Books & ideas

An awareness of danger

Emmanuel Droit — 2025-07-01T21:06:29Z

How did French Jews view Nazism? Beginning in 1933, they organized and prepared for war with a lucid yet often resigned outlook on Hitler's Germany.

Jewish Archives, French History

Pierre Birnbaum — 2024-10-10T07:56:26Z

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.

The Universal and the Particular

Maud S. Mandel — 2017-10-30T08:00:00Z

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.

Philip Roth's Counterlives

Benjamin Balint — 2014-05-05T07:00:00Z

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.

Ghettos: Centers of Jewish Resistance?

Florence Heymann — 2013-04-25T06:44:17Z

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.

The “Ambiguities” of Irène Némirovsky

Olivier Philipponnat — 2013-04-18T12:10:25Z

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.

1939-1945: The Germans exterminate the Jews

Ivan Jablonka — 2013-03-21T09:29:13Z

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.

Analytics of Power

Claire Pagès & Mathieu Trachman — 2012-11-29T08:00:00Z

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.

Who Will Write Our History?

Audrey Kichelewski — 2012-10-03T10:44:35Z

Until now, the Warsaw Ghetto archives were known to only a few specialists. The American historian Samuel Kassow presents them in a new light—as the work of a team whose mission was to describe the daily life of a community as it was being exterminated.

Translation and the Meaning of Linguistic Diversity

Thomas Grillot — 2012-03-01T11:31:53Z

A translator of twentieth-century writers into English, David Bellos has recently devoted an entire volume to his trade, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? Where does linguistic diversity come from? Can we trust automatic translating machines? Is English a hegemonic language? David Bellos offers insights afforded by his familiarity with “the extraordinarily subtle business of English as an international language.”