The exclamation point – that is the title of the essay by Leon Wieseltier, which closes the first volume of the second year of the magazine “Liberties”, which he founded.

It is only published four times a year, so it gives its authors plenty of space.

The editor always concludes with a contribution.

Wieseltier is host, arranger, dramaturg when he acquires texts and arranges them in an order that teaches through variety.

But he is free enough to reserve the last word for himself.

It was the same with The New Republic, a weekly magazine in its prime.

Wieseltier was her editor responsible for book reviews from 1983 to 2014, de facto alongside changing editors-in-chief a permanent co-editor-in-chief with a free hand in designing the back half of the magazine.

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

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Editor and columnist - these are two talents that rarely go together.

Weaseltier succeeds in the art of living by continuing and preforming the decisive intellectual debate he encourages his collaborators and readers to engage in in his own texts, in a constant soliloquy that includes counter-speech not only on the merits, the dutiful plea of ​​the devil's advocate , but also in style, with sudden changes of keys and moral registers.

He universalized methodological doubt in an artistic way, but all the effort of counter-testing serves to increase the decisiveness of his own position.

Clarifying arguments means laying out the conditions and thus also the limits of their validity so clearly that one can defend them with all one's might.

If you honor the semicolon and dash, you can put an exclamation mark at the end.

Or exceptionally at the beginning: above the text.

A book purchase in Jerusalem

It is a quote in the title of Wieseltier's essay.

He found it in a Hebrew translation of Theodor Herzl's "Jewish State," which he had bought from the estate of an Italian rabbi in an antiquarian bookshop in Jerusalem.

The exclamation mark is at the front of this copy as a handwritten entry after the year 1945. Wieseltier takes the mark of the astonishment of the previous owner at the fact that he was able to acquire this book in that year as an emblem of the project of Zionism, which he founded in 1948 against Jewish critics Jewish state, including Peter Beinart, a former editor-in-chief of the New Republic.

He does not dispute the historical scientific finding that the Zionists did not strive for a national state for a very long time, he even emphasizes this knowledge that

In 1936, David Ben-Gurion countered the then proponents of a binational state with wanting to hide the Jewish flag in order to buy peace with the Arabs.

Weaseltier quotes this at the end of his essay, leaving it up to the reader to refer its title to the symbol invoked by Ben-Gurion.

The mast with the flag of a new state looks like an exclamation mark: demonstratively planted ad hoc vertically over a point.

The Jewish people had never flown a flag before the era of nation states.

In 1936 his flag was not yet a sovereignty sign, but a sign of freedom.