K., as our readers know, is an exceptionally serious publication. However, this week’s issue coincides with two carnival-like celebrations, since they call for rejoicing in the subversion of the usual established order of power and domination, until their overthrow. So what can we do to avoid losing our reputation as killjoys? We have found no other solution than to explore the meaning of these festivals, which, if we want to avoid them being reduced to mere masquerades, they must retain a tangible sense of festivity.
Purim is a festival linked to the political condition of Jews in exile, in the sense that it reflects the central issue at stake: that of their protection as a dispersed people. In principle, the Jewish state – which is dedicated to this task of protection – should make the experience of the tension contained in the Book of Esther inaccessible, and therefore Purim obsolete. Yet Purim continued to be celebrated, even where its meaning was most remote. On October 7, by highlighting the function of the Jewish state and its limitations, this progressive derealization was called into question. So much so that, for this year’s Purim, there are calls for Israeli children to adopt the Batman costume worn by Ariel Bibas. But what exactly does this call to update the diasporic festival par excellence in Israel mean? Danny Trom invites us to consider the meaning of Purim, in its disjointedness depending on whether one is in the diaspora or in Israel, but also in its convergence.
What is International Women’s Day if not a procession of calculated tributes, a choreography of sycophantic bows, a high mass of warm feelings where the patriarchy goes to the trouble, once a year, of pretending to bury itself? That, at least, is the opinion of our author Valeria Solanstein who, pastiching Valerie Solanas’ famous SCUM Manifesto of 1967, tells us about the reality of the female condition in the Jewish community on all the days when we don’t pretend that male domination is dying. K. believes that we must hear this cry of rage from a young Jewish woman who is trying to exist in a world that does not want her if she cannot stay put “in her place”. When it comes to women’s emancipation, the Jewish world is no worse than the rest of society, but it is no better either, is what this voice painfully echoes.
It was equally painful to see Jewish women and feminists being rejected again from demonstrations in honor of International Women’s Rights Day. Like last year, this procession, which was supposed to advance the struggle for women’s emancipation, turned into an anti-Israeli forum, stubbornly refusing to hear the suffering that Jewish women endured on October 7, and later in the Hamas tunnels. All this in the name of a twisted universalism, claiming to work for the emancipation of all. To honor Israeli women, who clearly do not belong to this “all” in the eyes of Western feminists, this week we are republishing the chilling text that Julia Christ devoted to the mass rapes on October 7, and to this false universalism where Jewish women seem not to matter.
