The start of the French new editorial season was marked by publishing house Cahier de l’Herne’s release of a volume devoted to Hannah Arendt. For the occasion, K, in partnership with Akadem, looks back at the Jewish dimensions of the life and work of a major intellectual figure of the second half of the 20th century and author of a plethora of works. Arendtian theories of anti-Semitism, the relationship of the political philosopher to Zionism, but also questions about her links with Heidegger, Avishag Zafrani converses about all this with the philosophers Martine Leibovici and Aurore Mréjen, editors of this important publication. These different subjects affect the disposition from which we read today Arendt’s great “enigmatic” work. Central in Arendt’s thought, as much as in the philosophy that has been produced since Auschwitz, the question of responsibility for the Holocaust also comes up in these discussions.
The same theme, in another mode, emerges from Sam Sussman’s short story, which K. has the great pleasure to publish this week. Winner of the prestigious BAFTA New Writing Contest and the Oxford Review of Books Short Fiction Prize, this promising young author is still unknown in continental Europe, which is the setting for much of his fiction. “In the Palace” tells the story of an American Jewish student visiting Germany whose affair with a haughty Berlin student leads him back to the traces of a family history swept away by the Holocaust.
Finally, after last month’s Italian municipal elections, K. reprises its interview with Tobia Zevi. A candidate for mayor of Rome, Zevi eventually withdrew from the race before being appointed by the new mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, to the post of deputy mayor in charge of heritage and housing policies. This is a key position from which he will be able to embody the Jewish voice whose history and stakes in Italian public life he detailed a few months ago.
