Edito

During this summer break, the magazine is pausing its regular publications. However, while we await the start of the new school year, we’ll be offering our readers a weekly feature exploring an important theme that has mobilized us this year and which, in our current context, remains topical. An opportunity to discover the article you missed, to rediscover the one that caught your eye, and to share some of K.’ s publications with your friends who don’t yet know us. As a reminder, our archives are open, and we invite you to browse through the hundreds of texts we’ve already published over the last three and a half years, all of which bear witness to the magazine’s ambition: to move between topicality and historical depth, to take account of contemporary issues that call for reflection on the situation of European Jewry.
We hope you enjoy this week’s feature and wish you a good rest of the summer!

The Editors

During this summer break, the magazine is pausing its regular publications. However, while we await the start of the new school year, we’ll be offering our readers a weekly feature exploring an important theme that has mobilized us this year and which, in our current context, remains topical. An opportunity to discover the article you missed, to rediscover the one that caught your eye, and to share some of K.’ s publications with your friends who don’t yet know us. As a reminder, our archives are open, and we invite you to browse through the hundreds of texts we’ve already published over the last three and a half years, all of which bear witness to the magazine’s ambition: to move between topicality and historical depth, to take account of contemporary issues that call for reflection on the situation of European Jewry.

This week, our feature offers a glimpse into the sometimes intimate world of Jewish life. Each of the first-person testimonies provides an insight into the diversity of contemporary Jewish experiences and identities. These appear in turn under the sign of strangeness, a shift, duality, disarray, incomprehension or doubt. Perhaps it is Ivan Segré’s reflection that best captures the impression that emanates from the whole, as he sees the experience of Jewish identity irremediably divided between the inescapability of genealogical inscription and the singularity of subjective affirmation.

During this summer break, the magazine is pausing its regular publications. However, while we await the start of the new school year, we’ll be offering our readers a weekly feature exploring an important theme that has mobilized us this year and which, in our current context, remains topical. An opportunity to discover the article you missed, to rediscover the one that caught your eye, and to share some of K. ‘s publications with your friends who don’t yet know him. As a reminder, our archives are open, and we invite you to browse through the hundreds of texts we’ve already published over the last three and a half years, all of which bear witness to the magazine’s ambition: to move between topicality and historical depth, to take account of contemporary issues that call for reflection on the situation of European Jewry.

This week, we return to the Jewish-American symbiosis, and the prospect of its deterioration. The days when Motl discovered New York with his eyes full of stars seem long gone. Today, it’s more a kind of malaise that seems to grip American Jews, particularly in their relationship with the progressive camp or through reflections on heritage and belonging. From the media coverage of Jewish victims in the United States, to the press of Hasidic communities to the history of relations between Jews and African-Americans, the articles in this dossier explore the tensions in the American Jewish community.

This summer, as we prepare for the new school year, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all our donors and invite regular readers who have not yet done so to support us (via PayPal orHelloasso). We are currently developing projects to give the magazine a greater impact, which we feel is more necessary than ever in these troubled times. We know that many of our readers share this view, as their numbers have more than doubled since October 7th brought the Jewish world to its knees and to the center of national debates, as witnessed by the recent elections in France.

Wishing you a good summer and happy reading!

The Editors

During this summer break, the magazine is pause its regular publications. However, while we await the start of the new school year, we’ll be offering our readers a weekly feature exploring an important theme that has mobilized us this year and which, in our current context, remains topical. An opportunity to discover the article you missed, to rediscover the one that caught your eye, and to share some of K. ‘s publications with friends who don’t yet know us. As a reminder, our archives are open, and we invite you to browse through the hundreds of texts we’ve already published over the last three and a half years, all of which bear witness to the magazine’s ambition: to move between topicality and historical depth, to take account of contemporary issues that call for reflection on the situation of European Jewry.
This week, the focus is on our interviews, each of which provides an opportunity to familiarize ourselves with a particular way of thinking about history, memory or Jewish identity, and the challenges we face today. Readers in search of a literary escape will be delighted by Etgar Keret and André Markowicz. And we recommend the enlightening interviews with David Nirenberg on the genealogy of anti-Judaism, with Tal Bruttmann on the ethics of the historian, with Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani on the construction of the concept of ‘race’, and with Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski on the militancy of Polish nationalists rewriting the history of the Holocaust on Wikipedia.
This summer, we’re preparing for the new school year, and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our donors and invite regular readers who haven’t done so to support us (via PayPal orHelloasso). We are currently developing projects to give the magazine a greater impact, which we feel is more necessary than ever in these troubled times. We know that many of our readers share this view, as their numbers have more than doubled since October 7th brought the Jewish world to its knees and to the center of national debates, as witnessed by the recent elections across Europe.
Have a good summer and happy reading!
The Editor

During this summer break, the magazine will pause its regular publications. Don’t worry, however: until the new season arrives, we’ll be offering our readers a weekly feature exploring an important theme that has mobilized us this year and which, in our current context, remains topical. An opportunity to discover the article you missed, to rediscover the one that caught your eye, and to share some of K. ‘s publications with your friends who don’t yet know us. As a reminder, our archives are open, and we invite you to browse through the hundreds of texts we’ve already published over the last three and a half years, all of which bear witness to the magazine’s ambition: to move between topicality and historical depth, to take account of contemporary issues that call for reflection on the situation of European Jewry.

This week, we return to the discursive confrontations surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For the most part, they have been at the heart of post-October 7 debates. The aim is to discipline the words that inflame the conflict: inflammatory slogans, dehumanizing insults and contentious qualifications. And, conversely, it will be a question of destabilizing the too well-established meanings, the supposedly unproblematic genealogies and the self-evident political appellations. In a word, to ensure that language is a tool for resolving and clarifying, rather than aggravating and obscuring.

This summer, as we prepare for the new school year, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our donors, and invite regular readers who haven’t yet done so to support us (via PayPal or helloasso). We are currently developing projects to give the magazine a greater impact, which we feel is more necessary than ever in these troubled times. We know that many of our readers share this view, as K.’s audience has more than doubled since October 7th brought the Jewish world to its knees and to the center of national debates, as witnessed by the recent elections across Europe.

Wishing you a good summer and happy reading!

The Editors

In light of recent elections across Europe, the issue of antisemitism along the political spectrum is fresh in our minds and begs the question if elected officials will be able to tackle it amongst their own ranks. Our firmest commitment is to ensure that they cannot evade this accountability – for their sake, for the sake of the Jews, and for the sake of Europe as a whole. Because the problem is a European one, that’s where we wanted to place ourselves in K. magazine from the outset. That of a Europe which, as the post-October 7 period has made abundantly clear, has no other way of rethinking itself today than through the prism of the fate of the Jews.

That’s what this issue is all about. Europe, as an entity and as an idea, is the breeding ground for modern nation-states, which are interrelated and in constant transformation. But how is the term “nation-state” to be understood? Is the hyphen the mark of a successful synthesis, or of an eternally recurring problem? It all depends on how you look at it. For while we usually consider that a nation exists insofar as it has endowed itself with a state, certain borderline cases call this classic scheme into question. This week, Danny Trom – paying homage to Milan Kundera, who died just over a year ago – looks at how the Dissidence movement articulated one such borderline experience. Under Soviet domination, the state is not what sustains national existence, but rather what stifles it. This raises the question of how to ensure the continuity of the nation independently of, or even against, the state. According to Danny Trom, the critical conceptions born of the cultural resistance of Dissidence work from within the European mind, and its relationship to nationalism. This is why they apply with particular acuity to Israel, which Kundera described as “the true heart of Europe, a strange heart placed beyond the body”.

Fortunately, there are also a handful of countries where Jews, if not at home, have always been welcomed. This week, Clément Girardot and Yoann Morvan give us an insight into the surprising case of Georgia, a small country between Europe and Asia that never harbored antisemitism, and early on regarded Jews as an integral part of the nation. What are the origins of this philosemitic exception? And why is the Georgian Jewish community still alive and well today, but on the verge of extinction? To answer these questions, we invite you to embark on a journey of Georgian Jewry.

The recently concluded elections in France have given us the strange feeling of emerging from a narrowly averted peril, but with no real sense of relief. The fact that the Left, whose unity was not produced from within, but only through a just oppositional cause, has recovered electorally only reassures those who prefer to ignore what is most unacceptable about it. In this respect, eradicating its antisemitism is one of the great tasks of the day. Will the Left be able to face up to it outside an electoral emergency? Elisheva Gottfarstein deconstructs the efforts of organic intellectuals in France’s far-left party LFI’s recent statements and how they are tainted by an antisemitism that is impossible to sweep under the carpet. 

Wishing you a good summer!

That’s what this issue is all about. Europe, as an entity and as an idea, is the breeding ground for modern nation-states, which are interrelated and in constant transformation. But how is the term “nation-state” to be understood? Is the hyphen the mark of a successful synthesis, or of an eternally recurring problem? It all depends on how you look at it. For while we usually consider that a nation exists insofar as it has endowed itself with a state, certain borderline cases call this classic scheme into question. This week, Danny Trom – paying homage to Milan Kundera, who died just over a year ago – looks at how the Dissent movement articulated one such borderline experience. Under Soviet domination, the state is not what sustains national existence, but rather what stifles it. This raises the question of how to ensure the continuity of the nation independently of, or even against, the state. According to Danny Trom, the critical conceptions born of the cultural resistance of Dissent work from within the European mind, and its relationship to nationalism. This is why they apply with particular acuity to Israel, which Kundera described as “the true heart of Europe, a strange heart placed beyond the body”.

Fortunately, there are also a handful of countries where Jews, if not at home, have always been welcomed. This week, Clément Girardot and Yoann Morvan give us an insight into the surprising case of Georgia, a small country between Europe and Asia that never harbored antisemitism, and early on regarded Jews as an integral part of the nation. What are the origins of this philosemitic exception? And why is the Georgian Jewish community still alive and well today, but on the verge of extinction? To answer these questions, we invite you to embark on a journey of Georgian Jewry.

And finally a last look back at France’s left and how it is tainted by an antisemitism that is impossible to sweep under the carpet – despite the efforts of organic intellectuals in France far-left party LFI, as Elisheva Gottfarstein’s text shows.

Wishing you a good summer!

The National Rally (RN), a nationalist, racist and antisemitic party, is on the brink of power in France. We therefore devote this week’s issue to the unique and indisputable challenge of this second round: the need to resolutely oppose the extreme right. If we’ve reached this point, it’s because, without changing anything in its ideological matrix, it has managed to pass itself off in the eyes of a significant proportion of the French population as something it could never be: a credible political alternative, a responsible and modern party. At the heart of this well-known “dediabolization” operation is the idea that the RN has rid itself of its antisemitism. From now on, the devil dresses as a philosemite. Julia Christ’s text examines the context in which the RN’s claim to be a “shield for Jews” may have been founded. And what responsibilities need to be assumed if we are to mount an effective opposition to an antisemitism that now knows how to move forward in disguise.
In order to dispel the illusion that the RN has become the defender of the Jews, and that the latter are therefore rallying it in large numbers, we publish a cross-interview between Johan Weisz – editor-in-chief of the extreme right media specialist Streetpress – and Jonathan Hayoun – co-author, with Judith Cohen Solal of an investigation (La main du diable : Comment l’extrême droite a voulu séduire les Juifs de France [The Devil’s Hand: How the extreme right sought to seduce France’s Jews ] (Grasset, 2019)) on the evolution of its discourse and strategy concerning the Jews.
In our third text for this week we focus – as reflected in the dialogue between Bruno Karsenti and Danny Trom – on the dilemma facing Jews on the left, which has long been their political home, and which should be their refuge from the rise of the extreme right.

“Violence” is a word that resonates strangely with Jewish ears. Whether it echoes persecution or the accusations often used to justify it, violence is always perceived as something imposed from outside. And indeed, for the exilic tradition, violence is excluded from the realm of possible recourse. However, since the realization of the Zionist project, the political situation has changed. For the State of the Jews, like any other State, cannot avoid exercising violence: this is a consubstantial fact of political sovereignty. From then on, the problem that divides Jewish consciences, to the point of dividing them profoundly today, is that of the possibility of assuming this inflicted violence. In the text we are publishing this week, Danny Trom sets out to shed light on the historical and ideological motives behind the radical rejection or unreserved acceptance of the violence inflicted by Israel. Between the violence suffered and the violence inflicted, the roots of an ambivalence that we would do well not to abandon are revealed.

Over the past few months, a great deal has leaked out of the confines of the university, placing it at the center of media and political attention. After a tour of TV shows by a radical right-wing journalist who had “infiltrated the heart of the extreme left”, the appetite for easy polemics, outrageousness and alarmism will have found something to satiate itself. And, indeed, there is cause for concern, provided we avoid panic. In The scrutinized university, a student gives us their views and reflections – informed by the social sciences and their familiarity with the world of activism – on what’s happening in the universities, on the scale of the mobilization and the ideological reconfigurations to which it bears witness. Around the question of the link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and its unsatisfactory handling by an administration frightened by public order disturbances and their media echoes, it is the issue of the future of the university space that is raised by his text.

For our last article of this week, we revisit an account of the Latvian Jewish community. While looking back at its history, Elie Petit dives into the struggle that surrounded the eventual adoption of the Law on Goodwill Reimbursement, which set out to right a wrong that had been ignored and dismissed for way too long. Namely, unlike many other Jewish communities around Europe, Latvia’s Jews were already stripped of their property under the Soviet regime, years before the Nazi occupation began. 

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”…