Edito

What explains South Africa’s commitment to being the vehicle for the accusation of genocide against Israel? [Note: See in K.: “Israel at the ICJ: Interview with Yann Jurovics” and “At the Aftermath of The Hague”]. To listen to South African politicians and their supporters, you’d have to look no further than a selfless love of human rights, freedom and justice. The African National Congress’ (ANC) unwavering support for the Palestinian “resistance” would simply be a natural extension of Mandela’s party’s struggle against apartheid. But, as this essay by Howard Sackstein, a founding member of the Jewish Anti-Apartheid Movement, shows, there are good reasons to be wary of this idyllic narrative. The “rainbow nation” proclaimed by Mandela seems to have developed its dark side since then. At a time when South Africa is plagued by galloping poverty and endemic corruption, the ANC’s attempts to dress itself up as a paragon of virtue seem to be little more than a smokescreen. After all, it wouldn’t be the first to try and buy itself a progressive reputation on the back of Israel. And, by alienating the South African Jews who were its historic allies in the struggle against apartheid, is it not denying part of the heritage to which it lays claim?

In K., we have already questioned the way in which the October 7 massacres revived the memory of the European pogroms for Jews, that fatal repetition which the creation of Israel as a state of refuge for Jews was supposed to avert. This week, Anne Simon explores the mythological, religious, linguistic and literary imaginaries conjured up by the recent pogrom. However, her starting point opens up other perspectives and sheds new light on the events: that of the Flood. For how did Hamas conceive of its atrocious crime, if not as a retelling of this biblical myth? “Operation Flood of al-Aqsa” is the name they gave to the day when every creature on Israeli soil, including pets, became the target of a divinely-inspired will to annihilate. From then on, hope for the future was captured by the equivocal and scattered motif of the Ark.

Finally, as the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel presented its detailed report on the sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7 to the UN last week, we are republishing Julia Christ’s article on the subject from late November. At that time, after nearly two months of deafening silence, it was one of the first to shed light on the systematic nature of the rapes suffered by Israeli women during the massacre. Above all, Julia Christ questioned the stakes involved in their concealment by a significant proportion of international opinion, including so-called “feminists”.

What makes the constant flirtation of American anti-racist circles with antisemitism possible, if not a certain ingenuity in the face of historical reality? Confined to the American context, they have the impression that antisemitism is, after all, not a very serious issue, especially when compared to the violent racism of a formerly slave-owning society. Especially since Jews, being “white”, would be welcomed into American society if only they wanted to be. By omitting the European context of persecution against which it was formulated, they can equate Zionism with Western racism and imperialism. From Europe, we then have the impression that, if anti-Zionism can appear to be the natural extension of American anti-racist struggles, it is above all due to a naiveté peculiar to our friends across the Atlantic. In this respect, Christian Voller’s text provides food for thought. Tracing the transformation of the civil rights movement into the militant activism of Black Power, and the way in which Black Americans encountered traditionalist Jews in the slums of America’s industrial metropolises, Voller highlights the genesis of a specific antisemitism, which accuses Jews of being representatives of the domination exercised by white society. Paradoxically, while liberal Americanized Jews have historically supported the civil rights movement, this antisemitism specifically targets the least integrated Jews, reinforcing their identitarian withdrawal. The Brooklyn of the ’70s, with its clashes between Huey Newton’s Black Panthers and Kahane’s Jewish Defense League, appears to be the crucible for a pattern of interpretation that is today applied without nuance to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Contemporary French Judaism seems to suffer from a strange paradox: while it still represents the largest Jewish community in Europe and can boast a particularly rich political and intellectual history, it seems to be bled dry, unable to renew itself and pass on its heritage to younger generations. Gabriel Abensour’s observation is clear: it was only in Israel that he discovered the great thinkers of the French Judaism in which he grew up. Against the attempt to compensate for the instability of identity with a lack of audacity and the adoption of a rigid ultra-Orthodoxy, he reminds us of what Franco-Judaism owes to the revolutionary spirit and to a Sephardism that cannot be reduced to its culinary talents.

Finally, this week we publish the second part of our investigation into the specificities of Greek antisemitism. Journalist Sofia Christoforidou tells us how the Greek authorities have set about tackling the problem. But with the Orthodox Church perpetuating the idea that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, digital packs of Holocaust deniers, tags associating swastikas with the Star of David, and a tendency to import the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the difficulties encountered in this fight are understandably particularly complex to overcome.

By now, we’ve become sadly accustomed to hearing that Jews are taking undue advantage of the history of their persecution, that they’re basically wallowing in their status as eternal victims. This week’s interview with Dara Horn, based on her book People Love Dead Jews, offers an interesting twist on this accusation. For the journalist and professor of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, the question is why Westerners, and Americans in particular, seem to find dead Jews so much more interesting than living ones. Why, in the contemporary imagination, are Jews always relegated to the figure of the victim, or rendered invisible as Jews? For Dara Horn, the sanitization of the memory of the Holocaust, and the teaching of it as a moral fable from which everyone can draw their good conscience, erase the particularity of Jewish life and culture, and reduce Jews to the status of symbols of Nazi horror, and of the lessons we are supposed to have learned from it forever. What therefore seems unthinkable, and gives rise to unease, is the idea that Jews can be actors in their own destiny: the figure of the all-powerful Jew is countered by that of the radically powerless victim. To this interview conducted before October 7, Dara Horn adds a reflection following the event that continues to hit the Middle East.

Little remains of Greece’s once thriving Jewish community, which was devastated by the Holocaust. This has apparently not prevented antisemitism from flourishing, as Greece is now one of the European countries where prejudice against Jews is most prevalent. To understand the specifics of the Greek case, this week we present the first article in a series conceived in partnership between K. magazine and DILCRAH as part of a European survey on the state of public policies to combat antisemitism…

Interview with Carlo Ginzburg / Belgium, 19 April 1943: the attack on the 20th convoy

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As the Israeli response continues to batter Gaza, with the human toll rising daily, we are deeply moved by the fate of the Gazan population. This emotion must lead us…