judaism

Have France’s Jews been excluded from the great national narrative? The fact is, their archives are as rich as they are significant, bearing witness to a very long history. Moreover, they provide a basis for writing the “external” as well as the “internal” history of Jewish communities.

Intellectual historian Maurice Samuels offers a timely corrective to simplistic renderings of French universalism showing that, over the years, it has been far more nuanced and far less anti-particularistic than usually argued. However, studying Jews as the paradigmatic minority, he tends to forget the growing focus on Muslims in contemporary conversations.

Just one year after Philip Roth’s announcement that he was retiring from fiction making, Claudia Roth Pierpoint’s Roth Unbound offers a review of his long and versatile career as a writer of subversive fictions and American counterlives.

Running through this encyclopedic undertaking to map all the Jewish ghettos of World War II are Yad Vashem’s contentions that the ghettos did not constitute a prerequisite for the Final Solution and that they were centers of Jewish resistance. What is innovative about this reference work is the huge amount of hitherto little-known documentation from the ex-USSR.

After being readmitted to French literary heritage following the international success of Suite française (2004), Irène Némirovsky’s work provides a unique insight into the intellectual landscape of the inter-war period, particularly with regard to the crisis of the novel, the new mal du siècle and the Jewish literary renaissance. However, Angela Kershaw’s recent book on the author shows the difficulties involved in reading and understanding a book once the Holocaust has changed our perception of it.

In a text which will be remembered as his masterpiece, historian Saul Friedländer recounts the enactment of the “final solution to the Jewish question in Europe”. His book is a monumental piece of historical work, but also a choral narrative which allows the voices of all the witnesses to resonate, and a personal quest for this child who lost his parents in the Shoah.

After the publication of her last book, Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of zionism, Judith Butler discusses her most recent work in an interview, proposing a new analytics of power. She discusses how the most recent evolution of capitalism exposes populations to greater precarity, and defends the idea of a life that would be completely democratic, taking into account the multiplicity of power relations.

As Friedländer notes in The Years of Extermination, Hitler lost the war against the Allied forces but not the one he unleashed against the Jews. Within a few years, Nazism had succeeded in destroying a civilisation, a heritage, a language. The executioners spoke German but they also invented a whole propaganda lexicon, complete with coded language and circumlocutions designed to conceal the extermination scheme. Conversely, in the face of imminent destruction, the victims accumulated testimonies. Are there such things as languages of life and languages of death? Dialogue between a historian and his translator.

Waiting for Godot: jewel of absurdist theatre or historical play? Valentin and Pierre Temkine topple the interpretation of this classic play by replacing it within the context of its creation. Their essay is drawing a lot of attention in Germany, despite being written in French, by Frenchmen, about a French play.

The large-scale massacres of Jews on what was then Soviet Territory are not as well recorded as the industrialised mass murder perpetrated in the extermination camps. Since 1945, several initiatives have sought to bring to light the traces of a pre-war Jewish presence and the accounts of the killings, this more urgently so over recent years. Flash back on the work of those memory rescuers.