Alice Kaplan

Zionism Without Zion

Rachel Cockerell’s family saga shows that in the search for a Jewish homeland, Palestine was only one possible location.

The Posthumous Autobiographer

Michel Leiris’s literary memoirs belong to a form almost unrecognizable today; they are driven not by plot—the narrative arc—but by words.

Seeing Baya Anew

An exhibition of the Algerian painter’s work liberates it from the political symbolism of late colonialism.

The Master of Blame

A recently rediscovered work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been celebrated as a masterpiece, but does it erase the rabid anti-Semitism of his later writing?

War and Memory in France and Algeria

Sixty years after the end of the Algerian War of Independence, “painful passions” on both sides continue to impede the reconciliation of the French and Algerian people.