Edito

There’s no denying that the electoral deadline set by the President of the Republic of France has thrown all French Jews into the peril of the far-right taking over the government. While some may play down this danger, or even say they want to support the RN (Rassemblement National; French far right political party), we have to take note of the fact that they are thus renouncing awareness of their minority condition and what it implies for politics in general. For the many others who do not fall into this trap, it is obviously impossible to tolerate the rise to power of reactionary nationalist parties and their consequences in terms of the persecution of minorities. Among the political positions that can be taken by the Jews of France, the left-wing Jewish voter is caught in a particular dilemma: they cannot be blind to the fact that on the side of the progressive forces that should welcome the minority perspective and articulate it clearly in opposition to the reactionary camp, antisemitism is gaining ground, to the point that in some constituencies antisemitic candidates are being invested without this causing any outrage. At K., we feel it is our responsibility to offer intellectual and existential support to all those who feel caught in this trap, whether in the first round of elections or in the second, when the dilemma will undoubtedly become even more acute, and when everyone will have to arbitrate within themselves, as Jews and as citizens of a European nation, to make the right choice. The texts we are producing and will be publishing in the coming weeks will bear the mark of this commitment.

Judith Lyon-Caen’s testimony to us this week expresses these persistent rifts with the utmost accuracy. For even if we want to suppress the dilemma, all it takes is a typographical slip of the tongue, one little “h” too many, to plunge us back into it.

As its resurgence after October 7 attests, “pogrom” is the term by which the modern persecution of Jews is expressed, serving as a memorial device that inscribes traumatic memory in a temporal series. But how did the term come into being, around what issues and events, and with what uses? Elena Guritanu has delved into the dictionaries of the last two centuries to offer us a linguistic history of the pogrom. Despite the gradual consecration of the term in the Jewish and European worlds, she notes a certain tendency, particularly in the Soviet Union, to eliminate it from the vocabulary. As if keeping the word silent would make us forget the horror.

Meanwhile in Canada, a new page of anti-Judaism is being written for Benjamin Wexler, a recent graduate from McGill University in Montreal, who is watching the anti-Israel demonstrations rocking his hometown with concern. These demonstrations have often descended into “overt antisemitism”: last November, for example, a synagogue on the outskirts of the city was firebombed. For Wexler, Canada’s 300,000 Jews – one of the largest communities in the diaspora – suffer from a curious tangle of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They are promptly equated with “settlers”…

“Are Jews a viable part of the left-wing union?” After the tidal wave of the extreme right in the recent European elections results in France, followed by the political earthquake of the National Assembly’s dissolution by the French president Emmanuel Macron, this is the question K.’s editorial team asks itself in this week’s first feature, taking note of the tragedy of the situation: faced with the Rassemblement National (France’s far right political party), and despite a campaign in which LFI (left-wing political party) crossed all the red lines of populism, the left seems only able to think of its union by dispensing with the fight against its own antisemitism.

For the first time in 9 months, a credible prospect of peace is taking shape in Gaza, provided Hamas agrees to release the hostages and the far right does not regain control of the governing coalition. The talks have never been so close to a ceasefire, which everyone must obviously want, both for Israel and for Gaza. But, assuming it does happen, it’s clear that putting an end to the war is not yet a solution to the political conflict, and that the latter is destined to continue, both in the Middle East and in the echoes it finds elsewhere. Can we imagine, however, that the end of the war will put an end to the dynamic that has developed over recent months around anti-Zionism, particularly in universities? The prospect of peace in Gaza, then, is not only a reason to rejoice, but also an opportunity to clarify the positions involved. The rich text by Bruno Karsenti that we are publishing this week, based on an analysis of the grammar of student mobilizations, sets out to clarify the ideological divide between Zionism and anti-Zionism. In the latter, two notions are opposed as irreconcilable: the nation, though the only historically realized political form of collective and individual emancipation, and an apolitical fetish, the people, as fantasized as pure and authentic. Criticism from the university then goes adrift and, without the students necessarily knowing it, it’s the old “Jewish question” that finds a new formulation, around the unthinkable persistence of the Jewish people in the modern nation.

From Europe, it’s difficult to grasp the way in which, after October 7 and as Israel plunged into war, the daily reality of Israelis was altered. It’s hard to get a clear idea of how the day-to-day reality of Israelis has been altered, from the strong mobilization of citizens for their country to the accentuation of political cleavages, without really knowing how it all fits together. In the interview conducted by Emmy Barouh that we are publishing, Etgar Keret finds the words and anecdotes to describe what struggling can be described as. At the end of November, we published a short account by the writer, whose texts depicting a banality transfigured by the imaginary have already been translated into over 25 languages. Here, with humor and candor, he shares his impression that the content of reality is crumbling, as if it were made up of a juxtaposition of stories that no longer fit together.

What does this persistence for searching and identity mean in concrete terms for Jews, if not a singular relationship to the history, memory and culture of the Jewish people that, far from opposing national belonging, extends it by questioning it? This week’s article by Yossef Murciano on his Moroccan Jewish great-grandmother, and the exploration of their relationship, is a moving illustration of the questions that can emerge. Indeed, Méssaouda’s great-grandson remembers above all a lack of understanding, first and foremost linguistic: something could not be conveyed between Arabic and French. And yet, without knowing much about Méssaouda’s history and culture, he is steeped in this heritage. In evoking his strange familiarity with them, Yossef Murciano returns to the subject of family immigration.

For our second exploration this week, we republish Yann Jurovics’ clarification of the unprecedented situation caused by the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s request to issue international arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, as well as for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, to which a postscript has been added. On May 24, following an urgent request from South Africa, the International Court of Justice issued new provisional measures concerning the military operations at Rafah. While the international press was quick to headline that the ICJ was ordering an immediate halt to these operations, we asked Yann Jurovics whether this was a correct interpretation of the new ruling.

Finally, to mark the centenary of Kafka’s death on June 3, we republish Ruth Zylberman’s interview with Reiner Stach, author of a masterly biography of the man who wrote in an attempt to overcome life. Right from the introduction, the biographer sets out the paradox with which he was confronted: Kafka may have been the brilliant writer we know, but his “physical existence offers a properly damning balance sheet.” Rainer Stach reminds us that during his short time on earth – 40 years and 11 months – Kafka wondered, endlessly and in vain, how to carve out a place for himself in a world where he found himself blocked. Ruth Zylberman spoke with the biographer, who looks back on his vertical plunge into the secret of an existence, that while it struggled to make much headway, placed the act of writing at its center.

Beyond the demonstrations themselves, how is opposition to the Netanyahu government and the crisis into which it has plunged the country being organized in Israel? For there is opposition, and it is massive. Documenting it is more important than ever at a time when lazy international opinion is propagating the image of an Israeli society in solidarity with a Netanyahu government that not only seems intent on sacrificing the hostages, but is also continuing its attack on Rafah, with the unacceptable casualties it is causing, without any war aims or prospects for the future. We therefore continue this week’s series of articles by Julia Christ and Élie Petit – who set off for K. to encounter the complexities of an Israeli society grappling with war and its dilemmas – with an interview with Eliad Shraga, anti-corruption lawyer and founder of the Movement for Quality Governance. The country’s “biggest judicial troublemaker” has become famous for repeatedly taking the current government to court, which he does not hesitate to describe as a “group of criminals”. His conclusion is clear: the degree of corruption fostered by what he calls “a government mafia” threatens the liberal and democratic principles vital to Israel, and condemns it to stray into a war without end or objective which, according to this veteran, should have ended after six weeks. For the future to emerge, a process of cleansing the political sphere is therefore necessary: it is unthinkable that the Israel of tomorrow will be run in the same way as the one of today.

While it is vital that social and political criticism be expressed in our democratic societies, there is also a tendency for this criticism to go astray, in a way that is surprisingly regular. What characterizes this deviation of criticism is that it replaces the normative support it lacks with an evil intentionality. If it is necessary to criticize, but we no longer know in the name of what, then nothing is more convenient than to target monstrous entities. The text by Balazs Berkovits that we are publishing this week contradicts those who would like to excuse this conspiratorial tendency, on the pretext that it is the inevitable, if not legitimate, manifestation of salutary criticism. For to reason in this way is to forget, or not to want to see, that within the list of providential culprits, the Jews always end up as champions. But what explains this bitter victory? Could it be a kind of inability to conceive of Jewish agency, if not as synonymous with crime?

The way in which anti-Zionist critics currently focus on the assertion that the Jewish state could not possibly want anything other than genocide – when they do not hesitate, as Youssef Boussoumah recently did, for example, to describe it as “an entity that is an enemy of humanity” – supports the idea developed by Eva Illouz in the text we are finally publishing. She returns to the way in which antisemitism has long been linked to a representation of Jews as bloodthirsty executioners. Eva Illouz reminds us that Christian anti-Judaism, Nazism and Soviet anti-Zionism were all motivated and justified by a perception of Jews as a threat to the moral order, and even to the survival of humanity. It is this supposed virtuousness of antisemitism that allows it to run riot, while claiming to have the best of intentions.

How are Israelis integrating the traumatic memory of the October 7 victims into their collective memory? This week, we continue the article series by Julia Christ and Élie Petit – who set off for K. to document the complexities of an Israeli society grappling with war and its dilemmas – with a report on the ceremonies of Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembrance for the victims of wars and attacks in Israel, which took place ten days ago. Our reporters attended an evening vigil held at a Tel Aviv high school, where, as is customary throughout the country, the names of its victims were read out. The names of victims since October 7 are now added to this list. At the very heart of this ceremony, we can discern the particular knot that, for Israelis, commands the relationship with the country: gratitude for its protection against persecution and awareness of the need to defend it, even at the risk of one’s own life. But how have the political and military events of this year affected this knot? Was it really just another Yom Hazikaron vigil?

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has just asked for international arrest warrants to be issued for the three main leaders of Hamas, its political chief, the head of its armed wing and the planner of the October 7 attacks, as well as for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, respectively Prime Minister and Defence Minister of Israel. The fact that the stigmatization of Israel has been taken to a new level here is obviously what we find most compelling about the event. And yet, there are many other aspects to it, which we need to get to the bottom of in order to see matters clearly. That’s why we went to interview Yann Jurovics, who had already spoken in our magazine about the proceedings initiated by South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice. As unfettered as usual by prevailing passions, the jurist – a specialist in crimes against humanity and former expert to the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda – answers our questions, explaining the situation and providing us with the means to understand it better. What are the practical implications of these arrest warrants, assuming they are authorized by ICC judges? What are we to make of this judicialization of the conflict? Is there not reason to hope that it could produce salutary political effects? Does this procedure really equate Israeli politicians with Hamas leaders? Distanced from the political clamor and the many attempts at instrumentalization, Jurovics reminds us that it is individual responsibilities that are at stake in this case, and not a judgment on collective entities.

Finally for this week, in the wake of the recent Eurovision, we return to David Stavrou’s article on Malmö and Sweden, where antisemitism imported from the Middle East dances the tango with an old right-wing antisemitism that found a welcoming refuge there after the Second World War. Given the tenor of the demonstrations that targeted the young singer Eden Golan, who was treated as an embodiment of the abominable “Zionist entity” to the point of being forced to travel protected by an impressive convoy, it seems that Malmö has not usurped its reputation as one of the world’s most antisemitic cities.

How do Israeli universities resist becoming involved in the war? We continue this week’s series of articles by Julia Christ and Élie Petit – who set off for K. to document the complexities of an Israeli society grappling with war and its dilemmas – with an interview with Mona Khoury, Vice-President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The contrast between the university life she describes and the hustle and bustle of American and European campuses is striking: while one might expect proximity to a conflict that affects Jewish and Arab students in their very identity to exacerbate tensions, the opposite seems to be true. In Israel, the conflict is not an abstract affair, but a reality that has long been experienced collectively, in a familiar relationship with its contradictions. A reality that the administration has been able to recognize in order to ensure the continuity of university life, by organizing mediation between the different sensitivities. Far from the monolithic image that is often associated with it, Mona Khoury bears witness to the plurality of an Israeli society that is concerned, but prepared for the complexity of the ordeal.

Is it possible that in the heart of Europe, in its very capital, Jews find themselves alone? This is the sad conclusion drawn this week by Belgian historian Joël Kotek. In it, he expresses alarm at the pervasiveness in Belgium of an unabashedly anti-Israeli passion, often openly antisemitism, which seems to extend across the entire political landscape, from the Christian Right to the Socialist Party. While we may wonder about the particularities of this Belgian antisemitism, and worry about what it means to express such hostility towards Jews just a stone’s throw from the European institutions, we may also be surprised that, seen from Belgium, the French situation seems so enviable. Could it be that the republican model, which vectorizes opinion according to an ideal of emancipation, allows antisemitism to be confined to the bangs?

While Belgium is putting on a show that we dread for Europe, the American Jewish scene seems to be continuing to produce eulogies of exile, conceived not in complementarity with a state for Jews, but against it. This week, we publish a review by Abraham Zuraw of Shaul Magid’s latest book, The Necessity of Exile. In a vein reminiscent in some respects of Daniel Boyarin’s “Jewish manifesto” (according to which the solution for Jews lies in the fact that they have no state), Magid idealizes exile, promoting a metaphysical “counter-Zionism”. But as the climate changes for American Jews – from the Trump administration to the current wave of anti-Zionism on campuses – it may well be that even the most resolute contemptors of the State of Israel will come to feel the anxiety of Brussels. Has counter-Zionism already outlived its usefulness?

What’s going on in Israeli society? While for some this question may seem secondary to what’s currently happening in Gaza, it’s fair to say that we don’t know much about it. Although the region was intensively covered in the weeks following October 7, work in this area has fallen by the wayside as international attention has focused on the unbearable consequences of the war in Gaza. The reports that tell us about this Israeli society, which cannot be disentangled from the army waging the by international opinion now vilified war, have become rarer and, in truth, have settled on a fixed plane: a society united in trauma and torn between the desire to see the hostages return and its fierce attachment to winning this war. But Israeli society is more complex than that. Two members of our editorial team, Julia Christ and Élie Petit, are currently on location to document the complexity of the dilemmas and issues that run through it. One of these issues is certainly the hostage situation. So, as soon as they arrived in Israel, they went to the weekly demonstration demanding their release, to understand what is really at stake in this issue. And it turns out that Israeli society’s demand can be summed up in a single word: “Now”, as if the present of October 7 had never closed. This week, K. publishes their report, the first in a series of articles to come out of their stay in Israel.

Also this week, we bring you a text that is a cross between historical vignette, literary criticism and a return to family memory. After publishing a review of Sholem-Aleichem’s Motl in America a month ago, on the occasion of the release of its French translation by Éditions de l’Antilope, Mitchell Abidor tells us what reading this extraordinary tale of Jewish immigration to the United States evokes for him, as a Jew who feels deeply American. His text recounts the long and difficult journey from the Old World to the New, the hope of an unfettered life and the anguish of being turned away at Ellis Island, the astonishment of the new arrivals at the discovery of American society and their gradual acculturation to it. Above all, it pays tribute to the unfailing optimism of this first generation of immigrants, who had left behind the memory of their European experience. At a time when something of this experience seems to be returning on the other side of the Atlantic, we can’t help but feel nostalgic as we listen to this evocation of America’s promise.

Finally, we round off this week with Gabriel Rom’s report on Poland’s Jewish cemeteries. After discussing the way in which the conservative Polish government had set about restoring and protecting the heritage of certain Jewish burial sites in order to silence a memory laden with guilt, Rom focuses in this second part on more limited phenomena, but indicative of an evolution in mentalities. While the Nazi policy of destroying Jewish cemeteries was continued after the war by the Polish population, leading to the theft and dispersal of gravestones, in recent years we have seen local initiatives to restore and renovate Jewish graves. In a Polish society grappling with the demons of its past, Gabriel Rom asks what can stand in the way of the forces of denial and enable the emergence of a Jewish memory that can be recounted.

We hope you enjoy the read!

What’s left of Polish Jewry? Around 10,000 people, and a few well-kept cemeteries. This week, we are publishing the first part of a report by American journalist Gabriel Rom, devoted to the preservation of the burial heritage of Poland’s Jews, and the strange ambivalence of memory that this reflects. The conservative Polish government had devoted substantial sums of money to the restoration of Jewish cemeteries, while at the same time spending years constructing a national narrative that was intended to be free of grey areas. Even going so far as to criminalize the idea that Poland was responsible for the Holocaust. The burden of memory – a memory laden with guilt – is met with silence and denial, with the result that Poland struggles to fully honor its participation in a European Union that has made lucidity about its past a cornerstone of its political identity. But Gabriel Rom’s journey among the tombstones is not limited to well-ordered alleys and heritage-laden names: behind the desire to whitewash history and pretend that Jewishness and Polishness are seamlessly linked, we find moss-covered monuments to the victims of the Holocaust, and plaques whose names have already been almost erased. It is these fragments of a disappearing memory that his report echoes.

The second text we’re publishing this week also deals with the memory of a vanished Eastern Judaism, and how its glorified summoning up in the present can serve as a smokescreen. We asked Boris Czerny to write a review of Tales from the Borders, the latest book by Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, a specialist in the role of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust and inter-ethnic relations in Ukrainian Galicia. Bartov sets out to restore the intimate memory of a Judaism at the European “end of the world”, through the tales that circulated among the inhabitants of Buczacz, the Galician town from which his mother came. But, as Czerny points out, while Bartov’s historical reconstruction is rich and evocative, if not rigorous, it serves above all to condemn the way in which Jews have entered another “end of the world”: Israel. Indeed, why does Bartov use his description of the cultural richness of a Jewish nation integrated into a multi-ethnic Galician society as the basis for an anti-Zionist argument? This never ceases to amaze. Bartov, Cerny tells us, sees Zionism as a brutal and proud nationalism, quick to assert itself through violence at the expense of its neighbors. Yet the Jewish society of Galicia, almost all of which was exterminated, was one of the most fertile breeding grounds for socialist Zionism, and for the budding field of international law. Playing with the idea that the victim ultimately resembles his executioner, and not merely criticizing Israeli policy, objectively makes Bartov a prime source for the antisemitic positions that are advancing under the guise of contemporary anti-Zionism.

Finally, since the idea that the realization of a state for Jews is intrinsically suspect is clearly still alive and well, and for those who haven’t yet read it and sent it to all their acquaintances who confuse criticism of Israel in the name of international law with anti-Zionist criticism, we’re leaving one more week to Julia Christ’s article “Anti-Zionism: a realistic option?”.

Happy reading!

Because K. is a space where concepts and affects intermingle without contradiction, this week’s issue of our magazine features a long read on political philosophy and a poem. Two texts of a very different nature, but both intended to provide us with the intellectual resources we need more and more in these dark times.

In “Anti-Zionism: a realistic option?”, Julia Christ meticulously analyzes the issues involved in distinguishing anti-Zionism from antisemitism. As we know, the stakes are high, given the opposition between those who believe that one can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic, and those who believe that all anti-Zionism is constituted by hatred of Jews. In the current political situation, clarifying this debate means taking it back to its principles, i.e. the fundamental political conceptions involved. In public debate, however, very little light has so far been shed on this subject. No matter how many times “antisemitism” and “anti-Zionism” are pitted against each other, no doubt in the hope of creating some friction, the intellectual distinction between the two struggles to emerge. To change this, it is necessary, as Julia Christ does here, to identify as closely as possible the kind of state criticism that justifies the creation of an ad hoc term for the singular case of the State of Israel. For it is by distinguishing anti-Zionism on the level of political semantics that its exact link to antisemitism can be understood, and at the same time unmasked.

In The Other Shoe, Judith Offenberg shares some news with us from Israel, all the way from Tel Aviv, in the form of a poem. How is a normal life possible in the atmosphere of a country at war? And how is it possible not to succumb to the temptation to carry on as if nothing had happened? That nothing is possible, and yet it must be, is what our young poet tries to capture.