‘How are we going to be able to reach a higher degree of self-determination?’: A conversation with writer Max Czollek about ‘Radical Diversity’

Abstract

Max Czollek just published a translation of his book De-Integrate!: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century (translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi at New York Restless Books, 2023), a controversial, often humorous and best-selling polemic first published in Germany at Hanser Verlag, Munich, in 2018 under the title Desintegriert Euch. De-Integrate! is a battle cry against Jewish assimilation into a dominant culture that seeks to paint over the past – and a handbook for minorities on how to embrace their differences and resist rising nationalism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism. Max Czollek was very generous by inviting me to his apartment in Berlin-Kreuzberg in the summer of 2022, where we publicly talked about narratives of non-belonging and belonging, migration and postmigration, as well as diversity and memory politics. This article is a shortened and edited version of our conversation in anticipation of his new publication De-Integrate!