by Jonathon Catlin
Enzo Traverso, a leading scholar of modern European history and thought, is the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. His books include The Origins of Nazi Violence (2003), The End of Jewish Modernity (2016), Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914–1945 (2016), Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (2017), The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (2019), The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate (2018), Revolution: An Intellectual History (2021), and Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography (2022), which he discussed with Sakiru Adebayo on the Blog. Traverso’s work is distinguished by its vast scope, metahistorical self-reflexivity, and distinctive relation to the history of the Left, given that he was born into the Italian Communist Party. His latest book, Gaza Faces History (Other Press, 2024), translated from the Italian by Willard Wood, began as a series of articles and interviews for Italian and French newspapers in the months after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. Contributing editor Jonathon Catlin spoke with Traverso about his latest book and how modern European history and thought can illuminate our present moment.
Jonathon Catlin: As a publicly-engaged historian, you have commented for years about the “emergency” we face amidst the resurgence of the far right around the globe (x). I want to start by inviting you to reflect on the role of historians for understanding this moment in which historical concepts like “fascism” and “antisemitism” have been sloppily bandied about and cynically weaponized. You wrote in The New Faces of Fascism:
As Reinhart Koselleck reminded us, there is a tension between historical facts and their linguistic transcription: concepts are indispensable for thinking about historical experience, but they can also be used to grasp new experiences, which are connected to the past through a web of temporal continuity. Historical comparison, which tries to establish analogies and differences rather than homologies and repetitions, arises from this tension between history and language. (4)
What role can intellectual history play in clarifying the conceptual architecture of the present?
Enzo Traverso: We live in strange times in which our historical categories and methods are deeply unsettled: we desperately need useful concepts to interpret a changing reality but realize that our historical workshop is full of worn, in many cases, obsolete tools. Maybe we are living in what Koselleck called a Sattelzeit, a transitional era like the passage from the Old Regime to the Restoration, with the difference that we cannot historicize it because we are still in the middle of this historical change. The century’s turn symbolically dated with the fall of the Berlin Wall has opened a process in which the old and the new intermingle, in which old concepts must be used to describe new realities. Simply look around. A new wave of authoritarian regimes has relaunched the debate on fascism, but this word is inadequate to describe Trump, Milei, or Marine Le Pen. The old concept of war is equally problematic for grasping the novelty of conflicts conducted with drones and AI. The revolutions of the past decade abandoned any reference to socialism and shared little with those of the previous century. Antisemitism means less and less prejudice against Jews and instead becomes an indiscriminate label for all critics of Israel. And we could continue with many other concepts. A few years ago, I pointed out some significant mutations that took place within the historical workshop itself, with the birth of a new historiography written in the first person, which is a major transgression of a rule uncontested since Antiquity: history must be written in the third person, the necessary condition of objectivity and critical distance. So, we live a kind of interregnum, as Gramsci depicted the 1930s in his Prison Notebooks: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This statement fits our present very well: we don’t face a historical repetition, a regression to the past; we are facing new problems and new threats, but we possess only concepts inherited from the past to analyze and interpret them. Of course, this is frustrating: the inadequacy of these words mirror the uncertainty of our times, which seem to announce a terrible storm. This anxiety affects intellectual history, which swings between antipodal feelings of being both indispensable and irremediably inadequate.
JC: Our discussion comes a few weeks into Donald Trump’s second term as President. You recently said you have no difficulties labeling Trump a “fascist” owing to his readiness to transgress democratic principles and endorse political violence. Yet, you write in The New Faces of Fascism, many such “striking similarities” among far right figures like Trump and Le Pen do not imply a direct lineage (23). Instead, you employ the concept “postfascism,” which “emphasizes its chronological distinctiveness and locates it in a historical sequence implying both continuity and transformation” (4). Where do you stand on the “fascism debate” today?
ET: Why “post”-fascism? Because this heterogeneous new far right is different from classical fascism. It is a constellation of movements and parties with different origins and ideological references, which in their overwhelming majority basically accept the institutional framework of liberal democracy. They wish to destroy democracy from within, not from outside. They are a threat to democracy, but they don’t act like historical fascism. They put into question the traditional dichotomy between fascism and democracy in a time in which democracy itself seems worn out, discredited, emptied, and deprived of all its original virtues. Paradoxically, the “novelty” of this emerging far right is its conservatism. At the end of World War I, fascism had a powerful utopian dimension. It depicted itself as revolution, spoke of the New Man, the thousand-year Reich, etc. Fascism said the world was collapsing and it proposed an alternative for the future. In other words, it possessed a utopian horizon. Today, “post-fascism” is purely conservative. It speaks of a “great replacement” threatening Western civilization and pretends to defend traditional values: family, sovereignty, national cultures, Judeo-Christian civilization, etc. In general, these movements have lost their capacity for making people dream about a different future; instead, they plead for restoring order and security (economic, political, cultural, psychological security). Even Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again,” while it excites his followers, is not a battle cry; it is the dream of returning to a lost golden age, when the US was powerful and prosperous.
What is new—and reminiscent of the 1930s—is post-fascism’s capacity to find an organic link with economic elites, as Trump’s inauguration ceremony spectacularly showed. Perhaps the most probable scenario for the coming years is an authoritarian form of neoliberalism. Till now, post-fascist leaders and movements appeared as outsiders that contested the establishment and proposed a conservative alternative to neoliberalism; today, they have become reliable interlocutors for economic elites, both in the EU and in the US. Of course, it’s difficult to predict how long this new alliance between post-fascism and neoliberalism will last. In the European Union, we are still far from the oligarchic power that is emerging with Trump, but a similar tendency exists. What seems quite clear is that neoliberal elites don’t aspire to create a “total state” like Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany; their goal is a state of exception that suspends democracy by establishing their own rule, a political power grounded on the principle of the “autonomy of capital,” which is different from the “autonomy of the political.”
JC: You open your book on Gaza with W. G. Sebald’s reflections on the “guilty silence” of Germans after the Second World War (1). Even though their state was the aggressor, for decades Germans saw themselves as victims of bombings and expulsions. You describe a similar role-reversal of victims and perpetrators between Israelis and Palestinians: “While Israel destroys Gaza under a hail of bombs, Israel is presented as the victim ‘of the greatest pogrom in history after the Holocaust’” (3). Obscured in this view is “the basic fact that [the Palestinian resistance] is a movement whose combatants are battling against an army of occupation” (71). There is also a parallel in the way Gaza has been devastated by aerial bombing in a fashion not seen since the Second World War—though you consider “war” an inappropriate term for characterizing the destruction of Gaza. What do you find illuminating about this historical analogy?
ET: In my view, this analogy is illuminating insofar as it reveals a difference. At the end of the Second World War, Germans were haunted by a feeling of victimhood because of their sufferings, but they knew—Sebald stressed this silent awareness—that when their cities were destroyed by the Allied mass bombings, Nazi Germany was perpetrating much worse crimes on the Eastern front, including genocides. At the end of war, German guilt was universally acknowledged. Now, Hamas’s attack on October 7 was obviously a horrible crime, and, yet, it followed decades of segregation, oppression, dispossession, and massacre. We are witnessing a paradoxical situation in which the relationship between oppressor and victim has been reversed: Israel is depicted as the victim of a barbarian attack, a pogrom, and the Palestinians are depicted as the aggressors; the genocidal violence that follows is a just retribution by the victims. This is like a Nuremberg Trial against the Allies instead of the Nazis, a Nuremberg Trial in which the Allied war crimes had eclipsed the Nazi genocides.
In this context, the concept of war seems to me inappropriate. War has long been understood as a conflict between two armies belonging to two or more sovereign states. The Gaza “war,” on the contrary, is the systematic and unilateral destruction of a territory previously segregated, with a planned, systematic massacre of its population. Of course, there are Hamas combatants hidden in their tunnels, but the asymmetry of this conflict puts into question the concept of war. In this context, speaking of war can serve as a means of avoiding the reality of a genocide.
JC: I was struck by a provocative line in one of your essays on the failures of German Holocaust memory. Rejecting the notion of Holocaust singularity central to Germany’s memorial “civil religion” or “catechism,” you write: “All genocides are ‘caesurae of civilization’ (Zivilisationsbruch).” The Zivilisationsbruch concept, inspired by Horkheimer and Adorno and popularized by Dan Diner in the 1980s, has today achieved a kind of conceptual hegemony. I was surprised by the way your gloss on this pithy claim resonates with Diner’s own insights about the incommensurability of victims’ and perpetrators’ perspectives: “there is an absolute uniqueness of genocides—the Holocaust among them—which is embodied by their victims,” you write, yet “historical understanding consists in contextualizing and transcending it, including through its comparison with other forms of violence, instead of sacralizing it.” You suggest that the notion of a Zivilisationsbruch creates a hierarchy of genocide victims, sidelines the crimes of (German) colonialism, and frames the Holocaust as an aberration rather than a product of modern civilization. When and how did this concept enter your thinking? Despite its contradictions, what is at stake for you in holding on to it and inverting its meaning?
ET: Dan Diner’s conception of the Holocaust as a “collapse of civilization” (Zivilisationsbruch) was a powerful intervention in the Historikerstreit, when Nolte proposed an apologetic interpretation of the Nazi crimes, but it was not lacking in ambiguities. In particular, I don’t share his view of the Holocaust as a “black box of understanding” (ein schwarzer Kasten des Erklärens). There are many ways to define a “collapse of civilization”: a historical regression towards barbarism, as Norbert Elias suggested; a negative dialectic that metamorphized reason from an emancipatory tool into a totalitarian one, i.e. the “self-destruction of reason” theorized by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer; or even, as indicated by Jürgen Habermas, an anthropological break, the tear of a primary web of solidarity that allows human beings to live together on earth. Hannah Arendt described totalitarianism as the annihilation of the infra, the diversity and plurality of human beings, in which she grasped the core of politics. I think that any genocide is a “collapse of civilization,” and any genocide is “unique” for its victims, but I also think that historians should transcend this “uniqueness” related to a lived experience by inscribing it into a broader context with multiple actors. Historicizing genocides means contextualizing, comparing, and explaining them instead of analyzing them as closed and isolated monads. In other words, this singularity is relative, not absolute; it can be grasped through comparisons and analogies, and it does not exclude similarities. I radically disagree with Claude Lanzmann, for whom the absolute singularity of the memory of survivors was the Holocaust’s “truth.” This truth having been captured in Shoah, he modestly thought, the entire historiography of the Holocaust was meaningless and could be thrown into the garbage. This is a mystical discourse that impedes any investigation about the colonial roots of the Holocaust as well as its comparison with colonial genocides. Today, this mystical discourse about Holocaust “uniqueness” has been translated into a kind of facile Realpolitik: the “uniqueness” of Israel as a redemptive state that embodies the legacy of Holocaust victims. Thus, the discourse of Holocaust uniqueness performs an epistemological and moral reversal that turns the oppressor into the victim. It posits Israel’s ontological innocence and justifies its unconditional support.
JC: I read Pankaj Mishra’s remarkable essay “The Shoah after Gaza” as a eulogy marking the end of a progressive Jewish tradition of Holocaust memory exemplified by thinkers such as Jean Améry, Günther Anders, Theodor Adorno, and Zygmunt Bauman, which centers on universal human rights and the claim that “Never Again” applies to everyone, not just to Jews. This is especially true in a contemporary European context in which, as you have argued, Islamophobia has replaced antisemitism as the primary form of racism. As you cite an open letter signed by many prominent Jewish Italians, “What use is memory today if it does not contribute to stopping the manufacture of death in Gaza and the West Bank?” (90). You write: “For decades, Holocaust memory has been a driving force for anti-racism and anti-colonialism, used to fight against all forms of inequality, exclusion, and discrimination. If this memorial paradigm were to be denatured, we would enter a world where everything is equivalent and words have lost their value. Our conception of democracy, which is not just a system of laws but also a culture, a memory, and a historical legacy, would be weakened.” In works like L’Histoire déchirée, essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels (1997) and The End of Jewish Modernity (2016), you have long championed that progressive, universalist, cosmopolitan Jewish tradition. Has Holocaust memory been distorted beyond recovery? Should we, with Yehuda Elkana, extol the virtues of forgetting? (76). Or can this tradition of memory, in Mishra’s words, still be “redeemed”?
ET: I think with Pankaj Mishra that the Holocaust memory should be “redeemed.” Gaza is not Auschwitz, and genocides differ in many ways, from their phenomenology to their size. What they share is the factuality and intentionality of destruction—this is the core of the legal definition of genocide—and they should not be hierarchized according to moral or political criteria. The memory of the Holocaust should be used to impede, not to justify new genocides. The reference to Jean Améry and Günther Anders, two authors I frequently quote in my own texts, is interesting because it reveals a crucial gap between the 1960s, when they wrote about Auschwitz in order to condemn colonialism in Algeria and Vietnam, and nowadays, when the Holocaust is weaponized by Zionists and Israel’s supporters. Before the 1980s, Holocaust memory was neither institutionalized nor reified by the cultural industry. There were very few Holocaust memorials and Hollywood did not produce movies about the death camps like Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) or Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997). Fascist leaders were antisemites, not enthusiastic supporters of Israel, and Western statesmen were much more sensitive towards the victims of communism than towards the Jewish ones. At that time, fighting against fascism, antisemitism, and colonialism was not contradictory at all; it was obvious for anyone belonging to the Left. It’s the incorporation of the Holocaust into the Western ideological dispositive at the end of the Cold War, with its official commemorations, memory policies, school programs, and museums, that created a growing rift between its memory and that of colonialism. Once transformed into a “civil religion” of the West, Holocaust memory broke its organic link with anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, and antiracism; it became part of a human rights rhetoric displayed as a shield for the Western civilizing mission. Such a transformation has frightening consequences. This is why I think we should rescue a forgotten Holocaust memory that joined the struggle against colonialism after the Second World War. I understand the meaning of Yehuda Elkana’s plea in the 1980s—or the more recent praise of forgetting by David Rieff—but forgetting cannot be imposed or decreed, like in Athens after the Peloponnesian wars. Paul Ricœur convincingly explained that forgetting is always part of a process of memory building; it’s a kind of sleeping past that can be reactivated, as we learned from the powerful wave of iconoclasm that took place five years ago after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The past celebrated by racist statues was petrified but not forgotten. Today, we cannot prescribe any forgetting of the Holocaust, we should rather contest a weaponized and corrupted Holocaust memory.
JC: You’ve also written about the legacy of the Italian Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. As I learned when teaching his work last year, his evolving relationship to Zionism was conflicted and illustrative of his generation. After the war he sympathized with Israel as the land of Holocaust survivors, even calling it his “second homeland.” But he also openly criticized political currents he considered fascist, including Revisionist Zionism from Jabotinsky to Begin. He was a distinctive survivor-witness in two respects. First, as you write, because “he had been deported as a Jew, but had been arrested as a partisan,” and so held that “Jewish and anti-fascist memories could only exist together, as twin memories.” Second, his enlightenment-humanist conception of post-Holocaust morality, employing concepts like the “gray zone,” rejects simplistic binaries of good and evil. Do these aspects make his work more resistant to distortion?
ET: The contemporary canonization of Primo Levi as an iconic figure of the Holocaust catechism is deeply discordant with his own conception of testimony. In his view, witnesses were neither secular saints nor oracles. He always insisted on the limits of individual memory. Those who survived the Holocaust were neither the “best” nor the most resilient; they were simply “lucky” people in the middle of a historical tragedy. Their experience of the death camps was limited; they hadn’t known the gas chambers and therefore, he pointed out, they were only indirect witnesses. With extreme severity toward himself and his fellow inmates who had returned from deportation to the Nazi camps, he described himself as representing an “anomalous” as well as an exiguous minority: those who by chance had not “touched the bottom.” Those who did, “those who saw the Gorgon, did not return to tell, or returned mute.” The “drowned,” he added, “are the rule, we are the exception.” Witnesses’ recollections could play a crucial role in the process of building a collective historical consciousness, but they did not deserve medals or privileges. He believed in some left-wing values such as self-emancipation and, as an advocate of Enlightenment, he considered testimony as an expression of human reason. He was deeply committed to anti-fascism and could not conceive his Auschwitz memory as separated from the legacy of the Resistance. He certainly could not imagine the inheritors of fascism (Giorgia Meloni) as supporters of Israel and scourges of antisemitism, but he was not blind to Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. In 1982 he described Menachem Begin as “fascist.” In fact, it would be difficult to find a diasporic Jew less Zionist than Primo Levi. He was Italian and never felt his Jewishness as a patriotic feeling or a national identity.
JC: The jacket of your Gaza book sharply articulates its historical intervention: “The destruction of Gaza is reminiscent of the golden age of colonialism, when the West perpetrated genocides in Asia and Africa in the name of its civilizing mission.” You later invoke the Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s idea that “Israel is not a ‘nation-state’ but an ‘ongoing process of redemption’ based on a unique combination of theology and colonialism” (83). In an interview, you say that “Zionism is a sui generis form of colonialism, very different from the British model in India or the French model in Algeria.” Some like Adam Kirsch have criticized the use of the concept of “settler colonialism” in this context because it can generate inexact analogies to cases in which settlers could be expelled back to metropoles, which doesn’t apply to Israel. What do you see as the merits or dangers of employing the framework of colonialism in this context?
ET: Your question covers two different topics: on the one hand, the theological-political core of Zionism, a form of Jewish nationalism that secularizes the identity of a religious community reshaping it as a modern nation; on the other hand, Israel as a kind of settler colonialism. Of course, these topics are intimately entangled but can be analytically distinguished.
Israel’s theological roots have been stressed by many scholars and Zionist thinkers. According to Zeev Sternhell, “the Bible was always the supreme argument of Zionism,” from Aharon-David Gordon onwards (111). And this argument, he pointed out, was shared by the Zionist founding fathers. I agree with Raz-Krakotzkin when he depicts Israel as something different from a conventional nation-state. The project of Zionism was the creation of a Jewish state through a process of permanent immigration and settling a territory reserved for a community with a religious basis (Jews from all countries and continents) and susceptible to becoming a new Jewish nation. In the eyes of Raz-Krakotzkin, this process was a singular combination of theology and colonialism. Of course, both dimensions belong to Western history, but Zionism merged them in a singular way. More recently, Adam Stern, an Israeli citizen himself, reformulated this diagnostic in a book which you know very well. Maybe we could say that our Western political modernity contains this hidden theological genealogy that takes an accomplished form in the Zionist discourse of Jewish redemption through Israel. Israel gave a new sovereignty to the victims of the Holocaust by redeeming the dead and sacralizing the temporal power of the survivors. This political theology is the secret kernel of a state whose existence and acts are thoroughly profane. This is the theological-political background of a modern imagined community.
The definition of Israel as a form of settler colonialism belongs to a large tradition of anticolonialism and postcolonial thought, from Maxime Rodinson to Rashid Khalidi. The Zionist project of Jewish immigration to Palestine with the purpose of building a nation-state is a form of settler colonialism, since its planned consequence is the eradication of the Arabs. Zionism did not wish to submit to them, it wished to expel them, and this project fits the category of settler colonialism. We could call it a peculiar form of settler colonialism, since most Jewish immigrants who came to Israel after the Second World War were refugees, but Israel transformed them into settlers. This was the tragedy of many Bundists who in Poland had been committed anti-Zionists and in Israel became soldiers of the Jewish state. Settler colonialisms can significantly differ from one another, but in many cases their consequences are irreversible. Viewed in a historical perspective, both the United States and Australia were born of settler colonialism. Today they are prosperous nations, and nobody proposes their erasure or evacuation, but the acknowledgement of their violent origins legitimizes indigenous peoples’ claims for justice and reparation. In the Middle East, Zionist settler colonialism created an Israeli nation which is eighty years old (more than three generations). Neither its Arab neighbors nor the Palestinians themselves, including Hamas, deny its right to exist. What they demand is freedom and equality, not the expulsion of the Jews. From this point of view, Adam Kirsch’s arguments are not very convincing. Denying the nature of Israel as a settler colonial state ultimately means denying the reality of its policy of dispossessing the Palestinians. I cannot accept a theological argument according to which Israel is not a settler state because the Jews are the legitimate owners of Eretz Israel, a land that God gave to them.
Israel was born from exceptional historical circumstances, by a vote of the United Nations that still reflected the alliance of the victors of the Second World War at the moment it was collapsing amidst the onset of the Cold War. But it grew up as an extension of the West in the Middle East, existing since 1967 as one of its crucial geopolitical expressions. Jewish history (including that of Arab Jews) was incorporated into the idea of a “Judeo-Christian” Western civilization, a corollary of which was colonialism. This is the paradoxical process through which a historically antisemitic Christian tradition assimilated a secular form of Jewish messianism. Gaza is only the latest stage of this process.
JC: The term Staatsräson, or “reason of state,” was invoked by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2008 to describe her country’s unconditional support for Israel’s security, and has since become a pillar of German foreign policy. You critically reappraise this concept, claiming that from its coinage by the Italian statesman Giovanni Botero in 1589, to Machiavelli, to Friedrich Meinecke, to Paul Wolfowitz, to Olaf Scholz, it alludes to a “state of exception,” “the violation by a political power of its own ethical principles in service to a higher interest” and “is commonly described as an immoral form of realpolitik” (32, 33). Thus, you conclude, “Behind the reason of state there is not democracy but Guantanamo” (34). This concept thus aptly captures the hypocrisy of Germany’s continued military support for Israel in its current wars despite its legal obligations to uphold international human rights, which in the view of several international courts Israel has contravened. Do you see this as a new development?
ET: No, I don’t think it’s a new phenomenon, rather the accomplishment of a process that started at least twenty years ago. From the Historikerstreit up to the early 2000s, Holocaust memory meant above all the building of a new German historical consciousness based on the acknowledgement of the Nazi crimes, not a reason of state that aimed at reinforcing the position of Germany within the Western geopolitical and symbolic order, implementing xenophobic and Islamophobic policies, and supporting Israel unconditionally. At the same time, I think that Staatsräson always played a role in the German approach to the Jewish question. For instance, it played a not negligeable role in the early 1950s, when Adenauer adopted a policy of reparation for the victims of the Nazi crimes (Wiedergutmachung). But we should not forget that the reason of state, however immoral and despicable it may be, is certainly not a German peculiarity. What is particularly disgusting, in this case, is the rhetoric that accompanies this choice, presenting it as a proof of high morality, when in fact it weaponizes the memory of a genocide to justify a new genocide. I prefer the honesty of Fidel Castro, who in 1968 admitted that Cuba had no choice but to approve the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For Cuba, it was a condition of survival. This was not the case of Germany, which has chosen Western Realpolitik against the International Court of Justice.
JC: The Palestine solidarity protests that took place on American campuses last year constitute activism on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. You experienced Cornell’s firsthand. These demonstrations, often involving Jewish students, were quickly tarred with the accusation of what you call “a new, imaginary anti-Semitism” that was instrumentalized to suppress and criminalize anti-Zionist views (45). For the media, donors, and administrators prosecuting this moral panic, you quip, “The Judeo-Bolshevist plotters of yore have become the Islamic leftists of today” (51). In the German context, you criticize the culture of denunciation and “fatwas” against thinkers like Achille Mbembe, and even Jewish scholars like Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser, who violate German taboos about Israel. At the same time, German guilt is “outsource[d]” onto immigrants and Muslims, fueling “a new xenophobic development” (36). When you write that “the cynical misuse of Holocaust remembrance poses a grave danger to our global democratic culture,” you refer to both European and American contexts beset by “antidemocratic censorship” (35). But let’s not end on a note of left melancholy! After the purported end of the intellectual, does this repression not illustrate that ideas and intellectuals still matter, and are perhaps even dangerous?
ET: You are right: intellectuals still matter! In the midst of these dark times, this is very good news. In the face of the Gaza genocide, beside demonstrations and protests on a global scale, many voices have arisen to challenge the dominant discourse. Intellectuals came back and we rediscovered the importance of the role that Jean-Paul Sartre and Edward Said assigned them: the role of troublemakers, dissenters, people who raise their voices to speak truth to power. And their voices create a fruitful contrapunto. The mobilization of so many Arab scholars and public intellectuals against what they see clearly as the genocide of Palestinians is certainly not surprising, but such significant dissent among Jewish intellectuals could not have been predicted. This proves that the rich and noble tradition of Jewish critical thought is still living, and this is one of the most comforting “side effects” of this catastrophe. In Germany there is a joke which runs throughout conversations, and which troubles the boards of magazines and newspapers: the list of censored Jewish intellectuals whose lectures and debates have been canceled or visas denied is so long that nothing similar had happen since the end of the Third Reich. At this rate, our virtuous and zealous inquisitors dedicated to hunting antisemites will soon be able to organize new book-burnings of Jewish authors. However, the role of intellectuals has changed in our societies. Although relatively large, their voices are scattered and diluted in the protests. There are no prescriptive voices like Émile Zola at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, even less charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King or Malcom X in the 1960s, at the time of the American struggle for civil rights. This is not a consequence of their limits or actions but rather the outcome of a significant transformation of the public sphere. In Régis Debray’s terms, one could say that this depends on the transition from the “grapho-sphere”—an age in which culture was mostly written, printed and monopolized by a relatively small elite—to the “video-sphere” and internet, in which culture is dominated by images and communication. This historical change has deeply unsettled and finally dethroned the classic figure of the public intellectual. Speaking with Walter Benjamin, one could observe that this is a new stage in a long process of the reification and democratization of culture. Maybe this is not only a bad thing. The fall of idols and myths is a premise for self-emancipation.
Jonathon Catlin is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester, where he also teaches in the Department of History. He holds a PhD in History and Interdisciplinary Humanities from Princeton. His current project is a history of the concept of catastrophe in twentieth-century European thought. He has contributed to and edited for the JHI Blog since 2016. He is on X at @planetdenken and Bluesky at @joncatlin.bsky.social.
Edited by Jacob Saliba
Featured image: The covers of three of Traverso’s books. Author photo courtesy of Cornell University.
