while embracing the nationalist and religious tendencies that are deepening its break with Zionism. The BRICS, a conglomerate of commercial and military powers, each defending its own interests and ruling over its population with an iron fist. And, in the face of all this, a Europe that is witnessing both its economic decline and its inability to unite around the democratic principles that define it.
It’s not a good time to be a Ukrainian from Donbass, or a Palestinian, West Banker, Gazan or Israeli. Nor is it a good time to be a Jew anywhere in the world. The anti-democratic and nationalist wave that is sweeping over us is bound to weaken any population that stakes its fate on the progress of its rights to an extent unprecedented since 1945. Yet the Jews have been, for themselves since before this date of reconstruction, and for the enlightened conscience that has dominated Western opinion since that same date, the distinctive point and the reliable indicator of the progress made in this direction. The nationalist stupidity that has become the majority wish in the most powerful of democratic societies now threatens to sweep away this tendency, and with it the arrangement on which the relative unity and equilibrium of the Jewish people rested. To give an idea of how Trump’s election risks precipitating an internal rift in the Jewish world, we leave Bruno Karsenti’s text “Trump and the Jewish War” in our issue for another week.
To further clarify the coordinates of the situation, we are adding an interview with journalist and essayist Dara Horn on how the “Jewish question” came to agitate the American campaign, and how it may have been instrumentalized by the various political parties. In it, we read of the ambiguity that results from the mixture of an unshakeable attachment to social progress – undeniable since almost 80% of American Jews voted Democrat – and mistrust of the slope taken by the most radical part of the progressive camp.
For K., if there are still a few intact snippets left to build on, they are to be found in Europe. Dispersed, weakened, undermined by falsely universalist and vainly critical postures, they are nonetheless still alive in many of the consciences of European countries – indeed, in the majority of them. Our task is to offer them the intellectual means to express themselves more and better than is currently the case. It is also the duty imposed on Europe by Trump’s victory: to reconnect with its project. And for this, using the modern Jewish question as a spur is certainly not the option least suited to the constraints of the present. So we end this week’s issue with a critique, formulated from the current political wanderings of Jews, of what makes contemporary progressivism so inconsistent in the face of the push from the reactionary camp.
