By David Bidussa*
“The fanatic is a walking exclamation mark. The fight against fanaticism would do well not to reply with an opposite exclamation mark. Fighting fanaticism does not mean annihilating all fanatics but, perhaps, putting in place a cautious …
By David Bidussa*
Many years ago, in the late 1950s, Hannah Arendt argued that the only painful fragment of reality granted to a pariah was the reality of persecution. I have a feeling that, made sixty years in advance, this …
By David Bidussa
In next week’s Torah portion, we will read this verse: “The chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph; he forgot him.” [Gen. 40.23].
Was it not enough to say that he forgot him? Why is it also written …
By David Bidussa*
Every now and then I have the feeling, but maybe I’m wrong, of being a fortuitous survivor of a flood. Therefore, wherever I am, I’m forced, as Sisifo by Albert Camus, to endlessly push the boulder of …
By David Bidussa*
“One-sided” has become a way of saying that will probably mark our time (just as “ce n’est qu’un début, continuons le combat” was in 1968).
It is not the symptom of a residual phenomenon, but of a …
By David Bidussa*
“The Affaire Dreyfus” is a fairy tale with a happy ending only in appearance. With “The officer and the spy,” Roman Polanski opened up a reading of the present through the past. Once the credits finished rolling, …
By David Bidussa*
“Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it” (George Santayana).
On November 16, 1940, 79 years ago, the gates to the Warsaw Ghetto were definitely closed, and a wall was erected around it. …
By David Bidussa*
For the second time in a few months, the “Pecora Elettrica” bookstore in the Centocelle neighborhood in Rome has been set on fire. This time it was the evening before its new reopening.
“Nothing like arson embodies …
By David Bidussa*
The last one hundred years (more or less) in 60 characters, spaces included: 1917-2019, from “hate toward the indifferent” to “hate toward the different.”
*David Bidussa is a historian of social ideas.…
By David Bidussa
More or less 79 years later, once again in Dunkerque, Britain and Europe discover what the last resort is.
Now, unlike June 1940, there has been no “homeland” on the horizon, ready to bring the last survivors …