How can we talk about a singular traumatic experience when it is part of a global trauma that affects everyone? How can we assert a particular point of view within a chain of events that concerns all of humanity? These are questions that all minorities ask themselves when they speak about their experiences—and which are particularly acute for Jews at times when their unique destiny is intertwined with that of humanity as a whole.
The Allied victory over Nazi Germany, commemorated in the US on May 8, was one of the defining moments in this intertwining of Jewish destiny and the destiny of humanity. While crowds rejoiced, Jews mourned. While humanity was horrified by the sixty million deaths of the war, Jews were facing the almost total annihilation of their people in Europe. Inevitably, in the aftermath of the war, survivors asked themselves: how can we make our particular suffering heard amid the universal carnage? Following the reflections of Polish Jewish playwright Ionas Turkov on his own experience of May 8, 1945, Stéphane Bou takes us into the world of the survivors of the Shoah—those who knew that if they did not tell the story of what had happened to the Jews, humanity, both in mourning and in celebration, would not do so.
In a completely different context, the question of how to make a Jewish voice heard in a majority narrative arises today in relation to the war in Gaza. That the situation created jointly by Hamas and Israel in this narrow strip of land has become untenable is an idea that only the extreme right of the political spectrum, in Europe as in Israel, still disputes. But this position would have to be able to be expressed by Jews without them feeling that they were feeding antisemitism. This is precisely what the extreme left in our countries makes impossible, as was once again cruelly illustrated by the attack on the Socialist Party stand and Jérôme Guedj himself during the May 1 demonstration. Bruno Karsenti revisits this revealing scene, showing that the main obstacle to a lucid and fruitful critique of Israel is not Jewish solidarity. It is the extreme left, for whom demands for justice for the Palestinians will only be fulfilled when Israel has been wiped off the map, stifling and holding hostage any criticism of Israel that defends the Zionist project as such as a legitimate version of modern politics.
Between personal history and world events, Philip Schlesinger offers a poignant testimony to uprooting and Jewish diasporic identity. Through the “last words” of his parents, refugees who fled Nazi Austria for the United Kingdom, he explores the scars left by exile, the marriages of convenience between uprooted people, and the transmission of a fragmented European identity. His reflection concludes with his decision, after Brexit, to reclaim the Austrian nationality of his ancestors, while questioning the diasporic future of Jews in the shadow of recent events. This intimate account, which we are resharing this week, illustrates how individual trajectories are part of the larger story of history, and how Jewish identity continues to redefine itself in the face of geopolitical upheaval.
