Who are we
K. is an online review founded by academics and journalists from across Europe.
Its mission is to document and analyze the current situation of European Jews through reports, essays, interviews, and contributions that revisit the long history of Jewish life in Europe. The review also publishes timely opinion pieces responding to current events, as well as literary texts that, through fiction, offer insight into the reality that concerns us.
In 1939, about 10 million Jews lived in Europe. Today, they number around 1.3 million (Source: Institute for Jewish Policy Research, October 2020). Three quarters of the Jews who, after the Shoah, were present in Europe at the end of the war have since left the continent. Jews today represent 0.2% of the European population—no higher than it was 1,000 years ago, and still declining.
How and why, in a social and political landscape completely transformed over the past 70 years—where the number of Jews remaining in Europe amounts to just 15% of those who lived there in 1939—are antisemitic sentiments re-emerging and circulating with such insistence? What prospects, for Jews and for Europe, can be sketched within this present reality?
Our approach, with contributors from every country and every generation, aims to describe, explain, and understand, on a European scale, an unprecedented situation. What is the condition of Jews in France, Germany, or Ukraine? In Antwerp, Budapest, Moscow, or in particular neighborhoods of the suburbs of Paris or London? Across Europe, our contributors act as responsive sensors, offering on-the-ground insights and specific perspectives. We seek to build a panoramic view of the complex reality of Jewish life in Europe from every angle, while also shining spotlights within it: bringing forward places and faces, social realities and personal journeys, cultural contributions. Bearing witness to dangers and fears, but also to promising initiatives.
Our aim is to create a journalistic medium that is rigorous and open, thoughtful and educational, reflective and engaged—far from the culture of confrontation that favors polemics and ideological rigidity. The review serves as a meeting point, helping to foster a network of European voices by giving them a space for expression.
Jews will undoubtedly be among those most directly interested in this project, but its contributors and readers include all those—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—who are aware of the perilous political situation in Europe, which, through the resurgence of antisemitism, affects Europe as a whole. Our goal is to contribute to the diagnosis of what appears to be a crisis affecting the relationship of Jews to contemporary Europe, but which is also a symptom of a broader crisis for which Jews are a prism or a revealing indicator.
All texts are freely accessible, available in French, English, Italian Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian) and soon in German. To support the review and access its advanced features (read-aloud articles, detailed summaries, bookmarks, early access to ticketing, etc.), make a donation to Revue K. (Si Pas Maintenant association).