Recent events have been marked—as we have already mentioned—by heated debates about academic freedom. In particular, the echo between Eva Illouz’s disinvitation from the University of Rotterdam and the cancellation of the “Palestine and Europe” symposium at the Collège de France has sparked scholarly comparative discussions, which have often been flawed by a certain formalism in their conception of academic freedom. In other words, in order to guard against the threat of “political pressure”—which is inevitable given the specific nature of the social sciences—attempts were made to take refuge in a form of independence that was devoid of content. The question of the university’s assumption of its freedom, and therefore of the standards it sets for itself and enforces, has tended to be relegated to the background. Since this is unfortunate, we felt it was appropriate to show that, on the contrary, it is in the debate on these standards, insofar as they are intertwined with political issues, that academic freedom is tested. This week, we are therefore publishing Eva Illouz’s critique of Omer Bartov’s latest book: Genocide, Shoah, and Israel-Palestine: First Person History in Times of Crisis. The dispute here concerns the limits that academic norms impose on the use of memory comparisons.
In mid-October, Eugenia Maria Roccella, Minister for Equal Opportunities and the Family in the Meloni government, sparked controversy in Italy over the memory of Shoah. She attacked school trips to Auschwitz, which she believed fueled a left-wing political culture and demonized the far right. Echoing the debates sparked by this controversy, we received a text from Serena Di Nepi, a historian of the Jewish diaspora, who looks back at the development of Italian memory politics. Explaining why she herself has never participated in one of these “Journeys of Remembrance”, she traces the turning point represented by the adoption of this central civic ritual, while emphasizing that it is not without ambiguities, particularly because of the place of victimhood that this kind of memory policy assigns to Jews in the national collective.
Following André Markowicz’s article, which we published last week on the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s concert at the Philharmonie de Paris, we received the testimony of a member of the audience. It is, in short, the personal account of someone who simply found himself, somewhat by chance, taking part in a most unusual symphony concert. But in addition to the pleasure of reading a well-narrated experience, there is an informed question about what the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra had chosen to perform that evening. Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, the crisis of empires and the doubts of artists— this too was hard to grasp for some.
