Jews, Europe, the XXIst century

Thirty years after Rabin’s assassination, what remains of the peace camp? Israeli sociologist Ilan Greilsammer recalls the objectives pursued by Rabin’s policies and makes the bitter observation that the right wing has become the majority. Will the latter’s negligence, revealed by October 7 and the conduct of the war in Gaza, allow the cards to be reshuffled?

Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City, making him the first openly anti-Zionist mayor of the metropolis, goes far beyond the boundaries of municipal politics. This success, driven by progressive youth and a significant portion of American Jews, reveals the depth of generational and ideological divisions within American Judaism. Between growing disaffection with Israel, rising antisemitism, and the reshaping of the Democratic Party, Mamdani’s victory acts as a brutal revelation of an American Jewish world in the midst of an identity crisis.

Exactly thirty years ago, on November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a religious Jewish extremist opposed to the peace process. In Yitzhak Rabin, la paix assassinée ? [ET: Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated peace], Denis Charbit revisits the shockwaves caused by the event, the ambiguous legacy and fractured memory of the Israeli prime minister in his own country. For his name still divides, despite the commemorations that have become “a time for lies, a role-playing game, where, out of respect for form, Rabin’s opponents, who have been in power for nearly thirty years, have ‘a moral duty to commemorate him and a political duty to forget him’” writes Charbit, from whose book, to be published in French this week, we are publishing two excerpts.

Né en 1925 à Vilnius, le YIVO – Institut scientifique juif – voulait être le « toit » de la culture yiddish. Cent ans plus tard, installé à New York, il reste la référence mondiale pour l’étude et la transmission de l’univers ashkénaze. À l’occasion de ce centenaire, nous avons rencontré l’historienne Cécile Kuznitz, qui retrace pour nous l’aventure intellectuelle et politique de cette institution unique.

“Betrayal” is the appropriate word to describe what the ruling coalition in Israel is doing to the spirit of Zionism. While we hope that the end of the war in Gaza will be an opportunity for Israel to get off this slippery slope, German historian of Zionism Michael Brenner reminds us here what the founding fathers, across the political spectrum, had in mind when they envisioned the creation of a democratic Jewish state.

Under Netanyahu’s government, and with the war in Gaza, the State of Israel has found itself increasingly isolated on the international stage. The Israeli Prime Minister, a fan of power politics and macho bravado, would like to make this a source of pride: “We are going to be super-Sparta.” But, asks Danny Trom, isn’t Spartan sovereignty a pseudo-sovereignty, especially for the Jewish people? Examining the political lessons drawn by Hannah Arendt from Jewish history, the sociologist identifies the requirements that the Jewish state must meet if it wants to ensure more lasting autonomy.

After nearly a decade under the rule of the right-wing populist Law and Justice Party (PiS), marked by a deeply ambiguous relationship with the memory of the Holocaust and antisemitism, Poland has been led by a centrist coalition since December 2023. Can we now hope that the public authorities will take real action to tackle the still endemic problem of antisemitism in Poland? Paula Sawicka tackles this difficult question in this article, published as part of our partnership with DILCRAH.

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.

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.