Antisemitism in France Then and Now

French Election, Summer 2024 

News of France this week is primarily the news of the election. If you have been following French current events, you will probably know what I’m about to say, but here is my summary of the situation. France has a multi-party political system, representing a spectrum of views from extreme right to extreme left. For several years, the centrist party of President Macron has dominated the government; however, his party was severely defeated in the election of representatives to the European Parliament last month, and he declared elections for a new French government. 

Sunday, June 30, the first round of voting was a major blow to Macron’s centrist coalition, which came in third behind the far right and the far left. In particular the far right National Rally party (the RN, formerly called the National Front) obtained the most votes, and has a good chance to win a majority in next Sunday’s second and final round of voting. As the Guardian says:

“A high turnout in Sunday’s first round saw RN comfortably win first place with 33.1% of the vote, almost two points up compared with three weeks ago. For context, this is the first time that the party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen has broken through the 20% barrier in a legislative election.” (source)

This is concerning for many reasons; in this short summary I’m going to concentrate on the issues of antisemitism expressed by members of this party.

From French newspaper Libération: “Twelve million of our fellow citizens have voted for a far right party that is clearly racist and anti-Republican.” (source)

Despite pretense to the contrary, the “rebranded” party founded by self-proclaimed antisemite Jean-Marie LePen and currently run by his daughter Marine is a frightening specter in the French elections this week. A strong possibility of their winning a majority and thus taking over the government is very chilling.

After the first vote on June 30, the extreme right party in France is far ahead of the others.
This is the party of LePen, a dedicated antisemite, though they have stepped back the antisemite rhetoric.

During the electoral campaign in May, there were antisemitic statements from both far right and far left candidates, for example—

“Racist and antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories spread by National Rally candidates came under scrutiny during the campaign sprint — and amplified questions about whether the party’s rebranding was merely window dressing. Almost 1 in 5 of National Rally’s candidates for parliament have made “racist, antisemitic and homophobic remarks,” French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said in a televised debate Thursday.” (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/06/30/france-elections-macron-le-pen-bardella/)

Further, antisemitic public actions in France (as in other European countries and in the US) has been ongoing since the Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war last October:

“There were more than 360 antisemitic episodes in France in the first three months of this year, or an average of four a day, an increase of 300 percent over the same period last year, the government said. In the most recent one that shocked the country, the three boys are said to have dragged the girl [age 12]  into an abandoned building where she was repeatedly raped and insulted.” (New York Times, June 20)

Here are few additional examples of antisemitism by National Rally candidates:

“Sophie Dumont, a National Rally candidate in northeastern France, was spotlighted by Libération for a post implying that Jewish financing was behind Reconquest, a rival far-right party led by Eric Zemmour, who is Jewish. Zemmour’s adviser had said that the ritual slaughter of animals to make kosher and halal meat should not be banned in France. “The small gesture that betrays the origin of the funds that fuel Reconquest,” Dumont wrote in a now deleted comment. 

 

“Agnès Pageard, a National Rally candidate in Paris, has advocated for abolishing a law that makes it illegal to question the Holocaust and another that bans ‘incitement to hatred’ against religious or racial groups. She responded to a social media post that alleged ‘collusion’ among prominent Jewish people in France by recommending ‘reread Coston and Ratier’ — two authors known for their antisemitic conspiracy theories.” (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/06/28/france-far-right-antisemitism-racism-le-pen/)

On the left, there are also a number of candidates who have made antisemitic statements, such as this example about a candidate of the party “La France Insoumise” —

“At least one member of La France Insoumise has made intolerable remarks. Reda Belkadi, a candidate in the Loir-et-Cher department south of Paris, published anti-Semitic messages in 2018 on social media. He had used the anti-Semitic slur ‘youpin.’” (Le Monde, June 29, 2024)

Looking Back: Paris Under the Nazi Regime

Les Parisiennes by Anna Sebba (published 2016)

As I read this book about life in Paris under the Nazis, I constantly thought about the current French election and its all-too-painful reminders of this part of the past. I read this observation about the current party, the National Rally:

“There was a reason a political barrier was long erected against the National Rally, with its quasi fascist history (now disavowed) and its enduring belief that immigrants dilute the essence of the French nation. The party provokes extreme reactions and troubled memories of the collaborationist wartime Vichy government.” (source) 

 

In Les Parisiennes, Anna Sebba depicts the lives of many women who lived through the Nazi occupation of Paris. Most of the author’s subjects had little or no contact with the Jewish residents of Paris, and little or no responsibility for the persecution and deportation of Jews to the Concentration Camps — but there are many stories of the fate of Jewish women, including, for example, the famous writer Irene Nemirovsky. I’m not going to review this book, but only use it to remind us of the past history that haunts many Parisians (and of course others) even today as antisemitism seems to return, along with attacks on many modern immigrant communities and naturalized French citiens.

For the Jews of Paris in 1942, the main event was the arrest of almost the entire Jewish population, which was done by French, not German, authorities. Here is Anna Sebba’s summary (in case you are not familiar with the history:

“On 16 and 17 July, the Vichy government, aiming to satisfy German demands to reduce the Jewish population, arrested some 13,152 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, mostly from Paris, in an operation which they were calling ‘Spring Wind’. René Bousquet, Secretary General of the French National Police, knew that using French police in the round-ups would be ‘embarrassing’ but hoped that this would be mitigated if those arrested were only so-called foreign Jews. However, as the historian Serge Klarsfeld has revealed (making use of telegrams René Bousquet sent to the prefects of departments in the occupied zone), the police were ordered to deport not only foreign Jewish adults but children, whose deportation had not even been requested, nor planned for, by the Nazis. Pierre Laval maintained that including children in the round-ups was a ‘humanitarian’ measure to keep families together, a clearly fallacious argument since many of the parents had already been deported.’ (p. 159)

Before they could be deported on trains to the East, these victims were held at a sports stadium:

“Everyone was taken on French buses to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle stadium in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, where most of the victims were temporarily confined for five days in extremely crowded conditions, almost without water as there was only one available tap, with little food and with inadequate sanitary facilities. They were then moved to Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, internment camps managed by Vichy in collaboration with the Germans, before being sent on by train to Auschwitz for extermination. The round-up has been a source of enormous grief in France. It was not until 1995 that French President Jacques Chirac admitted French complicity as French policemen and civil servants had been used for the raid. He urged that 16 July be commemorated annually as a national day of remembrance. It was a ground-breaking moment in French history.” (p. 161) 

Sculpture commemorating the Jews of Paris deported in 1942 (Source: French Dept. of the Army)

The sculpture above shows the “Square de la Place-des-Martyrs-Juifs-du-Vélodrome-d’Hiver, where a sculpture by Walter Spitzer and Mario Azagury entitled ‘N’oublions jamais’ (Let us never forget) remembers the victims of the roundup of Jews on 16 and 17 July 1942, at 8, Boulevard de Grenelle, 15th arrondissement of Paris. © Département AERI”

Paris in July

Along with many bloggers, I’m participating in “Paris in July,” a blog event hosted by Emma at the blog Words and Peace (link). My contribution today connects current events in Paris to the historic events of another July — July, 1942. 

Blog post © 2024 mae sander.

 

A New Year is coming: let it be better than this one.

Birding allows me to enjoy the beauty of the natural world.
Yet anyone who appreciates the natural world has a lot to worry about.
This bird, the kingfisher, has long been a symbol of calm weather, peace, and love.

The Planet is in Trouble!

What is important to me this year? Global human and natural welfare are fragile. The future looks uncertain. My focus leans towards the US because that’s where I live, and I see many causes for concern, serious concern. Many of the issues that I worry about are closely linked to one another. And there are so many of them!

• Climate change as an existential threat to humanity: arriving rapidly and causing a number of types of deprivation, desperation, natural disasters, and dysfunction in societies, especially causing food scarcity and famine or near-famine in the global south.
• The war in Israel and the dreadful consequences if Hamas is not defeated.
• Antisemitism in American life and on US university campuses — brought out by the war in Israel, but obviously evoked, not caused by the war.
• Increasing inequality (both socio-economic and racial) throughout the US with a variety of bad consequences, combined with right wing repression of women’s rights and minority rights.
• The war in Ukraine and the looming dominance of Russia as a consequence of a bad end to the war. 
• Food shortages in many third world countries (much of it due to climate change) forcing large numbers of people to crowd into already overburdened cities and often to attempt migration to the global north.
• Political success by the extreme right wing in many places. The large numbers of desperate people wanting to enter North American and European countries is one factor in growing right-wing strength in the global north.
• Degradation of educational institutions in the US: a complex and multi-faceted issue.
• The threat to world peace implicit in almost every one of the above issues.
• In the US, we are also threatened with the end of democracy and the completion of a right-wing takeover of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the Federal government.

Notice that I don’t have any mention of AI or of any type of rampant and out-of-human-control technology on the list. I’m not very worked up about AI — maybe that will prove to be all wrong. And although I’m very interested in how our food choices and consumer choices collectively impact human life, my concerns for the future are expressed in a more general way. Similarly, fears that treasured creatures such as some species of birds, bats, frogs, polar bears, rhinos, fish, monarch butterflies, and many more may go extinct (or lose their natural habitat and exist only in captivity) is intrinsic in the concern about climate change. As the New Year approaches, all these thoughts perplex me.

Sunrise on one of the shortest days of the year. We hope things will start to look better.

I've also reread a mystical novel based on Jewish traditions and folklore:
The World to Come by Dara Horn. Reading good books: another cosolation.

Blog post © 2023 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz 

and with Eileen's Saturday Critters 

A Sad Time for a Holiday

The first candle to light tonight — in my home. Israeli menorah with doves of peace!

Hanukah starts tonight. We have various plans for celebrating the holiday, but it's a sad time. Here is a summary from Reuters of the situation for the holiday in Israel (source):

"Two months into a war with Hamas, the faces of Israelis taken hostage to Gaza still appear on individual posters plastered across Jerusalem bus stops and flashed across buildings. The sombre mood was all-consuming on Thursday at the start of Hanukkah, the first Jewish festival since 7 October … It was a solemn moment for all of Israel and not only for families of the 138 Israelis still held hostage."

 

At a rally in Tel Aviv last month

Writing in the New York Times, Qanta A. Ahmed, a senior fellow at The Independent Women’s Forum, presented her thoughts in an op-ed titled “Two months later, Hamas’s Oct. 7 horror cannot be allowed to fade.” She says:

“Barely eight weeks have passed, but this needs saying: Hamas committed crimes against humanity in Israel on Oct. 7. That much should be obvious from the terrorists’ own mass-murder video recordings, but it is indisputable for anyone who has visited, as I have, the ravaged sites of their attack. … As a Muslim woman, a physician and a journalist, I have devoted much of my work to battling radical Islam. …Islamism is a monster I know too well. And I know its hatred of Israel, hatred of Jews is especially poisonous.”

Antisemitism At Home 

As this holiday begins, we should be celebrating the end of a war in Israel when Jewish life was threatened — of course I mean the victory of the Maccabees over 2000 years ago. But celebrating this ancient victory is hard when forces around the world and direct violence in Israel once again are threatening to destroy Israel! 

Here at home in the US, we Jews are facing the most extreme antisemitism of our entire lives. The Anti-Defamation League reported on the incidence of antisemitism in October after the Hamas orgy of murder, rape, and kidnapping in Israel: “Preliminary data from ADL Center on Extremism indicates that reported incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault increased by 388 percent over the same period last year.” (source)

Over three-quarters of Jewish college students have recently encountered antisemitic verbal or physical attacks since the war began. (source) At congressional hearings this week, several prestigious college presidents embarrassingly refused to take a stand on whether a call for the genocide of Jews was against their free-speech policies. This is a complicated issue, but the safety of Jews on campuses is clearly not being taken seriously by the administrators.

In an article titled "There Is No Right to Bully and Harass," writer David Frum in the Atlantic describes this horror show:

"Rhetoric drawn from the Jefferson-Mill tradition is now being used to defend behavior that is meant to intimidate or harm. Important elements of our society have shifted from their former claim that speech can be violence to a bold assertion that violence should count as speech. ... Rifle through the news accounts of the past few years and you find dozens, if not hundreds, of similar cases of vandalism, bodily interference, even outright assault as forms of anti-Israel expression. Only this week, the Biden White House and the governor of Pennsylvania issued statements condemning the mob action against a falafel restaurant in Philadelphia owned by an award-winning Israeli-born chef and entrepreneur. But such menacing behavior has become the preferred style of anti-Israel expression in the United States and Canada."

This new American antisemitism pretends to be something else — it hides itself in a variety of ways. Another article in the Atlantic explains how this is working: "How to Be Anti-Semitic and Get Away With It: Too many communities have developed ways to excuse or otherwise ignore prejudice," by Yair Rosenberg. He writes: 

“Out of 8 billion people on the planet, there are only 16 million Jews—but far, far more anti-Semites. … I have become a reluctant expert in all the ways that anti-Jewish activists obfuscate their hate. … too many communities have developed ways to excuse or otherwise ignore anti-Semitism. Today, such prejudice is growing in high and low places because powerful people around the world are running the same playbook to launder their hate into the public sphere.”

From the White House last month:

“We can’t stand by and stand silent [in the wake of Antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents]. We must, without equivocation, denounce Antisemitism. We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia.” – President Biden (source)

Earlier this week, the US House of Representatives approved a resolution opposing antisemitism. However, the wording of this measure is controversial; several thoughtful representatives preferred a more effective measure. 

“Nadler, Goldman and Raskin on Monday introduced an alternative resolution that condemns antisemitism and calls on executive branch agencies and Congress to implement the Biden administration’s national strategy to counter antisemitism.” (source) 

The issue of intensified antisemitic behavior and speech may seem complicated, but the problem is pretty obvious: classic antisemitism is back, along with some new forms as well. Throughout the US, Jews are now subject to verbal and physical attacks on their organizations, their businesses, and their very existence, and old racial slurs that had become socially unacceptable are now becoming normalized. 

It’s not a pleasant time to celebrate the holiday, but we will try.

Blog post by mae sander. © 2023

Dara Horn and Antisemitism

 Two Novels

Dara Horn is a fascinating author, and I’ve read several of her novels in the past, as well as her book of essays titled People Love Dead Jews. (Reviewed here.) Somehow I missed one earlier novel titled Eternal Life (published in 2018), but I have just now read it, and I find it compelling. All of her books are centered on Jewish characters in a very special way, intentionally different from most fiction that I read.

Eternal describes the life of a woman named Rachel, who was born at the end of the Second Temple era in Jerusalem (that is, in the first century of the common era). As a very young woman, Rachel made a vow that caused her to be unable to die. Therefore, at the beginning of the novel, she is an elderly woman who lives in modern America, though her memories span 2000 years.

The details of Rachel's early life in Jerusalem in the first century are beautifully presented. Her memory of the burning of the Temple by the Romans is especially vivid: it “did not burn, not at first. It melted. Silver and gold plating on its surfaces heated until the precious metals shivered and slid down the massive limestone walls, solid becoming liquid.” (p. 201) After witnessing the destruction of Jerusalem, Rachel escapes, and survives to be old, but she doesn't die. Rather, she continues to lead new lives over and over again. 

Eventually, eternal life seems to her to be more of a curse than it is a blessing. Through her repeated experience of being a young woman, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, an old lady, and then starting over and repeating the same emotional and personal joys and sorrows, Rachel learns much, but feels a sense of futility: “Youth was no doubt wasted on the young, but only she knew how much of old age was wasted on those near death.” (p. 7)

Here is how Rachel sees eternal life: at first it seemed good, then not so much:

“I just thought I was lucky…. It wasn’t obvious, at least not right away. I still got hungry and thirsty every day like everyone else; I still had the same body, the same feelings. Years passed, and I even looked older, my face sagged, my skin loosened, my hair got lighter and thinner—maybe just from being exposed to the sun, or maybe it was more from suffering than from age, I don’t know. It was enough that no one who knew me noticed anything strange, and at first I didn’t either. But nothing else changed at all. Illnesses didn’t matter, injuries didn’t matter. Then there was a plague, whole neighborhoods were wiped out, but nothing happened to me…. And then years after that, the city was besieged and everyone starved, but for us it was irrelevant. When the city finally burned I saw that it wasn’t my imagination. I stepped through the fires and walked out the city gates.” (p. 27)

The main action of the novel take place in the early years of the 21st century; that is, now. Even cooking causes her to feel alienated by her extraordinarily long life. She prepares a Sabbath meal with dishes like kugel. Her 20th century family see it as old and traditional -- but it seems new to her. These dishes have only been invented for a few hundred years! 

"It wasn’t even possible to cook her childhood foods anymore. They required clay ovens, copper heating coils, inverted iron bowls over open fires, grains that no longer existed, animals whose parts were no longer for sale. Once, about seventy years ago, she had seen a jug of olive oil in a store, for the first time in over a century: ages had passed since she had lived anywhere near where olives grew, or near where anyone might buy them. Olive oil! She had felt a thrill when she bought it. But at home she had discovered that there was nothing to eat it with, and when she tasted it, the flavorless slick on her tongue bore no resemblance at all to what she remembered."  (pp. 82-83). 

Rachel makes an effort to find a way out of her predicament via modern technology -- but no spoilers! I was surprised at how suspenseful I found her story and that of both her past and of her current families.

A few years ago, I read Horn’s novel A Guide for the Perplexed, which is also historic fiction with magical realist leanings, and settings in three different historic eras. The unifying theme of the three parallel stories is memory. The unifying location is the Cairo Genizah, a storehouse of documents from the medieval era that was discovered in the late 19th century. The unifying philosophy comes from Maimonides' book A Guide for the Perplexed. Another unifying theme is the relationship of pairs of brothers or sisters; each of the three plot lines includes at least one and sometimes more than one set of siblings. There are similarities between the two novels, and both of them are very inventive and fun to read. (Though not everyone agrees with me that they are good to read!)

American Antisemitism as Dara Horn Observes It

From The Atlantic, April 3, 2023. (Article Here)

In the Atlantic this week, Dara Horn documents the constant barrage of minor antisemitic insults and comments that many Jewish people have recently been experiencing. She writes: “At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.”

The Atlantic article is mainly about Horn's view of the purpose and content of Holocaust museums and Holocaust education in American schools. She suggests several penetrating questions about how these efforts affect living people, and if they change anyone's attitudes or behaviors. Horn writes:

“American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering. ...This erasure feels completely normal. Better than normal, even: noble, humane.

“But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting it. That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters. It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.”

Many and complicated issues arise in Horn's treatment of the many holocaust museums and their approach to Jewish life, Jewish history, and Jewish identity. Mostly, they do not deal with current issues of any kind, and in fact avoid discussing anything contemporary. Her observations about why and how they avoid facing the currents of antisemitism in our society and internationally are very penetrating. I recommend this article, but I don't want to try to summarize the entire document. Please read it!

Reviews © 2023 mae sander.