The war is finally over. It is with immense relief and unadulterated joy that we welcomed and celebrated the news of the past week. The deadly sequence that began two years ago and has been dragging on ever since has now come to an end, and in many ways this feels like a liberation. Liberation for the surviving captives of October 7, and liberation for the people of Gaza from the violence of Israeli bombing. Achieving this result was the most urgent task, one that had been delayed for too long, relegating everything else to the background. Now that this has been achieved, new political horizons are opening up in the Middle East, both for the Palestinians and for Israel’s relations with its neighbors. Caution is obviously called for, but the mere seed of possibility is already cause for celebration.
For the State of Israel, this liberation is an opportunity. It is a chance to chart the course that the state intends to follow in the future, to reexamine the meaning of its policies, and to question where they have proven to be flawed. For what this sequence of events has brought to light—but which had already been clear at least since the political crisis triggered by the announcement of the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform project—is the extent of the disagreements within Israel over the meaning of realized Zionism. Israelis are expected to clarify what the existence of the refuge state means to them today, between a democratic path that will have to assume the heavy demands of appeasement, and a neo-messianic path that will be part of the general trend of moving away from the rule of law in favor of a policy of power. It is hard to see how they could avoid facing this alternative. The Israeli democratic aspiration is as…
>>> Read more
Introduction: The massacre of October 7, 2023, caused an earthquake whose shockwaves continue to reverberate throughout the Jewish world. In Israel, it reactivated the specter of pogroms, which the state was supposed to have made impossible; in the diaspora, it revealed the fragility of a security that was thought to be guaranteed. In this lecture given in Bern on October 9, historian Jacques Ehrenfreund examines what this event says about our times: the end of the post-Shoah era, the dissolution of European moral standards, and the persistence of a hostility that history seemed to have disqualified.
In March 1973, Robert Badinter — the French lawyer, humanist, and future justice minister who would later lead the fight to abolish the death penalty — delivered a little-known but crucial courtroom plea during the first trial brought under France’s newly enacted Pleven Law, which criminalized incitement to racial hatred. The case centered on a piece of Soviet propaganda in which antisemitism hid behind the mask of anti-Zionism. In his argument, Badinter wove together law, history, and Jewish memory with remarkable moral clarity. To mark his recent induction into the Panthéon, France’s secular temple to its national heroes, K. publishes the full text of this 1973 plea — a powerful early example of Badinter’s lifelong fight against antisemitism and his commitment to socialist and humanist principles. The document is introduced and annotated by historian editor-in-chief of Droit de vivre Emmanuel Debono.
How should we view the divide between those in Israel who put the destruction of Hamas before any consideration of the hostages' fate, and those who, on the contrary, are ready to negotiate their rescue at any price? In this text, Noémie Issan-Benchimol analyzes the coordinates of the debate in terms of cultural and religious ethos. While Jewish tradition sees hostage redeeming as a communal obligation, a significant part of religious Zionism is reviving a Roman ethos of civic honor, which scorns weakness and territorializes fraternity. Can fraternity, specific to the diaspora, continue to inform the politics of a state?
What is “traumatic invalidation”? According to psychologists Miri Bar-Halpern and Jaclyn Wolfman, it is a concept that could adequately describe the subjective effects of October 7 on the psyche of many Jews. Their important work is presented here by clinical psychologist Céline Masson.
October 7 did not only reopen the wound of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it also revived a fault line buried in the Western consciousness, particularly in Europe. The event laid bare the link between the history of the Middle East and that of the continent that scrutinizes its explosions. For October 7 was not only imported into the debates: it was reflected upon, revealing the internal crisis of a Europe uncertain of its post-Shoah and post-colonial legacy, and now divided between three irreconcilable narratives—the Western-oriented, the anti-colonial, and specifically the European. At the heart of this divide are two haunting questions: What remains of Europe if it can no longer recognize what the resurgence of antisemitism means, here and there? But also, what remains of Zionism as a European project if its response to antisemitism in terms of the rights of peoples eludes it just as much?
In this short text, originally published in the New York Times, Israeli writer Etgar Keret discusses the rift that war has created in his society, to the point of making communication impossible.
While the Polish state continues to systematically deny Polish responsibility for the Holocaust and engages in a continuous effort to distort memory, two eminent specialists on these issues, Jan and Katarzyna Grabowski, are sounding the alarm and calling for transparency in memory policy.
In a New York yeshiva, a young student scarred by the Six-Day War decrees that Talmudic law prohibits collateral damage. His friend, a not-so-innocent narrator, recounts the ensuing adventures, with their share of unexpected consequences. Through this novella, which reads like a coming-of-age novel, Elie Hirsch introduces us to the eccentric charm of the yeshiva world, against a backdrop of teenage misadventures.
Is being Jewish a pretense, a masquerade? Caught up in the eccentric merry-go-round between two beggars, Ruben Honigmann enjoys being thrown off balance, to the point of making his identity falter.
Yes by Nadav Lapid electrified Cannes and French critics. Hailed as both a political pamphlet and a cathartic confession, the film nevertheless raises a question: what exactly are we applauding in this work that is considered radical? Behind the cinematic object, it is the discourse of the media-savvy Israeli director—sometimes embracing the role of deconstructed sabra, sometimes that of prophet of doom or visionary poet—that fascinates French critics.
Between staunch supporters and fierce detractors, recognition of the State of Palestine crystallizes sharply divided positions. Each side’s arguments are defensible—as long as they aim to protect both Israel’s security and the Palestinians’ right to self-determination—but the challenge here is to understand what such a gesture would actually achieve: would a declaration of principle have consequences for the future?
The Institute for Jewish Policy Research is a British institute whose mission is to study and support Jewish life in Europe. In this interview, Jonathan Boyd, its director, discusses the major challenges facing European Judaism in the midst of change, and considers how to measure and understand the rise of antisemitism.
Join us
With the support of:
Thanks to the Paris office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their cooperation in the design of the magazine’s website.