For a recent interview with L'Orient-Le Jour, Michel Feher speaks about his new book Redevenir Juif (out now from La Découverte). See the button to the left to read the full piece. An excerpt appears below:

“I had never imagined writing as a Jew. Not because I denied that dimension of myself. It undoubtedly informed, if not my commitments, then at least my political sensibility, even though mine is an atheist Jewish identity, largely devoid of communitarian or traditional roots. If I am doing so today, it is first for a tactical reason. In the current context, where anti-Zionism and antisemitism are almost automatically conflated, writing as a Jew makes accusations of antisemitism against me harder to sustain, or at least more comical in my view. But there is a deeper reason. A certain Jewish culture seems to me to be threatened, not by Hamas, the Islamic State (ISIS), or Iran, but by Israel and Zionism. I am referring to a diasporic culture, a tradition of “bad Jews,” from Spinoza to Marx, Freud, Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg, and many others, that is now being undermined by the compulsory allegiance to Israel imposed on Jews.

…in the face of the resurgence of murderous ethno-nationalisms, of which Israel’s evolution is one example, it is urgent for those Jews who reject such currents to once again become the agents of identity disruption that antisemites once accused them of being.”