The most read articles of 2024

For the first issue of 2025, we invite you to read or re-read the 7 most popular articles of the past year.

 

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The Eternal Settler

Benjamin Wexler – Published June 20, 2024

In Canada, a fresh iteration of anti-Judaism takes shape. Ben Wexler, a recent graduate from McGill University in Montreal, watched with alarm as a wave of attacks swept through his hometown’s Jewish community. A series of firebombings, shootings, and vandalism targeted Jewish schools, synagogues, community centres, and businesses, beginning after October 7 and continuing into the present.  At the same time, protests against Israel often cross into explicit antisemitism and incitement. Wexler notes a curious variation on anti-Zionist formulas: Canada’s Jews – the Diaspora’s third-largest community, at 300,000 strong – are regarded as a distinctly ‘settler’ population, alongside the Yishuv and the modern state of Israel.

 

>>> Read Ben Wexler’s article

 

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Genocide in Gaza? Eva Illouz replies to Didier Fassin

Eva Illouz – Published November 16, 2023

Is Israel committing a “genocide” in Gaza? This is what Didier Fassin suggests in an article recently published on the French AOC magazine website. Bruno Karsenti, Jacques Ehrenfreund, Julia Christ, Jean-Philippe Heurtin, Luc Boltanski and Danny Trom have already responded in the same media. In K., Eva Illouz criticises the sociologist’s method, which skews his entire argument. In her view, “in the troubled times we live in, choosing the right words is a moral and intellectual duty”. Published in partnership with Philosophie Magazine.

 

>>> Read Eva Illouz’s response

 

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Etgar Keret: “When you say Israel is committing genocide, it means you don’t want to have any conversation.”

Interview with Etgar Keret by Emmy Barouh – Published June 14, 2024

Etgar Keret is a leading Israeli writer, whose talent for blending the mundane with the magical is appreciated both in Israel and abroad. In this interview conducted by Emmy Barouh a week ago, Keret evokes the feeling that, since October 7 and as the government plunges the country into war, the reality experienced by Israelis is losing its consistency, and escaping any grip they may have had on it.

 

 

>>> Read the interview with Etgar Keret

 

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The October 7th pogrom as a non-event on the Western left

Balazs Berkovits – Published January 25, 2024

 

Since the 7th of October we are appalled by the continuous flow of reactions denouncing Israel and only Israel. We are especially appalled by those that come out of academic institutions, articulated by scholars and intellectuals. But should we be surprised and shocked? Was this response to the atrocities committed by Hamas, aided by their civilian Palestinian collaborators, not entirely predictable? Have not these same people, departments, student bodies, activists, etc. been saying the same thing for at least the last two decades? Of course, they have, and a number of them didn’t even hide their glee as the full story of the massacre, the sexual violence and the kidnapping emerged.  

 

 

>>> Read Balazs Berkovits’ article

 

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‘People Love Dead Jews’ : Interview with Dara Horn

• Interview conducted by Élie Petit – Published February 22, 2024

  Dara Horn is a journalist, essayist and professor of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. In this interview, she talks about what prompted her to write People Love Dead Jews in 2021, and the question this book explores: why do dead Jews arouse so much more interest than living Jews? Between the ritualization of a sterilized memory of the Holocaust, fascination with the figure of the Jew reduced to helpless victimhood and denial of the actuality of antisemitism, Dara Horn questions the deeply ambiguous way in which the West, and America in particular, relates to Jews, and to the ghosts they evoke.

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• >>> Read the interview with Dara Horn

   

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“Arab Jews”: Another Arab Denial ?

Noémie Issan-Benchimol & Elie Beressi – Published November 3, 2022

The identity of Jews from Arab countries is the object of a conflict of legitimacy between the State of Israel and the supporters of the Palestinian cause. This article proposes a contextualization and reflection on the concept of “Arab Jew” and its political uses, following the controversy that erupted at the end of 2021 around the Institut du Monde Arabe’s exhibition “Jews of the Orient, a multi-millennial history”. 

 

 

>>> Read Noémie Issan-Benchimol & Elie Beressi’s article

 

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• • What Color Are the Jews? (Part I)

    Balazs Berkovits – Published June 16, 2021

  • How did Jews come to be defined as “white” by a critical discourse in vogue today? Why do we label Jews as dominant or privileged – and Israel as a colonial entity practicing apartheid motivated by Jewish and white supremacism? Part one of an essay by Balázs Berkovits on the supposed color of Jews…

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    • >>> Read Balazs Berkovits’ article