Laurent Munnich is the publishing director of Akadem, an online cultural tool that, within a few years, has established itself in Jewish cultural life in France. Akadem appears as a tool of knowledge and culture, but also as a place of dialogue among the various Jewish cultures.
Laurent Munnich, a first question: you have accompanied the project since its creation — in fact, since its very conception. Could you give us its history?
I must say that this project is especially dear to me, because it is bound up with my own development. I was born in the early 1950s, in France, and I very quickly realized that what interested me in life was journalism, which I practiced for many years in many editorial offices. When I look in the rear-view mirror, I notice, incidentally, that almost all the titles I worked for have disappeared. I began at France-Soir in the days when it was still a great newspaper, then I worked for Le Matin de Paris, then for Les Nouvelles littéraires, a fine publication that older readers will remember. For a long time I was a correspondent for the French service of the BBC, the only one of these media that still exists. There you have it. My life is the media, communication, the press. And then — because it is in a sense my native software — alongside the national press, I always kept a link with the community press. I was a freelancer at L’Arche, like everyone else; I worked a great deal for Le Bulletin de l’Agence télégraphique juive, which I recreated under the name Jour J. I took part in the adventure of the free radio stations when the FM band was deregulated in 1981. I always kept a link with the community media, and most particularly with the media of the Fonds Social Juif Unifié (FSJU). It happens that I have always had a very strong taste for computers and electronic things. And this from the early 1990s, when the term “internet” did not yet exist. I was working at the time in one of the branches of Libération that did a great deal of international partnership work. I then realized that here was a tool for networking editorial offices that was probably destined to develop, and I began to invest myself in this field. Very quickly, it became possible to do images, and moving images, on the internet. I explored that track, for example, by establishing a partnership with the great couturier Yves Saint Laurent. We filmed the great fashion shows; it was an absolutely magnificent spectacle, and very pleasant to do.
From there, how did the shift toward the cultural, and toward Jewish cultural activities, come about?
The hazards of life meant that I became a consultant for major brands such as Carrefour, such as Éditions Hachette, or the La Croix group. And then one day I said to myself that I would like to do this work for the things that truly matter to me, and what truly matters to me is Jewish culture. I must here evoke a man with whom I always had a very solid, very deep relationship, and who was at the time the director of the Fonds Social Juif Unifié, David Saada. We were at the end of the 1990s. I spoke to him about the importance the internet would assume, and he answered me: “Listen, Laurent, if you think it is important, let’s go for it.” That is a sentence one does not often hear in one’s life, and that is why I am so grateful to him. We then began to mobilize the means and to explore the idea. He, for his part, was convinced that the most important medium would be video, and we integrated video into the project. This was well before YouTube.
I was well aware that we were living through a quite remarkable period in the history of the Jews in France. We were witnessing a flowering of activities, of cultural centers, of publishing houses, of places of learning, of places of worship… Rarely in the past had Jewish life been so flourishing. We were then in 2002–2003.
That is to say, at the moment when the great Jewish cultural flowering is already notable and gaining in scale. And it is this that gives you the desire to perpetuate, to disseminate this cultural wealth, rather than to create yet another institution?
Yes. I told myself that one had to make “energy savings.” There were more and more places of learning. Besides, it was also the moment when the camcorders we used to film our children’s birthdays were becoming common. And I told myself that what was needed was to record — that is, to set down this teaching on a medium that happens to be digital. After all, it was rather like passing from the oral Torah to the written Torah. We have the good fortune, in this field, of dealing with subjects that do not grow stale very quickly. The study of the Torah is inscribed in the long term. And that is how we began to record and to film.
On the basis of this observation, how did you conceive the construction of this cultural site? For anyone who follows Akadem attentively can see that you grasp this culture from a few great poles, but in an ever broader, more nuanced, more ramified way. At the outset, what were the poles you had in mind?
Originally Akadem is very academic, very scholarly — in fact rather conventional. We had five favored domains: History, philosophy, Limmud, political sociology, and what is called Jewish life.
Concerning Limmud, can you be more precise? What is Limmud? The word means Study, I think, and does it not also involve different degrees of conventionality?
Indeed. But to define Limmud, there already existed a cleavage that was practical. From the moment it is a matter of texts, where one appeals to texts, where one cites them, where one returns to the source, whether the Bible or the commentators, one is in the world of Limmud. But if one works on Spinoza, for example, one is onto something else. You know better than anyone that every typology is necessarily reductive. But making this distinction allowed us to go further in the exploration of philosophy, for example. It is true that one can classify Levinas under philosophy, but one could just as well classify him in the category of Limmud.
What is very interesting is that, it seems, from the very start, in your project, Jewish culture is conceived as a whole that includes the relation to modernity, current cultural production, and the relation to traditional texts alike. It is perhaps a little later that other domains, such as music, will be added?
Yes, absolutely, and one can date the moment of this development. To the five categories I mentioned, we added a culture category with more contemporary elements: literature, cinema, theater, music, and, more recently still, cooking recipes. And it is true that all this contributes to broadening the spectrum.
Can we now speak of your audience? Akadem is widely followed. Are you able to know which programs are the most attractive to the greatest number?
Before answering you, I am going to open a parenthesis. If one looks at History, the Jews have always had a kind of predilection for the means and media of communication. In 1455, the invention of printing. In the years that follow, one sees Jewish communities begin to print absolutely magnificent Talmuds, in Livorno for example. They were really very quick to seize upon this invention and to learn how to use it. It is the same with the internet. As soon as the internet tool begins to become commonplace, one witnesses a flowering of Jewish websites (more or less felicitous, by the way). But by the same token, and because of the ease of the tool, one finds the same cleavages as in the community, and it is this whole stratification, in which each ignores his neighbor, that one finds again on the internet. That is exactly what I wanted to avoid.
Now I am going to answer you. From the very beginning, there was an editorial charter accompanying the project. With David Saada, we set out the project and specified a certain number of points, including the following: Akadem would be open to all denominations, to all tendencies within the community. We said, obviously, and from the very start, that the Liberals1 and the Masorti2 had their place on Akadem and that they could express themselves there freely. For in my view, what is innovative about Akadem is that this cultural tool is tied to no denomination, to no affiliation — and this choice, incidentally, earned us, from the very beginning, a few sound thrashings.
This wager on openness was therefore, on your part, a deliberate, considered choice, present from the outset?
We went even further. In the editorial charter, it is stated that Akadem wishes to be a window open onto the Jewish world for the benefit of non-Jews. That is how we clearly positioned ourselves. It must be said that at the beginning this was rather difficult. There were a few radical Orthodox, not very pleasant, who said horrible things to us. For example, that our choices were an offense to the dead of the Shoah (since we are partly financed by money from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah). Or that Liberal Jews were worse than the Nazis, because the Nazis at least displayed their program openly. Still others told us that it was unbearable to see women commenting on the Torah, and that therefore they would never come to our site. But we held firm. Quite quickly things calmed down, and those who were the most critical now come willingly to Akadem and ask to express themselves there. So I confirm it. This openness to all tendencies, to all currents, is truly something important and foundational for us.
You have therefore won this wager on openness. For, indeed, what is striking on Akadem, for example, is the proliferation of readings and commentaries of traditional texts by women.
I am going to explain this choice to you, for it is bound up with my own trajectory. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life in France, in a Judaism I found very boring. Then I had the good fortune to leave for the East Coast of the United States, where I discovered a Judaism that was, for me, revolutionary, because it had integrated all the great conquests of ’68, among them the desire for a profound equality between men and women. I found myself in the movement of the “havrouta.” These were women who read the Torah, magnificently, on equal footing with the men, but often much better than many of the men, and who made perfectly grounded commentaries on the texts. I must say that this experience really shaped me. Moreover, that Judaism already integrated — and thus well ahead of its time — a very strong ecological concern, which we are also trying to recover today on Akadem.
That is why, for me, it was obvious that the day I managed to express my point of view, it would be with these fundamental commitments to equality and modernism in the strict respect of tradition. All this was a matter of starting principles. They were not negotiable. But applying them was at times difficult and painful.
On the basis of these editorial choices of Akadem, can you discern, in what you offer, domains that meet with the assent of your audience? Do you get much feedback from this audience, apart from the sound thrashings you have evoked here and there?
Yes. It must be said that with the internet there is something diabolical: one knows everything. How long people watch, what they watch, where they come from. It is, in fact, rather unsettling.
We know that of the 8,000 to 10,000 visitors who come to the site each day, 60% live in France, and 8 or 10% live in neighboring francophone countries. There are more than 10% in Israel. I find it very interesting that we are very much followed in Israel, where French constitutes the third linguistic community, with a significant movement of Aliyah. And one can clearly sense that for many people there, Akadem is a link with the francophone culture they knew for a large part of their lives, and with which they are happy to keep in touch. All the more so since, when one does not have perfect command of Hebrew, it is not easy to inscribe oneself in Israeli culture.
To go in your direction, one has the impression that Akadem plays an important role in yet another domain. It bears witness to that immensely rich Jewish cultural life we were evoking. This phenomenon, you and I know it, but many Jews, and above all many Israelis, are not aware of it. Do you not think that the dissemination of these courses and lectures contradicts a certain number of received ideas or prejudices: that of the Jew losing his Jewishness when he lives in exile, in “galut3,” or that of the Jews of France who are supposedly terrified and live holed up at home?
Absolutely, I quite agree. There is sometimes a kind of condescension on the part of our Israeli friends toward the poor Jews of the “galut” who have not understood that their future was completely closed off in France and that, obviously, outside of emigration, of Aliyah, there is no salvation. Yet one need only live in this country to realize that this “exile” is perhaps a great opportunity for Israel as well.
You were saying that the internet is a diabolical tool. What does it reveal to us?
In February 2016 we celebrated the tenth anniversary of Akadem. And we had the idea of conducting an online survey in which we asked people to answer a few questions, so as to learn a little about who they were, what they did on the site, what they appreciated.
So, a first pleasant surprise: within the span of a week, we received more than a thousand replies. That represents a sample, even if not entirely representative, for one may suppose that the thousand visitors to the site who replied first are the thousand most attached to the tool. This survey was full of surprises and discoveries, and I must say that it influenced me in the reorientation of the project.
First surprise: there are many non-Jews who watch Akadem. There are more than 22% of people who say they watch Akadem at least one hour a day! I was the first to be surprised. And another surprise, which answers one of your earlier questions: there is an enthusiasm for the commentaries on the Parashah4, and those who watch them most, apparently, are non-Jews. So here, the need for spirituality and the quest for meaning are truly palpable. It must be specified, however, that these are above all Christians. There are barely a dozen among them who say they are Muslim.
And then — and this too was decisive in refining our choices — there are 20 to 25% of people who say: “I am Jewish, but I have no practice.” And since the question right after asked them whether they were Yom Kippur Jews, we know from their answers that these are Jews who do not even go to the synagogue on the day of Kippur. That is to say, these are people who attach themselves to Judaism only through culture. A cultural Judaism. When they enter a bookshop, they go toward books of Jewish History or Jewish thought or Jewish folklore. When Israeli films come out in the cinemas, they will not miss them, any more than a klezmer concert. It is a form of sensibility, and it gave me much to think about. I must tell you that I am very glad that Christians are interested in the Parashah and listen to the courses; I am proud of it. But faced with these 22 or 25% of listeners who have no link with their Judaism except through Akadem, I feel a genuine moral obligation — the obligation to nourish them.
It is a matter of nourishing them, and perhaps also of being nourished by them?
Yes, you are right. But in any case — forgive the expression — it is a matter of not letting them “slip away,” of offering them something. I am going to speak ill of institutional Judaism, but one is forced to observe that when one has not had even an embryonic initiation into Judaism, it is not easy to cross the threshold of a synagogue. And nothing is done to draw you in; on the contrary. The newcomer quickly feels ill at ease, he does not know how to position himself: is one allowed, is one not allowed to do this or that? And not much is done either (I am being severe) to attract these people to the community centers. There are magnificent community centers in France, but those who come to them already have a real culture, a real identity, a real demand; they are capable of formulating their curiosity.
You are evoking here a dimension of Akadem that is rich and paradoxical. It is a tool the Jewish community has equipped itself with, financed in part by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and in part by the Fonds Social, a community body — but at the same time, this tool is very largely open toward the Jews in the wider city and the non-Jews in the wider city. And that is perhaps its greatest success, in a sense.
If we continue to sweep quickly through the catalogue of percentages, we have a breakdown that, here too, arouses in me a certain pride. There is a roughly equal distribution of Liberal Jews, of Traditionalist Jews, of Shomer Shabbat5, and of Shomer Mitzvot6 (one must understand that the latter do not merely observe the Shabbat like the former, but that they are people who every morning put on tefillin7).
And the idea that on one and the same site one can have Christians curious about Judaism and about the reading of the Old Testament, and Jews of whom ten percent say “I am shomer mitzvot,” plus all the others — well! It is heartening. There is a place where all can cohabit. What would be ideal would be to go further in this direction. For there is also a forum where people express themselves a great deal and where, from time to time, people begin to dialogue. They ought to be encouraged in this.
We might now speak of the future. At the start, Akadem was a kind of transmitting witness of what was at play at the level of culture, of all the Jewish cultures, but it contented itself, in a sense, with filming and rebroadcasting. That was already a great deal. And I know, for example, that for the annual event we organized at the Lutétia — Livres des mondes juifs et diasporas en dialogue (Books of the Jewish Worlds and Diasporas in Dialogue) — we were in partnership with you and you accompanied us very faithfully. But it seems there has been a further step. From the moment you filmed not only colloquia or lectures but also courses, an aim was emerging that was more pedagogical. And now, are we witnessing the establishment of a third stage in which Akadem would be not only a disseminator but also a cultural producer?
Yes. For some time now we have become producers of content. This overlaps somewhat with what we were saying earlier. There are many lectures of a very high level, but which sometimes leave by the wayside the people who do not possess the fundamentals, the indispensable tools to follow them. And very quickly we were confronted with this problem. It led us to the creation of a whole line of little video clips, very illustrated, very animated, very pedagogical, of seven or eight minutes’ duration — a series we call Alef-Bet (like A-B-C) and which are, in fact, the tools needed in order to advance. There are clips on the great corpora of texts (what is the Torah8? the Tanakh9? the Zohar10?). There are some on the Jewish festivals, on the great concepts of Judaism. These fundamentals — there are about a hundred of them at the moment — all begin with the same sentence. A teacher who says: “You’ve heard of… I’m going to help you put a little order into all of this.” Take, for example, the tefillin11 — what they are, what is inside, what one does with them — or the question of kashrut12: one can say precisely what kashrut is, in 8 minutes. We realized that this had a real audience success and that it was the beginning of the pedagogical approach, a kind of stepping-stone for gaining access to other content.
On another plane, in filming more structured courses, we ran into another problem. The courses last on average an hour to an hour and a half, and these are durations that are difficult to sustain on the internet. One quickly tends to channel-surf. This world of channel-surfing is something of the flip side of the audiovisual world. So we thought of reinventing a format. And today we are working on a thirty-minute course format.
Are these courses that you produce?
Yes, these are courses that we produce. We choose a particular teacher or thinker. We discuss with him freely a strong theme, and we give him the open camera. For example, Henri Cohen-Solal, a regular of Akadem. We discussed with him the theme of violence in the Bible and we gave him the “open camera.” I think we are now at ten or twelve items. And this will doubtless give rise to a book that will come out some time from now.
In relation to what we film on location, we also try to “fill in the gaps,” to address themes that are less treated. The last rung of this construction consists in a partnership that works very well with Shmuel Trigano and the Université populaire du judaïsme. He long ran the Collège des études juives of the Alliance, then, after its closure, he recreated something called the Université populaire du judaïsme. And for the past five years we have now been systematically filming all the courses of this university.
Can we talk about Akademscope?
Akademscope was born of a very precise concern: to have an equitable relation with the organizers of events. The Institut Élie Wiesel, the Centre Medem, or Livres des mondes juifs, for example, go to a great deal of trouble to set up an event, to reflect on the relevance of choosing one theme or another, to bring in the speakers, to pay for plane tickets… Now at Akadem, all I need do, on the day itself, is arrive, plant my camera, shoot, and benefit from all this upstream work. Obviously, I render a service, since I preserve the trace of this work and disseminate it, but it may happen that my organizer friends tell themselves they could capture the event themselves. And above all, from the very beginning, I asked myself what I, too, could offer them in return that might interest them, help them — and that is how the idea of Akademscope was born. Since I have had the good fortune to set up a mailing list of more than 90,000 email addresses, I can let them benefit from it. Since they organize courses, seminars, lectures, symposia, I am going to announce these with this newsletter, which is a kind of guide.
Indeed, one could say that Akademscope is a guide, a sort of Jewish Officiel des spectacles or Pariscope. But it is also a genuine cartography of the state of a group at a given moment in its history and its culture — as is Akadem, for that matter. One might tell oneself that in a few decades or more, to go through Akademscope, to watch Akadem, will allow future historians to perceive some of the salient features of what the life of the Jews was, here, in France, at the beginning of the 21st century.
Yes, with this magazine one can take the measure of the absolutely phenomenal richness of Jewish cultural production in France. We film a little everywhere in France, and we have two filming teams in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. We also sometimes send our videographers to other countries where important events are taking place. We had a partnership with Canada, for example.
You were asking me the question of projects and of the future. I must tell you that what is hard in this profession is that one spends one’s time running after technological evolution. When we had printing, at least for a few years one had some peace… Even if it was improved, for years it was the same principle, a touch of ink on paper. But with this medium, which is diabolical and extraordinary, the technological revolutions follow one another at a truly infernal pace. Take, for example, the technology one uses to encode videos. One must digitize them, and in ten years we have changed standards three times. We have had to re-encode the entire video archive three times. I do believe the next standard will not be long in coming, and we will have to start all over again. That is why we have every interest in always being in a state of anticipation.
What I observe in the younger generations, in my children and in the young collaborators of Akadem, is that communication, information, has become a totally asynchronous activity. We were raised with the habit of having fixed appointments: the 8 o’clock news, or the morning radio program as we got ready to have breakfast before going to work, or the publication of the newspaper Le Monde that one would go and buy at 2 p.m. when one was a Parisian. This gave a rhythm to our days, and one had to be there at the moment the message was delivered, one had to be in synchrony. The receiver and the emitter had to be in phase. That is no longer the case at all today. If I want a slice of information, I connect, I go on my phone, on my Facebook, and I consume information for ten minutes to find out what is happening in the world. This is revolutionizing production, and today the news magazines are conceived first of all to be on the internet, and it is only afterward that one has versions on the television channels.
For us, all this means that, without abandoning any of what has been the substance of our activity — that is, filming lectures given by others and producing pedagogical content ourselves — Akadem will also have to become a provider of information, with a following of current events in the form of a magazine. We began by being a magazine of Jewish cultural news, then progressively we opened a Jewish magazine of the news.
Let me explain. I am convinced that on the great subjects that interest us today, and that interest the entire nation — the question of secularism, the relation to the body and the practice of dress, the economy and labor laws, or what a leader is in a democracy — Judaism has interesting things to say. On the notion of secularism, on the relation to the woman’s body, its visibility or its modesty. We are at the heart of our mission in trying to convey messages of universal value on the place of the stranger, the welcoming of the migrant, the relation to the Other. The Torah is rich in reflection on respect for the environment. When we bring in a Claude Riveline, a Henri Atlan, a rabbi, a thinker, to question the image of the leader in the Torah, I tell myself that, given the terrible boredom that emanates from political debate today, it is a way of giving it a little vigor — because, frankly, we have known political periods that were more stimulating.
We have now almost reached the end of this interview. A wish you would like to express?
… A personal wish for openness.
Each time I stop and reflect on what I am doing, I realize how much I have been influenced by the thought and the approach of my parents, of my father in particular. A grand Polish-French bourgeois, belonging to that well-established institutional Judaism, who found himself in the far reaches of North Africa, where he met my mother, an Algerian Jewish woman who had never left her Constantine region. It is from them that I learned to have respect for all forms of Judaism. My father had discovered Sephardic Judaism; he was the most “Sephardophile” of all the Ashkenazim I have ever met. He had a rather traditionalist practice, but that did not stop him from sending his children to the Talmud Torah on the rue Copernic, because he found that the best teachers of the time were there, and that was what interested him.
My mother accomplished the extraordinary cultural revolution of integrating herself into the reviving Judaism of postwar France, a world totally unknown to her. I realize today, in retrospect, that I was extremely shaped by this openness, and I think it is what is most precious to preserve in our Judaism. To preserve its eclecticism and, above all, its respect for others. Sometimes I grow anxious when I see the communitarianism, the sectarianism that is taking hold within the community, or the mini-communities that do not speak to one another. And it is also against all this that Akadem developed.
Notes
Liberal Jews: Liberal Judaism holds that the Jewish tradition was forged over the course of the centuries, that the Judaism of today is the result of an evolution, and it advocates an adaptation to modern times.↩︎
Masorti Judaism: The Masorti movement situates itself between Liberal Judaism and consistorial Judaism. It claims a Law that is evolving and adapted to the constraints of modern life, while preserving a traditional framework, notably in matters of worship.↩︎
Galut: A term meaning “exile,” designating the dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the world.↩︎
Parashah: One of the 52 weekly sections of the Hebrew Bible, read and commented upon throughout the year.↩︎
Shomer Shabbat: a believer who observes the prescriptions and the rest of the Shabbat.↩︎
Shomer Mitzvot: a believer who observes the entirety of the rules and prescriptions of Jewish law (mitzvot), including the rest of the Shabbat.↩︎
Tefillin: Phylacteries. They consist of two small cubic boxes containing four passages of the Bible. At the time of prayer, they are bound to the arm and the head by leather straps.↩︎
Torah: According to the tradition of Judaism, it is the divine teaching transmitted by Moses through his five books, as well as the whole of the teachings that flow from them. It is the Pentateuch, the Bible in all its parts.↩︎
Tanakh: the Hebrew Bible.↩︎
Zohar: The Book of Splendor, the major work of the Kabbalah and an esoteric commentary on the Pentateuch.↩︎
Tefillin: Phylacteries. They consist of two small cubic boxes containing four passages of the Bible. At the time of prayer, they are bound to the arm and the head by leather straps.↩︎
Kashrut: Kashrut consists in nourishing oneself according to the precepts of Jewish law, observing a certain number of rules and dietary prohibitions.↩︎