Edito

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

What accounts for Israel’s unpreparedness in the face of the October 7 attack? What explains the impression that Israel, in its legitimate response to an external military threat, is sailing…

The ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) clarifies the situation as the international public is now called upon to understand it. Rejection, first and foremost, of South Africa’s…

If times of crisis are often a pretext for identity withdrawal, when we seek to reassure ourselves of who we are at the risk of all kinds of blindness, it…

What is it between Jews and Europe? Who can still say, or call oneself, ‘European Jew’, as if the relationship of belonging went without saying? “Isn’t ‘European Jewry’ first and…

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…

On November 19, Javier Milei won the second round of Argentina’s presidential election against Sergio Massa, the candidate of the center-left Peronist coalition. He became the first libertarian president in…

The echoes of the current reactivation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in public debate in Western societies force us to revisit an old question: that of the difference, but also the…