Inside the issue: In our staff Responsa, the editors consider how Germany’s relentlessly pro-Israel Holocaust memory culture evacuates Jewishness—and Palestinianness—of meaning, while reinscribing German nationalism. Peter Kuras reports on Germany’s sprawling system of Antisemitism Commissioners, which puts the weight of government bureaucracy behind the country’s commitment to Israel advocacy. Andrew Silverstein explores how activists are laying Holocaust remembrance stones for Spanish Republicans deported to Nazi concentration camps in an attempt to break Spain’s “pact of silence” around its civil war. In an explosive deep dive on the collaboration between Jewish and Hindu American political groups, Aparna Gopalan investigates how the concept of “Hinduphobia”—inspired by Israel advocates’ weaponization of antisemitism—shields an increasingly ethnonationalist India from criticism. In our Chevruta column, in which activists and Torah scholars use Jewish texts to probe timely ethical questions, Sophie Lewis joins Laynie Solomon to ask: “Must we have children?” Oksana Mironova and Ben Nadler find a vital archive of early-20th-century radical life in the records of a New York state surveillance committee. And in a special Office Hours column, we’re featuring a conversation from 2020 between Elena Stein and the “People’s Bubbie” Shatzi Weisberger (z”l) about a lifetime of organizing and the art of dying. In reviews, we have Sanders Isaac Bernstein on De-Integrate!: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century by Max Czollek, Jess Bergman on the reissue of Rona Jaffe’s 1958 novel The Best of Everything—and her lesser-known works of the ’60s and ’70s, which show how her feminism took shape—and Isabella Hammad on a new edition of Anton Shammas’s novel Arabesques. Plus, fiction by Daniel Guebel (translated from the Spanish and introduced by Jessica Sequeira), poetry by Fred Moten and Jos Charles, art by Morgan Ashcom, and more!
(Vol. 77, No. 4)