# 229 / Editorial

In addition to this week’s planned summer feature, current events have forced us to respond to the announcement of a general strike in Israel on August 17, organized by the families of hostages and a large section of civil society. The first mobilization of this scale since the fight against judicial reform in 2023, it now crystallizes a head-on opposition between the government and a society mobilized around a central issue: the place of hostage rescue in the conduct of a war in Gaza that is bogged down and whose stated objectives are becoming more and more distant with each passing day. Bruno Karsenti analyzes this mobilization in light of the founding principle of the state—ensuring the survival of Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora—and shows how the question of the form given to this war, like that of the hostages, lays bare the ideological crisis facing Zionism, while jeopardizing the future of the country and the unity of the Jewish world.

While waiting for the new fall season, we are offering a special section in each issue featuring some of our articles published this year on a specific theme. This is an opportunity to discover articles you may have missed, rediscover those that caught your attention, and share some of K.’s publications with friends who are not yet familiar with us.
As a reminder, our archives are open, and we invite you to browse through the hundreds of articles we have published over the past four years.

This week’s feature is centred around the questions and reflections of perceptions and purpose in the grasp of the plurality of Jewish identity. From obscure origins in Romain Moor’s investigation on crypto-Jews or Keith Kahn-Harris’ article and call to frivolity in the face of ever shape-shifting antisemitism to David Haziza’s look behind the Jewish fantasy curtain of dybbuks and company to the realisation that we are only ever the second to last Jew, a piece by Ruben Honigmann or, lastly, David Lemler’s rereading of Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari and the Jewish state of the Khazars – this theme’s collection provides food for thought and reinterpretation on several levels.

We wish you a good read.

This summer, K. invites you to rediscover, in each of its weekly issues, a feature consisting of five articles previously published in the magazine. This week with five pieces by…

Who, as a child, has never dreamed of discovering a secret lineage, an obscure origin that would answer the nagging question of identity? Ubiquitous in fiction, this trope of the “family saga”, well identified by Freud, sometimes intersects with a semblance of reality. It is from this tenuous junction point that Romain Moor investigates the subject of those who discover themselves to be Marranos long after the fact.

Keith Kahn-Harris, author of Everyday Jews: Why the Jewish people are not who you think they are, questions, with a hint of provocation, this strange and alienating Jewish tendency to want to make themselves indispensable to the world. What if the best response to antisemitism was ultimately to claim the right to frivolity, to allow oneself a perfectly superfluous existence?

Dybbuk, golems, zombies, spectres, werewolves and other Mazzikim, Jewish demonology has penetrated the cinema, but what does it have to tell us? Between memories of the Shoah, reflections on evil, the body or the unconscious, or even the quest for an alternative religiosity – on the occasion of the exhibition currently on view at the mahJ in Paris: “The dybbuk. Phantom of the lost world”, an investigation into one of Judaism’s most singular contributions to art and representation. By David Haziza, who has just published ‘Jewish myths. The return of the sacred’, in the Diaspora book series published by Calmann-Lévy.

On the occasion of the K. sur scène evening, centered on the theme of The Last of the Jews, Ruben Honigmann invited us to meditate on these never-ending endings. We publish the text of his speech.

How did a classic work of Jewish thought written in Arabic in the 12th century, which claims the absolute superiority of Jews and Hebrew, come to be cited by both the Israeli far right and the most radical fringes of anti-Zionism? To dispel this mystery and the misreadings of this text, David Lemler immersed himself in Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari. His interpretation reveals an unexpected utopia, that of the Jewish state of the Khazars, whose critical function could help us escape contemporary aporias.

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Thanks to the Paris office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their cooperation in the design of the magazine’s website.