This summer, K. invites you to rediscover, in each of its weekly issues, a feature consisting of five articles previously published in the magazine. This week with five pieces by Romain Moor, Keith Kahn-Harris, David Lemler, Ruben Honigmann and David Haziza.
Today’s crypto-Jews? Ghosts and fantasies
Romain Moor – Published March 27, 2025
Who, as a child, has never dreamed of discovering a secret lineage, an obscure origin that would answer the nagging question of identity? Ubiquitous in fiction, this trope of the “family saga”, well identified by Freud, sometimes intersects with a semblance of reality. It is from this tenuous junction point that Romain Moor investigates the subject of those who discover themselves to be Marranos long after the fact.
>>> Read the article by Romain Moor
Why should Jews serve any purpose?
Keith Kahn-Harris – Published July 3, 2025
Keith Kahn-Harris, author of Everyday Jews: Why the Jewish people are not who you think they are, questions, with a hint of provocation, this strange and alienating Jewish tendency to want to make themselves indispensable to the world. What if the best response to antisemitism was ultimately to claim the right to frivolity, to allow oneself a perfectly superfluous existence?
>>> Read the article by Keith Kahn-Harris
Between two worlds, or Jewish fantasy in cinema
David Haziza – Published November 14, 2024
Dybbuk, golems, zombies, spectres, werewolves and other Mazzikim, Jewish demonology has penetrated the cinema, but what does it have to tell us? Between memories of the Shoah, reflections on evil, the body or the unconscious, or even the quest for an alternative religiosity – on the occasion of the exhibition currently on view at the mahJ in Paris: “The dybbuk. Phantom of the lost world”, an investigation into one of Judaism’s most singular contributions to art and representation. By David Haziza, who has just published ‘Jewish myths. The return of the sacred‘, in the Diaspora book series published by Calmann-Lévy.
>>> Read the article by David Haziza
We are only ever the second to last Jew
Ruben Honigmann – Published December 19, 2024
On the occasion of the K. on stage evening, which took place in Paris in December 2024, centered on the theme of The Last of the Jews, Ruben Honigmann invited us to meditate on these never-ending endings. We publish the text of his performance.
>>> Read the article by Ruben Honigmann
The Khazars, the Jews, and Us: The Delusion of Origin and the Question of Zionism
David Lemler – Published May 15, 2025
Rereading Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari
How did a classic work of Jewish thought written in Arabic in the 12th century, which claims the absolute superiority of Jews and Hebrew, come to be cited by both the Israeli far right and the most radical fringes of anti-Zionism? To dispel this mystery and the misreadings of this text, David Lemler immersed himself in Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari. His interpretation reveals an unexpected utopia, that of the Jewish state of the Khazars, whose critical function could help us escape contemporary aporias.
