As Robert Zaretsky has reported in Tablet Magazine, Le Pen fille has genuinely changed the party and has even leveraged its xenophobic, anti-Islamic platform to appeal to Jews. More than that: Her deputy, Louis Aliot, last month traveled to Israel in order to try to drum up support among Israeli residents enfranchised in France for the elections. (Israel may be even more consequential to the French parliament, the National Assembly: The brand-new eighth constituency—one of 11 overseas French constituencies—includes only eight countries, one of which is Israel, whose more than 70,000 eligible voters make up roughly half the entire constituency’s franchise.)

But the FN is still the FN. Marine Le Pen has been on the defensive because daddy was interviewed on television about a notorious 1987 interview in which he questioned the Shoah—and he responded by blaming CRIF, the Jewish community’s official spokesperson to the government, for distorting his words. Old soldiers never die.

French Far-Right Leader Making Gains in Run-Up to April Elections [Haaretz]
Related: Send The Marine [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: French Right Panders to ‘The Western Island’

Toward the end of the meal, the buffet cart was rolled out with tarte au citron, tarte au chocolat, œufs à la neige, and other delectable classic French desserts. And then I saw what looked like a creamy American cheesecake with a graham cracker crust beneath. I asked Elisabeth what it was. “Oh,” she said, “that is a new dessert that our guests really like. It is made with Philadelphia. We learned it from a Japanese intern.”

After Allan and I finished chuckling, we confirmed that this was indeed an example of the classic American cheesecake born when Joseph Kraft, who owned the Philadelphia cream cheese company, bought a graham cracker company. When I asked Elisabeth how the Japanese intern found the recipe, she said that she got it off the Internet and made it for the staff. Today the dessert, less sweet and more lemony than its American counterpart, is a regular on her menu.

I thought about this cake while wandering around Provence during my visit. As I strolled through the 1,000-year-old market, in the shadow of the Roman theater and forum in Arles, I couldn’t help but think about how rich Jewish life must have been in 1306 when, of the 52 butchers in the town, 14 of them were kosher, according to sources researched for my most recent book, Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Food in France. Given the 2,000-year history of Jews living there, Jewishness and Jewish food—like that classic American cheesecake—still pop up in places no one would expect

****

In the Middle Ages, Jews lived in quarters separated from Christians in every town in southern France and had a protected status in most towns. According to Kalonymos ben Kalonymos, who described the everyday life of the Jews of Arles in the early 14th century, holiday dishes included a round fried cake similar to a doughnut made out of flour, served covered with jam, for Hanukkah. (Sound familiar?) Kalonymos also wrote charmingly about the grape harvest. “Everybody goes to the vineyard and transports grapes either by boat or by horses,” he wrote. “The weather is very hot. Mosquitoes are numerous. They fall in the wine that we are drinking despite everything …”

But for the most part, the 13th and 14th centuries were dark times for Jews throughout France. All, for example, had to wear a round fabric badge declaring their religion and a pointed yellow hat on their head. In 1242, King Louis XI had the Talmud and 20,000 other books burned in Paris, and in 1288, a group of Jews was burned alive in Troyes. In 1394, Jews were expelled until after the revolution, and “officially” no Jews lived in France. A thousand or so Jews, known as the Juifs du pape, were able to live in four towns in Provence: Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon, and Isle de la Sorgue, protected by the Italian popes who broke with Rome in the 14th century.

For me, the most poignant visit in this area was the charming village of L’Isle sur la Sorgue on the Sorgue River, in part because very few people who visit this antique center know its history. Allan and I headed straight for the old city and La Place de la Juiverie. Across the street from a new chic chocolate store is a sign that reads “l’Ancienne rue Hébraïque.” Further down the road, the center of the Jewish community, once a square, is now a parking lot. The only remnant of the carrière, which housed about 250 people, is the façade of a four-story stone apartment building, attesting to the extensive community that lived here, protected by the cathedral nearby.

As I looked up at the façade, I remembered what I had learned about the Juifs du Pape. Beginning in 1650 until just after the revolution, when Jews were given back their civil rights, they were locked in the carrière from dusk until the morning. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Jewish community, despite these confinements, were the leading silk merchants of the town. After the revolution, the ghetto-like existence ended, and the Jews left L’Isle sur la Sorgue and the three other towns for larger cities in France.

But what remains in the south and all over France is a fondness for certain old, distinctly Jewish dishes like eggplant papeton (an eggplant mousse) and matzoh, which the French call pain azyme. It was baked in the matzoh oven, which was in the basement of the synagogues. The matzoh was so popular in the Christian community that at Passover the Jews made extra to be distributed to them in bakeries in the main part of each town.

With all this history under our belt, Allan and I left L’Isle sur la Sorgue, driving back to modern-day Provence and Elisabeth’s home, a stone house nestled in a vineyard. When we woke the next morning, she had a warm brioche ready for us in her sunny kitchen with salvaged wooden tables.

As we enjoyed our breakfast, Elisabeth took another piece of brioche, a member of the babka family, and began wrapping it around a fish first spread with mousseline, then dotted with chopped spinach as the first course in a meal she was preparing for a party in our honor that night. A very complicated dish, it reminded me of a friend’s very simple fish en croûte with puff pastry. Although the fish was delicious, I could not imagine many home cooks making it, so I am sharing my much easier substitute, which, together with Elisabeth’s French-Japanese-Jewish cheesecake will make you smile, even in the deepest winter.

Between 1940 and 1941, working out of a hotel room and later a small office in the French port city of Marseille, Varian Fry rescued hundreds of artists, writers, musicians, composers, scientists, philosophers, intellectuals, and their families from the Nazis, taking enormous personal risks to bring them to the United States. Fry was one of the only American “righteous Gentiles,” a man who voluntarily risked everything to save others, with no personal connection to those he saved. At the age of 32, Fry had volunteered to go to France on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an ad hoc group of American intellectuals formed in 1940 for the purpose of distributing emergency American visas to endangered European artists and thinkers. The U.S. Department of State, which initially supported the committee’s mission, slowly turned against it in favor of its supposed allies in the “unoccupied” pro-Nazi French government—to the point of arranging for Fry’s arrest and expulsion from France in 1941. During Fry’s 13 months in Marseille, he managed to rescue 2,000 people, including a hand-picked list of the brightest stars of European culture—Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and André Breton, to name a few. Until recently, I had never heard of Fry, even though it is arguably because of him—and because of his equally brave colleagues, including several other non-Jewish Americans—that these artists and intellectuals not only survived but reshaped the culture of America. But now I was driving through Los Angeles to see the former homes of some of these rescued luminaries—and to meet a filmmaker who is one of the few living Americans who has heard of Varian Fry.

“We pay tribute to the righteous in order to ignore them. There have been no high-caliber books written about the righteous, no rigorous, critical studies of what made these people do what they did.” This is what I was told by Pierre Sauvage, a filmmaker who has spent much of the past 14 years working on a documentary about Varian Fry. Bearded and bespectacled in a red polo shirt and looking less like a French cineaste than an American dad who had just dropped his daughter off at college, Sauvage is convinced that the stories of Holocaust rescuers like Fry should be not merely inspirational, but instructional—that by studying these exceptional people, we can learn to be more like them. It’s a surprisingly lonely point of view. In 1984, Sauvage helped organize an international conference on the righteous, chaired by Elie Wiesel. “We brought all these righteous Gentiles to Washington,” Sauvage recalled. “In the breaks between sessions, the righteous Gentiles were standing around being ignored by the scholars. No one spoke to them, no one engaged them. How can scholars not be fascinated by these people?”

Sauvage is the director (and proprietor) of the Varian Fry Institute, a nonprofit archive of “Fryana,” as he calls it. On a warm winter morning in Los Angeles, he welcomed me to the “institute,” which turned out to be a small office with floor-to-ceiling shelves of binders that revealed an obsession bordering on mania. Sauvage’s collection of Fryana included everything from copies of Fry’s letters to textbooks Fry wrote for a public-affairs think tank to a poem he composed in French not long before his death. But most of the Fryana was stored on computers containing video files of what was easily several months of Sauvage’s filmed interviews with nearly every person who ever worked with, talked to, knew of, or breathed near Varian Fry.

Sauvage’s fascination with rescuers comes in part because he owes his life to them. He was born in 1944 in Le Chambon, France, a Huguenot village in the south central part of the country in which the entire town, following the leadership of its Protestant clergy, formed a silent “conspiracy of goodness,” as Sauvage has called it, to shelter Jews from the Nazis. Sauvage’s parents were among the thousands of Jews hidden by the righteous of Le Chambon. His 1989 film Weapons of the Spirit is a documentary about the village; it has become an educational staple that I watched in my high-school French class. Sauvage’s parents went to Le Chambon, he later discovered, after being rejected for rescue by Varian Fry.

Fry was honored by Yad Vashem in 1997, 30 years after his death, as one of the Righteous Among the Nations; there is also a street named after him in his hometown of Ridgewood, N.J., not far from where I live. But to Sauvage, this kind of recognition is meaningless when we make no attempt to learn what motivated people like Fry. “Many years ago in New York, I read about a guy who had fallen onto the subway tracks, and another man had jumped down to rescue him,” Sauvage told me. “When he was asked why he did it, he said, ‘What else could I do? There was a train coming.’ For most people, that would be the reason not to do it. But this man’s response was automatic. Fiction and drama have given us a distorted sense of how rescuers think. Writers need a narrative arc, so they show these people wrestling with themselves, agonizing over what to do. But rescuers actually don’t hesitate or agonize. They immediately recognize what the situation calls for. When they say that what they did was no big deal, we think they are being modest. They aren’t. They genuinely experienced it as no big deal.”

From his research in Le Chambon, Sauvage developed his own theory about the righteous: that they are happy, secure people with a profound awareness of who they are. “I’ve never met an unhappy rescuer,” he claimed. “These are people who are rooted in a clear sense of identity—who they are, what they love, what they hate, what they value—that gives them a footing to assess a situation.” He described the inspiration the people of Le Chambon drew from their Protestant history and faith. Then he began showing me his interviews with Fry’s colleagues, introducing me posthumously to several exceedingly intelligent, colorful, and sincere Americans. All of them did indeed seem like happy people, with a deep sense of who they were.

The only person missing from his footage is Varian Fry.

I’ve long been uncomfortable with stories of Holocaust rescue, not least because of the painful fact that they are statistically insignificant—as are, for that matter, stories of Holocaust survival. But for me, the unease of these stories runs deeper. When I was 23 and just beginning my doctoral work in Yiddish, I barely understood the world I was entering. It is a very distant world from what we are taught to assume in American culture, where happy endings are so expected that even our stories of the Holocaust somehow have to be redemptive. In Holocaust literature written in Yiddish, the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers, because there actually wasn’t much of that. Instead one finds cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance. Stories about Christian rescuers are far more palatable to American audiences, because while they have the imprimatur of true stories, they also conveniently follow the familiar arc of fiction. The overwhelming reality of the unavenged murder of innocents—the reality one finds recorded in the culture that was actually destroyed—doesn’t play as well in Hollywood.

But unlike the humble peasants of Le Chambon, Varian Fry felt oddly familiar to me. Not just because he was young and American, but because he was very much the kind of young American I know best. Like me, he grew up in a commuter suburb in northern New Jersey; he graduated from Harvard in 1931, 68 years before I did. In photographs, he looks a lot like the guys I went to college with: thin, awkward, but handsome in a dorky way, his then-stylish glasses and carefully knotted ties a failed but endearing attempt at coolness. His personal letters, which I read in Columbia University’s Rare Book Room, are well-written and irreverent in a tone I recognize from my college friends—full of witty references to nerdy things ranging from the Aeneid (“I was surprised to find so many more/ had joined us, ready for exile …”) to Gilbert and Sullivan (“I am never disappointed in them [the rescued artists]—what never? Well, hardly ever!”). If he hadn’t been dead for more than 40 years, I might have dated him.

What felt creepily familiar about him, too, were his motivations.

To read Dara Horn’s full story in Tablet Magazine’s first-ever Kindle Single, see here. And remember: You don’t need a Kindle to read—Kindle Singles can be read with a free Kindle app for your iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry smartphone or tablet, or on your computer. The complete, 16,000-word version of The Rescuer costs $1.99.

His precepts, developed from his two years as a company commander in Algeria between 1956 and 1958, became American doctrine through two books. The authors of the U.S. Army counterinsurgency field manual FM 3-24, of whom the most famous is Petraeus, cite one: “Of the many books that were influential in the writing of Field Manual 3-24, perhaps none was as important as David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare.” But Galula’s other book, Pacification in Algeria, written for the RAND Corporation in 1962 and classified until 2005, is the more useful book for the soldier and the more interesting for the military historian.

Pacification gives a nearly week-by-week account of how Galula implemented his theories in a tiny, mountainous area of Algeria’s Kabyle region. The Kabyle is 100 percent Berber, to use the old word—or Amazigh, to use the word Berbers call themselves—and it was a hotbed of the insurgency. Galula admits that the two officers who followed him in command were both quickly killed by the insurgents. Yet he suggests that his ideas were taken up by French generals and resulted in tactical successes in the Algerian war. Of course, France lost that war, but in Pacification Galula emphasizes, correctly, that the Algerian revolutionaries had largely been defeated when Charles de Gaulle decided for political reasons to give Algeria its independence. Given Galula’s importance in recent years, it was only a matter of time before someone would try to revisit the historical record and assess his actual achievements.

Galula in Algeria, by Grégor Mathias, takes a deep dive in the French military archives to examine, almost day by day and village by village, what Galula accomplished and how his area fared after he left. (It is such a deep dive that only military historians will want to join in.) Unfortunately, the book is marred by what may have been unclear syntax in the French original, which I haven’t seen, and a sloppy translation. The reader’s confidence is undermined by small errors throughout (“it was to Galula to conduct counterpropaganda,” reads one). In the crucial “Conclusions” chapter, there are sentences that make no sense: “The main criticisms of Galula’s tactics, having never been compared against the archival record and are more focused on the simplicity of its methods with respect to other, more elaborate French counterinsurgency doctrine thinkers.”

Sadly, Mathias is also cavalier with extrapolations from material I know well. He frequently cites a magazine article I published on Galula and my biographical study of Galula for the Army War College, but he loosely interprets and re-transmits the details. To take one case, where I wrote that Galula “apparently met” Samuel Griffith, a translator of Mao: Mathias has “Galula knew Griffith well.” This does not inspire confidence in his use of other sources.

As to the larger points—Was Galula effective? Did he report his results accurately?—Mathias finds that Galula was just as likely to gloss over his failures and trumpet successes as most of the rest of us. He also convincingly suggests that despite some military successes and an impressive decrease in violence, Galula never eradicated the political substructure of the insurgency in his area.

I would suggest that Galula’s inconclusive results stem from an obvious error that the French officer made that neither I nor Mathias noticed. I understand it now because I recently spent a lot of time among Berbers in Libya, where tensions with the Arab majority are similar to those in Algeria. Put simply, the Kabyles don’t like the Arabs very much—and the best way to get them to go over to the French side might have been to capitalize on the ethnic, religious, and linguistic tension between the two groups.

Galula, along with every French commander in Algeria I’ve read about, missed the elephant in the room: If the French had been able to drive a wedge between the roughly 30 percent of Algerians who are Berbers and the Arab majority, they might have stopped the insurgency in its tracks. The potential of this idea is confirmed by the fact that the newly independent Algeria quickly set about oppressing its Kabyle citizens. One of the first acts of the new Algerian government was eliminating Berber studies at Algiers University in 1962. It was forbidden to name children traditional Tamazight names, and the Berber radio station was limited to four hours of broadcasting daily. In a country 30 percent Berber, the study of the Berber language was banned at the national university.

While the Kabyle produced a disproportional number of revolutionary leaders—and casualties—many were marginalized or slain by the Arabs in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the Algerian government built mosques throughout the Kabyle in towns that had never had them, including some that were and are Christian. This campaign was so unpopular that some Kabyle separatist leaders, like the exiled Ferhat Mehenni, openly support recognizing Israel.

Continue reading: Born and bred in North Africa

It is hard to imagine a scenario that better serves the ambitions of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Front National party. While the Socialists and the Gaullists throttle one another over the economy and immigration, Le Pen has mostly watched with a smile from the sidelines. She has good reason to grin: French opinion polls now show her in third place for next year’s presidential election. At roughly 20 percent, Le Pen trails Sarkozy by 6 percentage points and François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, by 10 points. (Squabbling over the crumbs is the rest of the packed field of candidates.) Le Pen’s prospects are even more promising because Sarkozy’s future is yoked to Merkel’s—critics now refer to the twosome as Merkozy—and Hollande’s greatest electoral advantage is that he is not Dominique Strauss-Kahn. To the extreme consternation of the left and right, nearly one in three French voters now has a positive opinion of Le Pen, according to the Ipsos/Le Point poll from mid-November.

Does this sea change in public opinion include the French Jewish community? The answer, unthinkable even a year ago, is yes, for reasons both practical and historical. French Jews and a political movement once steeped in anti-Semitism now seem destined to join forces.

***

Since its inception in the 1970s, the Front National has wrapped itself in the repellent rags of traditional French anti-Semitism. The series of outrageous dérapages, or verbal slips, of the movement’s founder and longtime leader Jean-Marie Le Pen—Marine’s father—are legion, ranging from his remark that the Holocaust was a “detail” of history to his rhyming of crematory (crématoire) with the name of a Jewish politician Michel Durafour. Thus the question of whether anti-Semitism was incidental or central to the Front National’s ideological essence was, from the perspective of French Jewry, entirely settled.

Until now, that is. Since she assumed its leadership at the beginning of 2011, Marine Le Pen has worked to “modernize” her father’s party—a diplomatic word for purging its most reactionary elements. Nolwenn Le Blevennec, a journalist for the news site Rue89 who reports on the Front National, notes that Le Pen has demoted party figures like Christian Bouchet, a notorious fan of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and expelled Alexandre Gabriac, who gave a Nazi salute at a party rally. She’s also distanced herself from Alain Solal, a prominent anti-Semite previously identified as one of Front National’s intellectuals. Even more notably, by making her father the honorary president of the Front National, Le Pen has effectively made him a figurehead shorn of actual power.

At the same time, Marine Le Pen has made a series of dramatic overtures to the Jewish community. Her trip to the United States in early November largely passed under the radar of the American media, but it was widely covered by the French press. At first, the visit wobbled between the surreal and slapstick. At one point, Le Pen’s handlers tried to bar the pack of French journalists from following her into the U.S. Capitol; once inside, the reporters found that Le Pen’s strenuous efforts to meet with a U.S. politician—indeed, any politician at all—ultimately yielded only a furtive 10-minute chat with Rep. Ron Paul. But then, days later, Le Pen pulled off a coup de théâtre: Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, attended a gathering she hosted at the United Nations. Despite the subsequent announcement from Israel’s foreign ministry that the meeting was based on a “misunderstanding,” all the press releases in the world can’t undo the image of a smiling Prosor standing side-by-side with a beaming Le Pen.

Le Pen has not had big success with the Jewish community in France, though not for lack of trying. In March, shortly after Le Pen declared in the magazine Le Point that the Holocaust was the “summum of human barbarism,” the radio station of the Jewish community, Radio J, scheduled an interview with her. The Union of French Jewish Students deplored the invitation, and Richard Prasquier, the head of the Council of Jewish Institutions of France, condemned it as “unacceptable.” Though the radio station insisted the interview would be “no holds barred,” public pressure proved too great, and the station’s director canceled the interview.

In a subsequent interview, Le Pen described the decision as a “deeply anti-republican and anti-democratic.” (Then, just last week, the Jewish council played a leading role in preventing Le Pen from participating in a public debate at the University of Paris. Le Pen responded by bringing suit against the student union for violating her freedom of speech.) By lobbing back at the Jewish council the traditional critique aimed at her own party, Le Pen displayed the skills that have made her a formidable political figure. But is her outreach to French Jewry just a crude political calculation?

Rue89’s Le Blevennec believes that Le Pen is not anti-Semitic and genuinely wants to turn the page. In fact, “turning the page” were the very words used by Gilles-William Goldnagel, a prominent lawyer, conservative essayist, and leader of the French Jewish community, when he agreed to meet with Le Pen earlier in the year. Jean-Yves Camus, a well-respected political scientist who tracks the extreme right-wing, has also stated that Le Pen is free of her father’s anti-Semitism, not to mention his negationist reflex regarding the Holocaust.

Yet many others, such as the intellectual Caroline Fourest, the author of a controversial biography of Marine Le Pen, are not persuaded. According to Fourest, Le Pen has simply disguised her party’s xenophobia and latent anti-Semitism with the garb of republican respectability. Another observer, Valérie Hoffenburg, the former director of the French office of the American Jewish Committee, warns that other anti-Semites within the party, like her father’s closest ally, Bruno Gollnisch, remain influential. Besides, Hoffenberg argues, to condemn the death camps does not make Le Pen a true republican.

***

French Republicanism—the doctrine that affirms the equality and liberty of citizens and requires that the public sphere be entirely free of ethnic or religious claims—is the crossroads at which the Front National and French Jewry seem slated to either collide or collaborate. Upon their civil emancipation during the French Revolution, French Jews embraced republicanism, particularly its emphasis on a secular society, as their own.

But that might not be the case for much longer. The national debate over immigration and national identity—issues that involve the 5 million Muslims, mostly of North African origin, living in France—seems shriller by the day. The urban riots that convulsed France in 2005, followed by the appalling death of Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew tortured and murdered by several youths of North African background, have had an especially powerful impact on French Jewry. It may well be that the community has reached a point no less pivotal than 1967, when the Six-Day War, followed by Charles de Gaulle’s notorious remark that Jews were an elite and domineering race, ignited French Jewish self-consciousness.

According to Jean-Yves Camus, the political scientist, at least 5 percent of Jewish voters will support Le Pen in 2012. While he and other specialists debate the precise number—there are no surveys on the question—they agree that France’s Jewish community has been moving steadily toward the political right and, indeed, to the extreme right. Clearly, a Jewish Le Pen supporter is no longer the oxymoron it once was. Richard Prasquier, of the Jewish council, worries about this potentially tectonic shift, suggesting that French Jews are increasingly “receptive to and tempted by Le Pen’s discourse.” Perhaps the most immediate reason for this evolution is, that “for the first time since World War II, French Jews are afraid,” said the intellectual Alain Finkielkraut.

These so-called transfuges—voters who cross not just party but ideological lines—clearly welcome Le Pen’s repeated claims that current immigration policies will destroy French culture and society. As she declared at a party conference in September, France is “confronted by a multiculturalism that is wreaking havoc with her laws, her mores, her traditions, in short the values of her civilization and her identity.” The Front National promises to slam shut the door on immigration, encourage legal aliens to leave the country, and beef up the police force. Insecurity will, on cue, disappear. As for national identity, Le Pen has borrowed a few pages from her father. Earlier this year she described as a “new occupation” the practice of Muslims in Paris praying on the sidewalks, lacking sufficient space in mosques. And there is the élan with which Le Pen has continued her party’s tradition of holding an annual celebration at the statue of Joan of Arc in Paris, which makes it all too easy for the fearful to see Marine Le Pen’s battle against the barbarian hordes from across the Mediterranean as a continuation of Joan’s struggle against the perfidious invaders from across the Channel. (Or, for that matter, against Brussels. Le Pen has astutely tied fears over immigration to her denunciations of globalization and the European Union. As the euro crisis worsens, her popularity improves.)

Against this background, Le Pen’s effort to seduce the French Jewish community takes on even greater significance. It is only by channeling popular fear and loathing at Muslims that the Front National has made room under its “republican” umbrella for its previous bête noire: the Jews.

CORRECTION, December 13: This article originally stated that the politician Michel Durafour committed suicide. He did not.

Before the French writer Romain Gary took his own life on December 2, 1980, he prepared detailed writings which, among other things, confirmed that the popular young writer Émile Ajar was actually just a pen name the well-known 66-year-old had covertly adopted. “This was more than suicide,” Emma Garman wrote in 2007. “It was the final act of mythmaking from a man preoccupied, above all, with manipulating the people and events in his life almost as deftly as those in his books.”

Born Roman Kacew in Vilna in 1914, Gary’s books—he published 22 by the time he turned 59—dealt with issues of Jewish identity in ways that were at once subtle and unavoidable. When his later work fell out of favor with critics, Gary began publishing under the name Émile Ajar and found nearly instant success with his adopted literary identity. Yet, Garman explained, Ajar’s success only confirmed Gary’s suspicions: “The breathless delight with which Ajar’s novels were received suggests that Gary had been right—reviewers were weary of him.”

Read Great Pretenders, by Emma Garman

• Yossi Melman reports that even now experts are significantly divided over how long they think it will take Iran to have a nuclear bomb. [Haaretz]

• Due to concerns about effects on energy markets as well as skepticism that China and Russia can be brought around, you have not heard much noise from the United States on the topic of further sanctions. [Haaretz]

• Actually, it’s France who has taken the sanctions-seeking lead. [Haaretz]

• Indeed, persuading Beijing is central to further sanctions. (I said the same thing!) [JPost]

• However, certain sanctions targeted at financial institutions could be just thing thing we’re looking for. [Slate]

• Has Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney changed to a less-hawkish line on Iran? [Wired Danger Room]

• British officials reportedly believe Israel will attack Iran in the next two months. [Haaretz]

• If it did, most if not all of the Sunni Arab Gulf countries would (very quietly) support it. [JPost]

• Israel has the capacity to launch fairly accurate, pinpoint airstrikes against half-a-dozen nuclear targets in western Iran. [Reuters/Vos Iz Neias?]

• An Israel financial firm estimates that the economic costs of such a strike, factoring in the likely consequences, would be catastrophic. [Reuters/Vos Iz Neias?]

So, still, nobody knows anything.

Camus understood, however, that the absurd reveals deep truths about the world and our own selves. Cradled between the semi-centenary of his death in 1960 and the centenary of his birth in 1913, we might take a moment to consider the question of Camus’ ties to Judaism. They are surprisingly deep and broad, encompassing not just his own life but his political and philosophical thought as well.

Though a number of his childhood friends were Jewish, Camus was as indifferent to their particular faith as they themselves were. In republican France, Jewishness was largely a private matter; it was only when Nazi Germany buried the Republic in 1940 that Jewishness became a public matter and indifference to the fate of Jews was no longer possible—or should not have been possible.

Yet when the authoritarian regime of Vichy passed a salvo of anti-Semitic laws in 1940, most Frenchmen and -women did not blink. One of the few who did blink—in fact, doubled over in shock and revulsion—was Camus. Working for the newspaper Paris-Soir, Camus was stunned when his Jewish colleagues were fired. In a letter to his wife Francine Faure—a native of the city of Oran, Algeria, who was very close to the local Jewish community—Camus said that he could not continue to work at the paper; any job at all in Algeria, even one on a farm, would be preferable. As for the new regime, he was merciless: “Cowardice and senility is all they have to offer. Pro-German policies, a constitution in the style of totalitarian regimes, great fear of a revolution that will not come: all of this to truckle up to an enemy who has already pulverized us and to salvage privileges which are not threatened.”

At the same time, he began to reach out to Jewish friends. To one, Irène Djian, he denounced these “despicable” laws and reassured her: “This wind cannot last if each and every one of us calmly affirmed that the wind smells rotten.” He reminded her he would always stand by her—a remarkable position for a Frenchman to take in 1940, when the vast majority of his compatriots either embraced or accepted the new laws. When he and Francine moved into her parents’ apartment in Oran, they become friends with André Benichou, a professor of philosophy who was born into a Jewish family but made a point of declaring his atheism at a local café every year on Yom Kippur, Good Friday, and the first day of Ramadan. With Benichou, Camus and Faure worked as private tutors for Jewish schoolchildren forced out of the public schools by the anti-Semitic laws.

In 1942, afflicted with tuberculosis, Camus went to the Cévennes, a rugged region in central France, to ease his damaged lungs. Unable to afford a sanatorium, Camus moved into Le Panelier, a farmhouse his in-laws owned just outside the small Protestant village of Chambon-sur-Lignon. Among the few visitors he had was his friend the historian André Chouraqui, a French Algerian Jew whom Camus peppered with questions about the Old Testament, all the while taking notes for the book he was then writing, The Plague.

By then, Chouraqui was already risking his life in the French Resistance, particularly in the critical work of finding homes for Jewish refugee children. Much of this activity centered on Chambon, where the pastor, André Trocmé, had already mobilized the village in the work of welcoming, housing, and hiding these children. By the end of the war, the people of Chambon had saved the lives of at least 3,000 Jewish children and adults.

Was Camus aware of Chouraqui or Trocmé’s activities? There is no record of such knowledge in his notebooks or in accounts of friends and colleagues; on the other hand, this was precisely the sort of knowledge one would deliberately keep from friends or notebooks. Nevertheless, the simultaneity of Camus’ reflections and Chambon’s activity is striking. The French Algerian novelist and Cévenol farmers found common ground in their insistence on the dignity of each and every human being.

Indeed, it is the theme of absurdity that most powerfully underscores Camus’ understanding of Jews, Judaism, and Israel. At the political and existential level, Camus felt a visceral connection with the absurd predicament of the young Jewish state. It was a political bond insofar as many on the French left, from whom Camus was estranged, had grown deeply anti-Zionist in the wake of the Suez War. In 1957, he publicly affirmed his sympathy and support for Israel. His reasons still echo today: Not only must Europe accept Israel’s existence as the only possible response to the continent’s complicity in the Final Solution, but Israel must also exist as a counter-example to the oppressive rule of Arab leaders. The Arab people, he declared, wished for deserts covered with olive trees, not canons. Let Israel show the way.

A naïve hope, certainly, but one that suggests that Camus’ attachment to Israel was existential: His plea for cooperation and collaboration between Jews and Arabs in Israel echoed his pleas to his fellow pied-noirs and Arabs in Algeria. In fact, Camus had flown to Algiers in 1956 to urge a civilian truce between Arabs and French Algerians. His desperate claim that Arabs and European settlers were “condemned to live together” proved wrong, of course. They instead concluded they were condemned to kill one another—a conclusion, were he alive today, he would urge both Israelis and Arabs to avoid while there is still time.

Yet Camus’ deepest and most intriguing bond to Judaism is revealed in his philosophy of the absurd. In early 1941, when Vichy was preparing a second round of anti-Semitic legislation and the papers in France and Algeria were giving free rein to anti-Semitic rhetoric, Camus completed his philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The opening lines are among the best known written by Camus: “There is just one truly important philosophical question: suicide. To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else … is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” Of course that question needed to be answered in 1941. How could it be otherwise, given the dire predicament in which the French and French Jews, along with Camus, found themselves?

But if the question persists, it is because it is more than a matter of historical or autobiographical interest. It is perennial. It is the same question that Job confronts when, with his children dead, his possessions gone, his belief in God tested, and he himself crumpled in a mound of dust and ashes, his wife tells him, “Curse God and die.” And it is the same question we all confront when, as Camus wrote in the “Myth,” the stage sets collapse around us—any number of belief and value systems we have lived with our entire lives—and we suddenly confront a stripped and bare world whose strangeness and opacity beggar any effort at comprehension.

Job and Sisyphus, in short, are heaved into a world shorn of transcendence and meaning. In response to their demand for answers, they get only silence. Herein lies the absurdity, Camus writes: It is “the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.”

The silence of the world, in effect, only becomes silence when human beings enter the equation. All too absurdly, Job demands meaning. “Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard/ I cry aloud, but there is no judgment.” And no less absurdly, Job must ask himself what he must do if meaning is not to be found? What is our next step if meaning fails to show up at our appointed rendezvous? “But where shall wisdom be found?/ And where is the place of understanding?”

We think we know how the story of Job ends: Rewarded by God for his loyalty, Job is paid back with even more children and sheep and property. But is this the ending? A number of biblical scholars suggest the Job we hear in the final chapter, the one who accepts and resigns himself to God’s power play, is not the same Job we hear in the preceding 40 chapters. Instead, he is a throwback to an earlier story that was grafted onto the otherwise perplexing account. Instead, the real Job is Camus’ Job. He is a Job who answers God’s deafening and dismal effort at self-justification with scornful silence.

It is déjà vu all over again. The Occupy Wall Street movement has pirouetted onto the political center stage just as France is marking the 75th anniversary of the mass strikes that accompanied the electoral victory of the Popular Front government led by Léon Blum. The many parallels between then and now, particularly in the personalities of Blum and Barack Obama, cast the OWS movement in a new and intriguing light.

To better understand them, we’d do well to look at France in the mid-1930s. The country’s economy, still staggering under the weight of the Great Depression, was in a shambles. The policies of France’s deficit hawks had come home to roost with a vengeance. Entrenched conservative distrust of deficit spending had catastrophic consequences for French workers: By the summer of 1936, at least 2 million men and women—one out of six citizens—were unemployed. The lives of those who still had jobs were flushed with anxiety. The French philosopher Simone Weil, who worked for a spell as a power press operator at a Paris factory in the 1930s, was ordered at the end of her first day at work to double her output if she wished to keep her job. The employer, she told a friend, “makes a favor of allowing us to kill ourselves and we have to say thank you.”

Popular Front poster from 1936. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

In order to underscore the nation’s economic inequality, leftist politicians denounced the power of the nation’s “two hundred families.” While the phrase at first designated the 200 shareholders who ostensibly oversaw the monetary policies of the Bank of France, it came to crystallize the popular anger of those who suffered the consequences of a global financial meltdown. At the same time, the Taxpayers’ Federation, an organization funded by the manufacturer François Coty—a great fan of Mussolini—declared that France could recover only if the government cut taxes on the wealthy. Given the abysmal state of national debt, successive centrist governments concluded that they had no choice but to retrench. As credit tightened, the building industry cratered, as state and municipal bureaucracies began to shed workers.

In May 1936, a series of strikes upended France. Business and industrial interests were horrified, claiming that the strikes were the work of communists. But the communists were terrified as well: The leaders of the French Communist Party, along with those of the trade unions, were caught flat-footed by the speed and magnitude of the strikes. As the social media of the era—newspapers, radio, and letters—carried news of the rapidly unfolding events, workers elsewhere were mobilized to follow suit. By June, nearly 2 million French workers had either walked out of their workplaces or simply sat down: Along with Edith Piaf and Pastis, interwar France also gave the world the sit-down strike.

By early summer, as the nation lurched to a halt, the party began. The events of May and June had far more in common with Mardi Gras than with Molotov cocktails. Far from establishing soviets along the Seine, workers instead dressed in drag and did the jig on factory floors. Instead of taking the Bastille, millions of protesters took a break. It was a revolution only insofar as the world was, if only temporarily, turned upside down.

The vast and unruly movement known as Occupy Wall Street is yet another American remake of a French original: OWS has grown in political, ideological, and economic circumstances that echo those 75 years ago in France. The character of the strikes is also remarkably similar. Just as American unions and some Democratic politicians have been playing catch-up with OWS, so too were French Communists, Socialists, and trade unions. As for the carnival-like behavior, it is hard to decide which wins first prize for outrageousness: OWS protesters wearing Superman suits (or nothing at all), or muscular Renault workers donning skirts and bras.

There are, of course, differences. The French workers had specific demands: a 40-hour work week, paid vacation, and higher wages. Yet, like the OWS, French workers expressed a more systemic dissatisfaction with the economic and social inequities tolerated by their republican state. And, like America’s Occupiers, they suddenly saw themselves as actors, not passive bystanders, in a political process indifferent to their material needs and social aspirations. Both then and now, protesters were flush with hope and believed, in the famous French phrase of the era, that “tout est possible.”

Perhaps one English translation of that slogan would be “We are the change we are waiting for.” Which brings us to the most striking parallel of all: the two men leading their nations at these critical moments.

Léon Blum, the French prime minister, was a formidable intellect trained in law and a remarkably eloquent writer. He was a committed socialist, but cautious and consensual to a fault. He was, in brief, a humanist who lacked a human touch, a man who embraced the left less for reasons of the heart than of the mind.

Much of this portrait resembles Barack Obama: His sharp analytical mind, his tendency to didacticism, and his attachment to deliberation match Blum’s character. So too does his ethnic background. Blum was not just the first socialist to become prime minister, but also the first Jew. He immediately became the target of the interwar equivalent of our own “birthers.” French pundits and politicians questioned Blum’s Frenchness, insisting he was instead Hungarian. Their accusations and attacks proved so distracting that they forced Blum to publish an open letter in a newspaper, with documents at hand, titled “I am French.”

The novelist and political observer André Gide’s remark about Blum—“He is never sure, he is always seeking; too much intelligence and not enough character”—has also been echoed by supporters of the current American president. But as historian Tony Judt noted, this was Blum’s strength as well as his weakness. Allergic to dogma, Blum recognized the provisional nature of most political truths, yet never lost sight of his particular brand of socialism, believing that all human beings have basic rights, including that of dignity.

Yet Blum’s moment was short-lived. In June, he used the strikes as a stick, forcing French industrialists to accept all the demands made by the striking workers. It was a remarkable moment—too remarkable, tragically. Historians take Blum to task for doing both too much—by hiking up wages and shortening the work week—and too little by refusing to devalue the franc until it was too late. It’s a very similar situation to the reaction of our own left and right to Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Ultimately, the resistance of French banks and the massive flight of capital overwhelmed Blum’s reforms. A year after he came to office, France’s first Jewish prime minister was forced to resign. It turned out that everything was not possible.

The institutions that challenged Blum are, of course, the very same ones whose power and apparent immunity are now being challenged by the carnival we call OWS. Just as the expectations stirred by the strikes in France were probably too great an aspiration to be met by any government, so too might this be the case with the hopes raised by the men and women, young and old, employed and unemployed now occupying public spaces across the country. But as Blum might have told Obama, this is no reason not to take a stand—one more forthright and determined than he himself took.

Whenever I see the old soldier, in memory of his sufferings and as a mark of respect, I raise a hand to my forehead and call out—much to the embarrassment of my children, who pass this park every day on their way to school—“Je vous salue, Capitaine Dreyfus.”

The oddity of the statue is exaggerated by the fact that it doesn’t seem to belong here. The Square Pierre Lafue, named after a Parisian journalist, is really little more than a traffic circle planted with banks of shrubbery and a few trees. It floats like a green island at the intersection of two narrow streets, Rue Stanislas and Rue Notre-Dame des Champs, while facing the wider Boulevard Raspail. The statue looming over this small square is a caricature of military honor, a three-dimensional scribble. The work was designed by the political cartoonist Louis Mitelberg, who signed his work—inverting the first letters of his last name—TIM. Dreyfus is saluting because that’s what soldiers do. They follow orders, no matter how criminal or stupid these may be.

While trying to figure out why Dreyfus was here, I learned that his presence is a historical accident. Mitelberg had been commissioned to design a sculpture for the courtyard of the École Militaire, where Dreyfus had been degraded. If Hommage au Capitaine Dreyfus had been installed in its rightful place, Dreyfus would be saluting his fellow officers and the army that tortured him. But the army was on to Mitelberg and his subversive sense of humor. They wanted no cartoons of soldiers holding broken swords. They vetoed the placement of TIM’s statue at the École Militaire, and, after that, Dreyfus was sent wandering around Paris, looking for a home. Anyone who sees Dreyfus standing on this leafy traffic island can sense that the Jew is still wandering and that the memory of his famous affair still divides France.

***

Down the street from Mitelberg’s statue, at the corner of Raspail and Rue du Cherche-Midi, is the site of the military prison where Dreyfus was incarcerated after his arrest. A plaque on the lawn announces that the Prison Militaire du Cherche-Midi stood here from 1853 to 1964. Modeled on the prison in Auburn, N.Y., which was among the first to experiment with solitary confinement, Cherche-Midi held other famous inhabitants, including Resistance fighters during World War II. Many were tortured and killed here, and then later their cells were occupied by members of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, whose headquarters was located across the street in what is now the Hotel Lutetia.

The prison was torn down to make way for the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, a think-tank for French historians and other scholars. The building was condemned recently for asbestos contamination. A homeless Russian and his German shepherd have taken up residence on an open porch, where they sleep at night in cardboard boxes. The lawns are overgrown with weeds, out of which rises a grim memorial to Dreyfus and the other prisoners held unjustly at Cherche-Midi. Meant to resemble the dolmans and menhirs of Celtic burial sites, seven blocks of black granite lie scattered on the ground, with five more blocks of granite standing upright beside them.

For a dozen years, from his arrest in 1894 until his rehabilitation into the army in 1906, Dreyfus and his affair rocked France to its revolutionary root. Partisans lined up on either side, fighting duels, rioting in the streets, and bringing down one government after another. Degas, Renoir, and Cézanne proclaimed his guilt. Pissaro, Cassatt, and Monet defended his innocence. The affair began in September 1894, when Marie-Claude Bastian, an Alsatian cleaning woman, who was actually a French intelligence agent working at the German embassy in Paris, brought to Col. Jean Sandherr, head of the Section Statistique, the anodyne name for French counter-intelligence, a note, written on onionskin paper, that she had fished from the wastepaper basket of German military attaché Lt. Col. Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen. Torn into six pieces, but easily reassembled, the note, henceforth known as the “bordereau,” or receipt, offered for sale to the Germans technical manuals and other information about France’s 120 mm Baquet howitzers. We now know that the information in the bordereau was fluff of little value, much of it already known, about a weapon that France would soon be retiring. In fact, this breach of security may actually have been a ruse, a piece of disinformation intentionally planted in von Schwartzkoppen’s inbox. Sandherr alerted the French minister of war that the army had a traitor in its midst, and the search was on.

• Next, he heads for Paris. [AP/WP]

• Responding to anger from the right at the demolishment of some outposts, Prime Minister Netanyahu is seeking legal ways to legitimize the building of certain settlement buildings on Palestinian-owned land. [Haaretz]

• Sanctions are beginning to significantly slow the Syrian economy, in turn putting real pressure on the Assad regime. [NYT]

• The military budget is becoming a political football as the government seeks money to pay for the new social reforms passed in the wake of the tent protests. [JPost]

• One Palestinian was killed in an unidentified blast in northern Gaza. Was not clear whether there was an airstrike or an accidental detonation. [AP/WP]

Who wins, who loses? It’s anyone’s guess right now. My instinct is to say this is actually a good thing for Prime Minister Netanyahu: it’s a much more stark step and therefore much easier to oppose than a watered-down, hardly-binding resolution in the General Assembly. It is not, however, what the U.S. was hoping for—it wants no resolutions at all—and is arguably less preferable to the U.S. than a G.A. resolution, in that it forces the U.S. to use its veto. Expect the U.S. now to concentrate on bringing other members of the Security Council onboard, which—again, because it’s a more drastic step—could be easier. Of the 14 other current Security Council members, Germany could almost certainly be brought around, and the U.S.’s fellow veto-wielders Britain and France might be amenable as well. After that, it’s Bosnia and Herzegovina; Brazil; Colombia; Gabon; India; Lebanon; Nigeria; Portugal; and South Africa. Only Colombia, heavily reliant as it is on U.S. support, seems like a possible “no” vote or abstainer. Keep in mind, however, that corralling those extra votes is purely optics and symbolism: even if the 14 other countries support it, the U.S. veto will automatically kill the resolution.

It’s worth recalling that the P.A. is one of only few parties close to the Mideast conflict that wants this. Israel and the U.S. are against. Hamas and Hezbollah are against (they see it as a compromise, as they want all the land). Jordan is against (the Hashemite monarch fears what this means for his substantial Palestinian population). The Palestinian diaspora is wary (they are getting less of a say, and this could arguably lead to the nullification of the right-of-return argument—although it won’t, because the U.S. will veto it).

The upside for Obama could come domestically. You can hit him for letting matters get to this point, but even the staunchest pro-Israel Republican will applaud him for exercising this veto, as they have already applauded him for promising to.

Finally, it’s not clear if this precludes a General Assembly vote: having failed in the Security Council, the Palestinians could then go to that venue, where the numbers and lack of vetos guarantee them a victory. You’ll want to pay attention next week.

Abbas: Palestinians to Seek Full U.N. Membership [Haaretz]
Earlier: Is the P.A. Statehood Drive Good for the P.A.?

• For the first time, a submarine will have a fully deployable Torah. [Ynet/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Reporting implies that Rep. Shelley Berkley, Democrat from Las Vegas and Tablet Magazine profile subject, supported policies that benefited her husband’s business interests. [NYT]

• Roger Cohen gets hopeless romantic about the Jews (in a sweeter way than other times). [NYT]

• The last traces of the last Jews of … Lviv, Ukraine! [Guardian]

• A performance by the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra on the BBC had to be turned off early when the performers were drowned out by pro-Palestinian hecklers. [Telegraph]

The two-thirds Jewish band from the 1980s Jane’s Addiction played Tel Aviv. Here is one of their songs, also from the 1980s. I guess this means the 1980s weren’t all bad?

Considering the grossly caricatured David Silbermann, the main character in Jacques de Lacretelle’s novel, Silbermann, it’s difficult to belief that the book was positively received by Jewish readers upon its 1922 publication. Yet, as Paul La Farge pointed out in 2005, the fictional account of a Protestant boy befriending the bewitchingly smart Silbermann in high school, written by a Protestant in post-Dreyfus France, was striking enough to earn widespread, laudatory attention from the Jewish community.

Almost a century later, we are able to view Lacretelle’s crude characterization with more scrutiny. “Little is missing from this description of the Wandering Jew,” La Farge wrote, “except, perhaps, beady eyes, or a patched coat, or a sack of gold.” Given the opportunity to reflect on the character several decades after the novel’s publication, Lacretelle himself noted, “Is it overdone, this portrait of a young Jew, animated by intellectual ambition? Did I carve his features too deeply, shade his scenes too dark? Assuredly yes. But you must understand why. When one sets out to create a type, one has to make him larger than life.”

For this narrative misstep, the flattening of an admittedly brilliant, evolved young man into a symbol of the Jew as outsider, Lacretelle earns La Farge’s ire; for setting himself apart from a character whose intellectual proclivities so closely resemble his own, Lacretelle commits what La Farge deems a fundamental, ethnocentric error: “he forgets that we are, in large part, them.”

Read School Ties, by Paul La Farge

“We’re passionate about the history of this house,” Valerie Bigot, the ambassador’s wife, told me as a white-jacketed waiter served us coffee on the oleander-filled terrace overlooking the sea. Bigot recently gave me a tour of the house, accompanied by Oded Rapoport, the son of its architect, who told the dramatic tale of how his father and his client together created one of the most fascinating 20th-century dwellings in the Middle East.

The story begins at the Tel Aviv Rotary Club, established in 1934 with a membership one-third British, one-third Arab, and one-third Jewish. There, soon after the club was established, Mohammad Ahmed Abdel Rahim, one of Jaffa’s wealthiest residents, met Yitzhak Rapoport. After seeing an innovative hospital design by Rapoport on a nearby street, Abdel Rahim asked the Ukrainian-born architect to design his new house.

Abdel Rahim owned vast citrus groves and flour mills and was a major exporter of Jaffa oranges. He was open to new technology, and, like the Jews in Tel Aviv, he wanted a forward-looking home with modern amenities. But he also wanted to adhere to his own religious and cultural customs. In response, Rapoport began to devise a minimalist exterior in the spirit of the Bauhaus. The interior was designed with a clear separation of public and private realms, with distinct areas for men, women, and children.

Soon after the ambitious project got under way, it became ensnared in tensions between Arabs and Jews in British-ruled Palestine. But the two men were committed to the project. To ensure his safety during deadly Arab riots in 1936, Rapoport would drive to the neighborhood of Manshiyeh on the outskirts of Jaffa, where he would disguise himself in Arab dress. There, he would be picked up by Abdel Rahim and brought to the construction site. Rapoport would spend the night and work the next day overseeing the execution of his design—all the while being introduced to his client’s other guests as a relative from Kuwait. The following night, Rapoport would return to his regular life in Tel Aviv.

“Abdel Rahim had already broken ranks with his cultural milieu to build a Modernist house,” Oded Rapoport told me later in his office, where he spread out a file of documents relating to his father’s life. “He couldn’t afford to be seen with a Jewish architect.” Let alone one who was—unbeknownst to Abdel Rahim—also a spy.

***

It was an open secret that Abdel Rahim was the treasurer of the Arab group orchestrating the uprising and attacks on Jewish civilian targets in Palestine. What no one knew—or at least no one knew inside the emerging structure in the Ajami area of Jaffa—was that Rapoport was also involved in the fight, as a senior officer of the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. During his frequent stays with Abdel Rahim, the architect overheard conversations about planned Arab attacks to protest against Jewish immigration to Palestine, and he would subsequently inform the Haganah about their plans.

The design and realization of the house, meanwhile, kept Abdel Rahim and Rapoport in collaboration, and they remained steadfastly protective of one another—but their histories would continue to intersect in complicated ways. After completing the residential commission, Yitzhak Rapoport went on to design a flour mill for Abdel Rahim and warehouses for his many business interests. During the 1948 war, the flour mill’s tower became a strategic post for Arabs, and Rapoport was in the Jewish military unit that blew it up—using his knowledge of the site to determine exactly how to topple it.

Abdel Rahim was able to enjoy living in his new house for only a decade. He was part of a small group that signed the declaration of Jaffa’s surrender to the Jewish troops, and, during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, his family fled to Lebanon. According to Oded Rapoport, Abdel Rahim left for Beirut with his family, but a nephew of his, Hasan Hammami, says his uncle stayed alone in the mansion for over a year under house arrest before going into exile.

In any case, before the ceasefire, Abdel Rahim transferred ownership of his property to Rapoport, fearing he would lose all claim and have it expropriated. At first, the architect was incredulous, asking, “Why leave it with me? You have family.” Other Arabs, too, remained in Jaffa.

The wealthy man replied, according to Oded, “I don’t trust any of them. I trust you.” He gave Yitzhak Rapoport a proxy for his entire property, even as the architect became Haganah’s chief engineering officer for the Tel Aviv district. “‘I know the Jews will win the war,’” Abdel Rahim told Rapoport.

At war’s end, the newly established Israeli government attempted to nationalize the property, but Oded Rapoport’s father refused to comply. “This is mine,” he told his fellow Zionists. Oded Rapoport explained: “They tried to convince him to drop it. They said, ‘We need it. We’re a new country.’ My father said, ‘I gave of myself to the country, I fought, I gave what was expected of me as a patriot. But I cannot betray my friend.’ ”

In 1949, the French government purchased the house from Yitzhak Rapoport to serve as the official residence of its ambassador to the fledgling Jewish state. The architect then passed on the money to Abdel Rahim, traveling to Naples in the 1950s to meet with him and complete the transfer. Abdel Rahim died in Lebanon in the early 1960s, and Rapoport gradually lost contact with the family as personal communications between Israelis and Arabs became increasingly suspect.

Arab residents of Jaffa have periodically cast doubt upon the story of whether the property was actually sold, most recently in interviews in a 2006 documentary by filmmaker Gadi Nemet broadcast on Israeli television. French authorities counter that Abdel Rahim appointed Rapoport as his agent, that the Foreign Ministry in Paris bought the four-bedroom house from the architect at full market value, and that he, in turn, gave the proceeds to the original owner. I recently confirmed that a transaction of some kind took place by locating the original bill of sale for 20,000 British pounds at the Tel Aviv municipal land registry office.

Yitzhak Rapoport died in 1989. Oded Rapoport took over his practice and has helped successive French ambassadors carry out minor renovations to the original residence. “Whenever a new ambassador arrives, I get a call,” said the younger Rapoport.

***

By the last odd twist of fate in a story littered with them, Oded Rapoport’s experience with Arab architectural commissions has ended up mirroring that of his father. In 1983, Oded designed a house in Gaza for a Palestinian friend. The project got under way during the First Intifada, and the client would meet Oded every other week at the border crossing between Israel and Gaza and then safely ferry him through barricades to a construction site in a car that flew the flag of the Red Crescent.

The client was Akram Matar, an ophthalmologist who ran an eye clinic in conjunction with Israeli doctors. Matar, a wealthy Muslim who studied in England and Germany, wanted a modern house in the upscale Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, and in the process of designing the project Oded Rapoport and his wife became good friends with Matar and his wife.

Sometime after the house was finished, and following the Oslo accords, Matar invited Rapoport—a pilot in the Israeli Air Force—to Gaza for a celebration at his home in 1994. “We came to the main gate accompanied by the Palestinian police in a convoy,” Oded recalled. “Suddenly Yasser Arafat came in. It turned out to be a surprise birthday party for Arafat.”

The architect doesn’t know what happened to his design in the 2009 bombardment of Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. Matar’s children had become more religious as Islamic fundamentalism gained influence in Gaza in the late 1990s. “Somehow the circle was closed,” Oded said quietly, before explaining that Matar died 10 years ago. “Unfortunately, personal stories are so different from the national story.”

Gainsbourg was a mostly washed-up artist when he died at 62 of a heart attack, in 1991. But that’s not what Sfar wishes to remember in his first feature film, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, which opens next week in the United States. Rather, Sfar revels in Gainsbourg’s crash-and-burn approach to life as an outsider, from his cavalier embrace of the yellow star in 1941 to his 1978 recording of a reggae remix of the French national anthem. The film takes creative license with Gainsbourg’s life, just as Gainsbourg was prone to do, and includes some of Sfar’s favorite things: puppets, caricature, Jewish themes, and sex.

Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry spoke to Sfar about Gainsbourg’s life, his love-hate relationships with France and with Jews, and Sfar’s own provocations as an artist and filmmaker. [Running time: 19:07.]

• Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak will be visiting his home-away-from-home—the New York-D.C. Acela corridor—tomorrow and Friday. [The Envoy]

• Facebook will not close pages that deny the Holocaust, for reasons of free speech. A survivors group has criticized the company. [JTA]

• Harold Bloom’s favorite book in the Bible is Jonah, and here he explains why. [NYRB]

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the first European leader to call for a two-state solution that recognizes Israel as “for the Jewish people.” [Contentions]

• The skinniest house in the world is being built in Warsaw for Tablet Magazine columnist Etgar Keret. [Fast Company]

We all need someone …

One of those provocations was in the title he and Hazan chose for their small book. In 60 pages, they argued that the only place anti-Semitism is partout, everywhere, in France is in the feverish imaginations of a coterie of mostly Jewish intellectuals ranging from Bernard-Henri Lévy to Alain Finkielkraut. The traditional anti-Semitism that pulsed through French politics and literature prior to World War II, they noted, was now little more than a “ghostly residue.”

As for the much-discussed rise in anti-Semitic activity among French Arab youths, Badiou and Hazan were equally dismissive. They allowed that since 2001 hate crimes aimed at French Jews have increased. Moreover, they acknowledged that the criminals were frequently beurs—the slang term for French youths of North African origin. But, the writers warned, the media, influenced by a loose association of Jewish intellectuals, have dramatically distorted the numbers and nature of these acts. This “opération de stigmatisation” aimed at young French Muslims, the authors argued, was at the heart of a massive public relations campaign led by these intellectuals. Whether the Arabs live in the decaying suburbs of Paris or the devastated villages of the West Bank, Badiou and Hazan claimed, they have all been transformed by these Jewish intellectuals into a single barbarian horde, against which the West is pitted.

The small book lit up the blogosphere and led to a widely watched televised debate in March among Badiou, Hazan, and Finkielkraut on the popular television show Ce Soir ou Jamais (Tonight or Never). Within minutes, however, it became clear that a calm and candid conversation was not to be. The participants quickly fell to finger-jabbing accusations and insults—all of it in impeccable French sprinkled with literary and philosophical references. It was as if Jerry Springer had choreographed a session of the Académie Française. While the guests did not leap for one another’s throats, the evening nevertheless ended as it started: with each side persuaded that the other simply refused to listen to reason.

It was a watershed moment. More than a century after French Jews, in the crucible of the Dreyfus Affair, had forged the concept of the public intellectual, which had inspired intellectuals all over the world and helped shape some of the 20th century’s most sweeping ideas, French Jewish thinkers, through their quibbling about Islam and Israel, were now destroying that very cultural tradition. If the intellectual, as a cultural figure, becomes an artifact of the past, intellectuals, many of them Jewish, will have only themselves to blame.

***

Providing the kindling that helped inflame the battle raging over L’Antisemitisme Partout are several slow but dramatic changes in the French political climate. Once a nation whose language was the lingua franca of diplomats and artists, whose cultural heritage and revolutionary history belonged to the world, France is now besieged by the economic and demographic forces of globalization. Particularly dramatic has been the growth of its Muslim population. While estimates of size vary from 5 to 6 million, France’s Muslim population is by far the largest within the European Union.

The sheer size of its Muslim population coupled with the erosion of its borders has made France’s national identity the subject of much debate. Oddly, it’s a debate in which Jews figure prominently. Speaking in 1789, Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre famously declared the after the French Revolution, “Jews should be granted everything as individuals and denied everything as a nation.” This led to an understanding of French republicanism as a tradition that safeguarded individual rights so long as citizens uphold its values and endorse its emblems. But where does the recent legislation prohibiting Muslim immigrants from wearing traditional religious garbs that cover the face, for example, fall under this logic? Should the republic punish those who refuse to adhere to its symbols? Or tolerate those who, in the name of freedom, reject some of the republic’s central tenets? These are huge questions; the answers may mold not only France but Europe as well, as every nation on the continent is currently struggling with similar conundrums.

These are not new questions. They’ve been asked, mainly by intellectuals, for a very long time, shaping what scholars call les guerres franco-françaises, the series of internecine political and ideological battles in France that first burst into flames in the late 18th century and whose embers glow even today. The war has pitted two ideological camps against one another: the forces of the Enlightenment, committed to the rational, secular and universal ideals of the French Revolution, versus those of the Counter-Enlightenment, wedded to an instinctual, religious, and particularist conception of France.

The Revolution made an offer to French Jews that they could hardly refuse: liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the eyes of many, it was as if God, in collaboration with the French Republic, had slipped them a world-historical trifecta. From scorned and shamed scapegoats, the Jews were transformed, literally overnight, into patriots blessed with all the rights and duties of citizenship. With the passage into law of Jewish emancipation in 1791, how could one not conclude that the coming of the Messiah and the coming of the Revolution were one and the same? France had become our Palestine, declared one Jewish witness, and France’s mountains now our Mount Zion.

But it was no less a defining moment for enemies of the Revolution, who emphasized an organic and historical conception of the nation against the prevailing rational and universal claims on the nation’s behalf. Perhaps inevitably, Jews found themselves in the middle of these furious claims and counterclaims over France’s true vocation. For the conservative thinker Maurice Barrès, the Jew and the intellectual, given their rationalist and cosmopolitan character, were equally alien—indeed, they were, in his phrase, “uprooted” and foreign to the “soil and dead” that constitute the true France. When other reactionary thinkers, like Charles Maurras, Louis Ferdinand Céline, and Robert Brasillach, attacked the Republic, they also attacked the place French Jewry had within it. While these intellectuals did not share the same political or aesthetic ideals, they all agreed that the Jew would always remain a Jew—the embodiment, in Maurras’ notorious phrase, of “l’anti-France”—and thus serve as the foil against which the true France could be defined.

These anti-Republican—and anti-Jewish—voices were gaining ground, but in 1927 republican intellectuals struck back. That year the French (and Jewish) intellectual Julien Benda published La Trahison des Clercs. The pamphlet, usually translated as The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, was a rappel à l’ordre for the band of intellectuals. A veteran of the Dreyfus Affair, Benda reminded his peers that truth is the one and only ideal of their vocation. Not the sloppy and sentimental truths of tenderhearted souls, but the austere and universal truths of scientists.

Benda insisted he was not a moralist but instead a rationalist for whom the accusations leveled against Dreyfus were toxic not because they endangered a Jew but because they endangered truth. Zola had already trumpeted this credo in J’Accuse, the article that turned une affaire into l’Affaire. The anti-Semitism that helped send Dreyfus to Devil’s Island scarcely crops up in Zola’s accusation; at most it is a sideshow to the sorry affair. What is at center stage, instead, is the assault on truth. But with the confidence of a rationalist rather than the fervor of a moralist, Zola declares that “truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it.”

Continue reading: Vichy and its legacy. Or view as a single page.

But if the scene is an explicit show of solidarity with the occupied French (the film provides the careful, ahistorical Hollywood touch of having the Vichy officer ultimately turn out to be a good guy), then might it not also serve as an implicit show of solidarity with other peoples trampled underfoot by the Nazis? Perhaps with one people in particular? A closer look at who made Casablanca and who appears in the scene—both the actors and the characters—reveals this almost certainly to be the case, and retroactively has something to tell us about the values for which “La Marseillaise” and Bastille Day stood, and continue to stand.

First things first: The scene is an homage to a very similar one in the 1937 French film La Grande Illusion, in which French P.O.W.s during World War One burst into the tune upon hearing good news from the Western Front.

La grande illusion – marseillaise by RioBravo

La Grande Illusion‘s main theme is how that earlier war destroyed what was left of the great civilization of Europe, particularly of its aristocracy, and set the stage for the second, worse war that everyone already saw was to come. Only five years later, in Casablanca, “La Marseillaise” is repurposed: No longer an anomalous outburst of nationalism whose message is almost elegaic, it is now angry, defiant, stirring.

Casablanca’s director, Michael Curtiz, was a Hungarian Jew who came to America from Vienna in the mid-twenties. Its three credited screenwriters are Julius and Philip Epstein (they were twins) and Howard Koch, who would later be blacklisted. Cinema historians hold Casablanca up as the ultimate realization of the studio system, in which films were cobbled together without (with few exceptions) an overwhelming artistic vision. (Casablanca’s famed script, for example, was a Frankenstein’s monster, based on a play [co-written by a Jew, Murray Bennett] and then rewritten and rewritten again, with scenes added even after filming had begun.) The studio system was, of course, almost entirely invented by Jews, among them Casablanca’s executive producer, Jack L. Warner, who founded one of the main studios with three of his brothers (guess what it’s called?).

Jewish actors are prominent in Casablanca. The catalyst of the story is the petty thief who steals the two letters of transit and hides them in Sam’s piano at Rick’s; he is played by the great Peter Lorre, born László Löwenstein in Hungary. Carl, Rick’s trusted head waiter, was played by S.Z. Sakall, also a Hungarian Jew who got out of Europe before the storm. Curt Bois, a source of comic relief as a pickpocket, was a German Jew who left in 1934. The croupier in Rick’s casino—yes, you may be shocked, shocked!, to find that gambling is going on in here—is played by Marcel Dalio, born Israel Moshe Blauschild. Even the German guy who plays Strasser, the chief Nazi, was married to a Jew! I could likely go on, but let’s get to the story itself.

The film’s most prominent refugee from Nazism, Victor, is not Jewish. And neither, of course, is Rick; and neither is Ilsa. But I have always read most of the rest of the outcasts surrounding Rick who quietly stand up against the Nazis as being Jewish (the one exception being Sam, the piano player, who proves the rule because he is black). It’s not an implausible reading: While many Jews of Vichy France (to say nothing of Occupied France) were, of course, deported, the Casablanca of Casablanca is clearly a place where nobody is trying to ruffle anyone’s feathers or go out of the way to do anything other than look after themselves—at least until Strasser’s crackdown. Carl, with his benign expression and mitteleuropa accent, easily reads as Jewish (it helps that he is played by Sakall). Ditto the croupier and the pickpocket. Rick’s bartender is a Russian named Sascha, and one has to wonder about a Russian who has somehow found himself in a lenient Casablanca in 1942, and who, Yvonne, Rick’s former lover, for flirting with one of the Germans. Then there is Yvonne, who cries as she sings along to “La Marseillaise,” who was played by a French woman who, in real life, was married to Dalio, the Jewish actor who plays the croupier.

Most of all, though, I have always read the young Bulgarian couple, the Brandels, as Jewish (“Things are very bad there, the devil has the people by the throat”). One of the most moving scenes comes when Mrs. Brandel tells Rick that Captain Renault, the wily Vichy gendarme played by Claude Rains, has offered to help them leave if she will give herself up to him. I always read them as Jewish because they are clearly in a hurry to leave Casablanca, which makes you ask why, and because, well, she looks it; and sure enough, Annina Brandel is played by Joy Page, daughter of a Mexican-American father and a Jewish mother. It was Page’s first role.

So what does this all mean? And why does it matter? Even in 1789 and the years after, “La Marseillaise” was not just about the French. Liberty, equality, and fraternity turned out to be values that helped the Jews of Europe as well (it was Napoleon, who modeled himself as the revolution’s realization, who freed most of them from the ghettos) and spurred the Haskalah, the 19th century Jewish Enlightenment. When it was a dark time for the French, it was a darker time for the Jews; and the French singing their song of defiance are also the Jews singing their song of defiance. At its best, the French Revolution claimed to speak for all humanity, and most of all for its most downtrodden. It is appropriate for Jews to feel that it spoke, and speaks, for them, too. A good thing to remember today. Vive la France!

Yet Bernard Lazare never rejected fame. Over the next decade, he became one of Paris’ most respected and feared journalists and literary critics, his dapper suits and delicate pince-nez belying a fierce and combative character. Yet that fame failed to endure: Though he was the first of Alfred Dreyfus’ defenders and the first of French Zionists—roles deeply entwined with one another—Lazare is mostly forgotten today. Lazare, however, deserves a second look; his life story reveals the aspirations and the limitations of French Jewry at the dawn of the 20th century.

For tourists, Nîmes is best known for the bullfights still held in its Roman arena. For the French, Nîmes is notable for its large Protestant population—as anomalous in this overwhelmingly Catholic country as Belfast is in Ireland. In the 19th century, Nîmes was the capital of France’s thriving textile industry and the birthplace of the famous rugged fabric, denim, that took its name from the town. The shmata trade, however, was the affair not just of the local Protestants but of Jewish families as well. Significantly, this small but influential community—home to the Crémieux clan, whose most notable member, Adolphe Crémieux, served as minister of justice in the Second and Third Republics—had not just stepped off the boat: Many of the Jewish families in Nîmes had roots that extended at least as far back as the Avignon Papacy in the 14th century, while yet others were as ancient as the Greco-Roman ruins littering the countryside.

While Lazare’s maternal line seems to have stretched back several centuries on French soil, it was his father’s family, immigrants from Germany, that had entered the textile trade and rose to prominence. Like many young men from families of means, young Lazare rebelled against the middle-class traditions and tepid faith of his parents. At the local lycée, he announced to one and all his hatred of authority and power, be it his father, his teachers, or the republican state. “I have always held in horror masters and rulers of any sort,” he wrote as an adult. It was his life’s credo.

But Lazare was hardly a rebel without a cause. At first, he plunged into symbolism, a literary movement that anticipated our own Age of Aquarius. Led by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the symbolists turned their backs not only on the stodgy pieties of bourgeois France but on rationalism itself. Like the surrealists who would shortly follow, they insisted on the reality of unconscious and irrational forces at work in the world and our selves.

But the purity of art couldn’t contain an active mind like Lazare’s. In the hothouse atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Paris, his aesthetic concerns quickly blossomed into political engagement: He was as eager to challenge traditional political parties as he was traditional artistic schools. And he certainly had ample opportunity to do so: In the last decades of the 19th century, Paris was rehearsing our own era of the Internet, convulsed by the explosive growth of the penny press that left the city awash with cheap, mass-circulation newspapers that made sport of the reputations of politicians and powerbrokers. Lazare flourished in the bedlam of Parisian journalism; by 1892, he was writing for several different papers as a theater and book critic.

Two events propelled Lazare away from the arts and toward politics: anarchist terrorism and the Dreyfus Affair. For Lazare, these seemingly disparate phenomena had a great deal in common.

For most of us, anarchy invokes visions of a Montessori playground or the lawless regions of Sudan. In Lazare’s Paris, it meant a wave of terrorist attacks that paralyzed the city with fear. Between 1892 and 1894, politically motivated bombers hit targets ranging from the National Assembly to popular cafés, a wave of terror climaxing with the assassination of the French President Sadi Carnot. These so-called acts of “propaganda by the deed” aimed at nothing less than the collapse of the Third Republic—for the anarchists, the rights guaranteed by the state amounted to little more, in the famous phrase of Anatole France, than the right to starve while living under a bridge.

But these deeds had nothing in common with Lazare’s brand of anarchism. He was as appalled by the bloody terrorist acts as he was by the repressive laws passed in their wake. For Lazare, workers would inevitably get the short end of the stick whether they lived under a socialist or a conservative regime. Governments may change, he believed, but the exploitation and neglect of the poor and the disenfranchised remained constant. Only a society of workers’ cooperatives, he believed, democratic and decentralized, could meet the material and emotional needs of all citizens. If a Tea Partier was to marry a Communist, their ideological brainchild might resemble Lazare.

In 1894, however, the arc of Lazare’s career was suddenly hauled into the powerful gravitational pull of the Dreyfus Affair. Long before renowned writers and politicians like Emile Zola, Jean Jaurès, Georges Clemenceau, and Charles Péguy joined forces on behalf of Dreyfus, Lazare had thrown himself body and soul into the battle. His anarchist convictions help explain his decision—after all, while ruthless in his treatment of the Republic, Lazare was always a committed republican. The revolution of 1789, which led to the first French Republic, represented to Lazare everything that was great and good for humankind. Fidelity for the trinity of revolutionary ideals—liberty, equality, and fraternity—was particularly great among the Jews of Nîmes, a well-established minority living in a town that was itself, religiously speaking, a minority within the country at large. And as Dreyfus’ arrest made clear, safeguarding these vaunted values required the constant vigilance of all French citizens, Jews and anarchists as well as Catholics and conservatives.

With France flooded by anti-Semitic sentiment in the wake of the affair, Lazare’s politics led him on an unlikely path back to his Jewish roots. In 1896, he issued his incendiary pamphlet A Judicial Error: The Truth About the Dreyfus Affair. In both its biting style and merciless analysis, the brochure anticipated Zola’s more celebrated J’Accuse, which would not appear for another two years. Captain Dreyfus, Lazare declared, was the victim of the lies and machinations of officials at the highest levels of the army and government. Unlike Zola, though, Lazare homes in on the matter of Dreyfus’ religion. “It is because Dreyfus was Jewish that he was arrested,” he roared, “because he was Jewish that he was judged, because he was Jewish that he was condemned and because he is Jewish that the voices of justice and truth have fallen silent.”

The silence that greeted the pamphlet’s publication left a deep impression on Lazare. Few friends and colleagues on the Left rallied to his call, while anti-Semitic newspapers pummeled him. By 1898, when Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island to France for his retrial, Lazare was prepared to see not just the captain but also himself as the “symbol of the persecuted Jew.” The same anti-Semitic frenzy that sparked the Zionist epiphany of Theodor Herzl—who covered Dreyfus’ public degradation for a Viennese newspaper—spurred Lazare’s conversion as well. Deeply impressed by Herzl’s book Judenstaat, Lazare had come to a conclusion similar to his Austrian counterpart: Despite their best efforts to assimilate, Jews would always be reminded by the world that they remained Jews. It was a far cry from his anarchist beginnings.

Like Herzl, too, Lazare abandoned his belief that Jews could assimilate into a secular republic like France. Yet it soon became clear that this was the only position they did share: Lazare never surrendered his radically egalitarian ideals and instead simply channeled them into his particular understanding of Zionism. As his biographer Nelly Wilson observed, Lazare believed that just as the Jew will never succeed to assimilate to French society, he must also never allow himself to assimilate to its unjust social and economic order.

Herzl’s more conservative vision carried the day, perhaps in part because Lazare did not live long enough to carry on the fight. He died, most probably of cancer, in 1903. The 200 mourners who gathered at his grave at Montparnasse were, along with a few anarchists, mostly immigrant Jews from eastern Europe. Five years later, a statue was erected in Nîmes’ central park, the jardin de la fontaine, to commemorate Lazare’s achievements. Thirty years later, it disappeared under the watch of the Vichy regime.

Should you ever visit the garden, take a minute away from the ruins of the Temple of Diana and walk toward the eastern gate. Against a rock wall and behind leaves and branches you will find a plaque where the statue once stood. Its inscription would not embarrass Lazare: “A statue once stood here,” it reads, “dedicated to a man who, in dangerous times, defended the rights of man trampled under in the person of Dreyfus.”

Robert Zaretsky is professor of history in the Honors College, University of Houston, and the author, most recently, of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.

That diplomacy began with Obama’s “1967 borders” speech, in which, it seems increasingly clear, he was cruel in order to be kind—was rhetorically tough on Israel (while giving essentially nothing away substantively) in order to buy credibility with the Germans, the British, and the French. That diplomacy continued into this week, with the U.S. effectively crippling France’s proposed talks (which the Palestinians jumped at, but which Israel and the U.S. are lukewarm on; instead, Secretary of State Clinton separately met with negotiators from both sides). The crowning moment? On Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stood beside President Obama as he bluntly requested that the Palestinians halt their unilateral statehood efforts. Because of his own efforts, it is looking more likely that he will get his wish, or, if he doesn’t, that he may as well have.

AP Exclusive: Palestinians Have Second Thoughts About U.N. Independence Drive [AP/WP]
Palestinian Leadership Divided Over Plan to Seek U.N. Recognition [Haaretz]
France to Pursue Mideast Conference Despite U.S. Reservations [Haaretz]
Clinton Meets with Palestinian, Israeli Negotiators [JTA]
Obama to Palestinians: Drop U.N. Statehood Bid [Ynet]
Earlier: Did Obama Sway Europe to Israel’s Side?

• This is probably partly because both sides are independently, secretly talking to the Americans. [Haaretz]

• The Turkish foreign minister advised the flotilla organizers to hold off until they see the situation in Gaza. This may be what the U.S. gets in exchange for giving Turkey a role in the peace process. [Haaretz]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu refused to meet with a J Street delegation of Democratic congressmen. [Ynet/Vos Iz Neias?]

• In the strangest press conference like, ever, Rep. Anthony Weiner admitted to communicating innappropriately with six women over Facebook and Twitter over the past three years. And then he took a lot of questions. #TMI [CNN]

• Gus Tyler, longtime author of the Forward’s Der Yiddish Vinkl column, died at 99. May his memory be for a blessing. [Forward]

• Nextbook Press author Deborah Lipstadt spoke last week about the importance of “contemporary Jewish creativity” on the occasion of the awarding of the Sami Rohr Prize. [Jewish Book Council Blog]

Leonard Nimoy writes a letter for Americans for Peace Now in support of a two-state solution. His work here is done.

The pamphlet argues that today’s French should cast off their indifference and “get angry!” in the manner of résistants such as himself, a comrade of De Gaulle’s in London who parachuted into France and was captured and sent to Buchenwald. “When something outrages you, as Nazism did me, that is when you become a militant, strong and engaged,” the roughly 4,000-word pamphlet proclaims. “You join the movement of history, and the great current of history continues to flow only thanks to each and every one of us.” And what is Hessel most angry about? “Today, my primary indignation concerns Palestine, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank.”

In The New Republic, Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch questioned the utility of Resistance-era anger in a time of (mostly) functional politics. Unquestionably a hero and doubtfully intending any harm, Hessel strikes me as a French version of Howard Beale, the Network anchor who instructs us to shout, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” Of course, Beale is a crank, a madman suffering a nervous breakdown. The parody in Paddy Chayefsky’s script isn’t found in the fact that Beale is right, but rather in the fact that somebody so profoundly wrong, albeit in a harmless way, is received as being right because he satisfies certain emotional needs; the film’s malicious villains have use for the anger he inspires because it distracts people from real problems. Beale, and Beale-like anger, is the tool of the true bad guys.

In the spring, in France, another Hessel pamphlet was released, this a collection of interviews titled Engagez-Vous!—“get involved!” That sounds more like it, anyway.

Book by French Resistance Here to Be Published in U.S. [Arts Beat]
A Resistance Hero Fires Up the French [NYT]
Related: The Trouble With Anger [TNR]
Earlier: So, You’re a ‘French Intellectual,’ Eh?

It appears Obama’s diplomacy is working. In a surprising move, over the weekend the Palestinian Authority reportedly agreed to France-sponsored peace talks—the existence of which, and progress on which, could be held up as justification for not holding a G.A. vote—if Israel agrees, too. (Prime Minister Netanyahu said Israel would consult with the U.S.) This is good news for Israel.

So, why the about-face on the French and, more so, the Palestinians’ part? Of France, which was one of the countries more likely to vote for statehood in the G.A., one senses consternaton about Palestinian reconciliation, specifically that the Fatah-Hamas alliance likely spells the end of Salam Fayyad’s premiership, which the West has viewed as the greatest hope for Palestinian statehood as well as the immediate justification for supporting statehood. Reconciliation has (predictably) failed in real life, specifically on the crucial issue of security. Moreover, one Palestinian source said that President Mahmoud Abbas recognized that a G.A. vote may require Security Council approval first, giving the United States the chance to quash it, although he intends to go ahead with it anyway.

But even the right-wing Horovitz recognizes that Obama’s diplomacy, which took Israel’s side enough so as not to truly give anything away but was rhetorically harsh enough so as to lend him real credibility with on-the-fence European countries—most of all Britain and France, both of which he visited last week—deserves credit for this outcome. “This is also a president who appreciates that the Arab upheaval is producing a ’1948 moment’—an empowerment of regional opponents not to Israel’s presence beyond the 1967 lines but to Israel’s presence, period,” Horovitz argues.

This is also a president who recognizes that much of Europe is far more empathetic to the Palestinians than the United States has hitherto been. Anxious to encourage Europe not to vote for “Palestine” in September, this is also a president, finally, who is convinced that the way to achieve this goal requires sounding tough on Israel and gentle on the Palestinians.

Editor’s Notes: The Battle for Europe [JPost]
Abbas Agrees to Peace Talks With Israel [AFP/IHT]
Report: Abbas Knows U.N. Won’t Recognize State [Ma’an]
Analysis: Palestinian Unity Going Nowhere Fast [Reuters]
Earlier: Will Israel-Based GOP Attacks Get Through?

One of the 20th century’s most original and unsettling thinkers, Weil was born into a Gallic version of J.D. Salinger’s Glass family. Her parents were worldly and smart Parisians who considered their Jewishness much as Weil’s father, Bernard, a successful doctor, viewed the appendix: the residue of evolution. Weil’s powerful mother, Selma, oversaw a rambling apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Michel that, according to one observer, resembled a “genius factory.” At the age of 14, her brother, André, entered the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he dazzled his mathematics professors, while Simone had mastered Latin, Greek, German, and English by the age at which other Jewish girls were preparing for their bat mitzvahs. The siblings spent their childhood arguing over passages in Racine and Pascal and their later years comparing notes on Eastern religions, in particular Buddhism.

As for her native Judaism, Weil had little good to say about it. Indeed, she protested mightily against what she thought were Judaism’s manifest shortcomings, especially in comparison to Christianity. Weil probably protested too much—there are deep Jewish concerns that infuse her work—but her protests nevertheless led her to a long flirtation with conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, if André resembled Salinger’s Zooey Glass, Simone shared Franny’s driven, spiritual, and self-punishing character. As a toddler, she chose to deny herself sugar as a gesture of sympathy with the French soldiers in the trenches; as a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she chose to work on factory assembly lines; she fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and later, as an exile from France, joined de Gaulle’s Free French in London.

Heroic as these endeavors might have been in theory, in practice they often led Weil to the brink of disaster. As an assembly-line worker, she cut and burned herself repeatedly on the machinery, and she was fired when she could not maintain the numbing pace of work. As a volunteer in Spain, her clumsiness and near-sightedness led her to step in a pot of boiling oil during a reconnaissance mission, necessitating her evacuation to France. As for the Free French, when her proposal to command a group of uniformed “nurses” who would parachute into France in order to tend the wounded was shot down by de Gaulle—“She’s crazy!” he shouted—Weil instead chose to starve herself to death in an English hospital.

When we consider Weil’s attenuated and atypical life, we may be tempted to agree with de Gaulle. But when we consider her understanding of war and work—the two, Weil argued, were deeply intertwined—we might take issue with the celebrated general.

In early 1941, scarcely six months after France’s defeat and occupation by Nazi Germany, a literary journal in the unoccupied zone, Cahiers du Sud, published Weil’s “The Iliad, Or the Poem of Force.” The essay, the style and substance of which are as angular and astringent as its author, approaches Homer’s poem from a perspective firmly rooted in the horrors of the 20th century. The war Homer sings about concerns the Greeks and Trojans—a war launched by Paris’ taking of Helen and ending with the Greeks’ taking of Troy. In between, Homer’s epic poem unfurls conversations among women about their lot in war, among soldiers about honor and duty, and among gods and goddesses about their petty jealousies and rages. And, of course, the poem recounts in surgically precise detail the many deaths on both sides in battle. Hector kills Achilles’ friend Patroclus, Achilles wreaks his revenge on Hector, and Priam—Hector’s father—and Achilles close the poem by joining one another in a common grief.

For most readers over the last two millennia, Homer’s epic is about warriors seeking to realize their excellence, or arête, on the battlefield, a singular and glorious pursuit. But, as Weil argued, the poem, in a deep sense, is about men at work as much as about men at war. A veteran of work on the battlefield and in the factory, Weil had the temerity to offer her own radical interpretation: While most traditional readers argued over which soldier is the hero of the story—Hector, who dies while defending his city, or Achilles, who dies after avenging his friend—Weil claimed that “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.”

Force, for Weil, is like gravity, a sort of necessity pressing without remorse on humankind. It turns us, she wrote, into things—physical matter shorn not just of life, but also of dignity. Given Weil’s own life, lashed by the gales of history and witness to the endless hecatombs of World War I and relentless Nazi machinery in World War II, it is perhaps not surprising that she insisted that force pure and simple infused the world. The power weighing on Homer’s soldiers, as they batter and behead one another, has nothing to do with honor, she argued, and everything to do with the nature of our world. Friends and foes are all condemned.

This empire of force, Weil insisted, bleeds into nearly every aspect of our lives. No one in the Iliad, she wrote, is “spared by force, as no one on earth is.” This was true not only of ancient Greece, but also of early 20th-century France, where factory workers faced the very same crushing force. Weil knew it well: In December 1934, when she began to punch the clock at Alsthom, a factory making electrical parts for trains, the rhythm and nature of the work, the quest for productivity and indifference to the well-being of the workers, made for an earthly hell. As she raced to meet her daily quota, Weil found that she was emptied of all thoughts and feelings; instead, akin to a “thing” she simply submitted, leaving the factory at the end of the day with just one hope: “that they will allow me to spend yet another such day.”

A half century later, not much has changed. Behind the fogs of war in Afghanistan and Iraq lies the same force that, in Weil’s words, “turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” The expanding use of drones, guided from planes high above or bases far away, emphasizes the impersonality of this fatal force described by Weil. But that same force also flows through firefights in Helmand Province and street battles in Ramadi, bloody scenes that are as intimate and confused as the clashes on the beach or near the walls of Troy. Force rules the modern workforce as well: Whether on our disappearing assembly lines or multiplying office cubicles, we do not seem all that far removed from the lot of Charlie Chaplin in Weil’s favorite film, Modern Times.

Yet Weil’s protestations are not all gloomy. Force, she argued, by its impassive and immovable character, makes possible “luminous moments”—when a warrior plumbs his soul, for example, or converses with a fellow soldier or embraces his son or wife. These moments also existed in factories. In her Factory Journal, Weil marveled at gestures of kindness shared between workers, or even instances of self-sacrifice. These moments allow each and everyone of us to see the humanity of our fellow beings, friend or foe. And even the most terrible force, Weil wrote, can never erase the memory of such tender and humane moments.

Equally crucial, for Weil, was the fact that force is an equal-opportunity destroyer. Commenting on the ups and downs of the Trojans and Greeks, she concludes: “force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to his victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.” Enemies like Osama Bin Laden have been finally and deservedly crushed; but Weil warned us against intoxication. Ultimately, she wrote, no one side can master force for very long, for its nature is fungible: Human beings are little more than vessels carried by the force of force. “The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong,” she wrote, “nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this.”

Memorial Day rightly calls upon us to honor our men and women at war, just as Labor Day asks the same respect and gratitude toward our men and women at work. For Weil, such commemoration is also right and good. No matter how vigorously she rejected her own Judaism, by shedding light on these rare luminous moments that arise suddenly from work and war, Weil should be considered a modern-day tzaddik, a truly righteous thinker.

Robert Zaretsky is professor of history in the Honors College, University of Houston, and the author, most recently, of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.

• Somehow made it through the whole week without posting this profile of David Mamet, focusing on his conversion (to conservatism, that is; he remains Jewish—actually, that has a lot to do with it). [The Weekly Standard]

• A guilty verdict was handed down in Israel’s sensational Rose murder case. [NYT]

• IHH, the Turkish group behind the flotillas, condemned the killing of Bin Laden. [Meir Amit]

• Most of those Korean-Jewish babies are being raised Jewish. [Forward]

• If l’affaire DSK has revealed one thing, it is that France no longer has an anti-Semitism problem. [The Daily Beast]

• Anne Frank wedding cards! [Regretsy]

• Sheldon Adelson backs (though not necessarily endorses) Newt Gingrich. [Jewish Week]

Les Lieber is the coolest 99-year-old you or anyone else knows (and to answer your immediate objection, Jacques Barzun is not 99, he is 103).

I come, however, to make a different point, and it is raised by the three examples Rieff cites of DSK apologists: The freelance intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, mais, bien sûr; Jean Daniel, a prominent editor; and Robert Badinter, a human rights lawyer who, more than any other single person, is responsible for France having abolished the death penalty. What do they have in common? They are all French intellectuals. They are all, in their various idiosyncratic and self-professed ways, men of the left. They are all buddies with DSK—come to think of it, another French intellectual man of the left. Is there anything else these four share … ?

Of course, there is, and I put it to you, France: Can’t you guys get yourself some non-Jewish intellectuals? I mean it’s an improvement on the situation during the Dreyfus Affair (J’abuse!), but come on! I just named four: DSK, BHL, Daniel, and Badinter. I haven’t even mentioned the godfather of French Baby Boomer leftism, André Glucksmann, or (along with BHL) one of the other chief nouveaux philosophes who rose to prominence in the ’70s, Alain Finkielkraut. I have not yet mentioned the model for French post-Sartre engagé intellectual activity, former Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, or his longtime friend Daniel “Danny the Red” Cohn-Bendit (a French-born German citizen, which is basically exactly the point). Alexandre Adler! Pascal Bruckner! Michel Taubmann! Jacky Mamou? Jacky Mamou! A bunch of other people mentioned in this article! The fact is, France would be looking at the wholesale elimination of its entire intellectual état should, say, France ever see fit to hand its Jews over to people who wished them ill, which, fortunately, would never, ever happen.

The only three exceptions to this rule help prove it. Pierre-André Taguieff is one of us in spirit, having been accused of being one by the Islamic intellecutal Tariq Ramadan. The novelist Michel Houellebecq, the reigning Prix Goncourt winner, is a non-Jewish French intellectual, but he famously lives in deliberate exile. And, finally, there is Pierre Manent. What makes Manent the exception that proves the rule? Manent is a neoconservative, and, apparently, only American neocons are Jews.

An Indefensible Defense [TNR]

Here’s why. DSK was the leading candidate of the leading party, the Socialists. The frontrunner is now François Hollande, but he is not quite the candidate DSK was, and besides, this scandal could tarnish the Socialists generally. And if they hemorrhage voters, some may go to the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing party, but some more may find themselves drifting to the far-right National Front, which also aligns itself as the party of the working class (complete with a May Day parade and everything). The FN is led by Marine Le Pen, daughter of the notorious anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen, and she has refashioned her party to make it more acceptable to the mainstream.

She is the weekend’s big winner: The weakening of the Socialists makes it more likely that her party will advance to the second round of France’s presidential elections next year, in which she would be pitted against only one other party. And while she has formally repudiated her father’s and her party’s past of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, she is not someone whom Jewish folks should be all too excited about. It will be bitterly ironic if she ends up gaining greater legitimacy and power due to the personal misconduct of someone who happens to be Jewish.

I.M.F. Chief, Apprehended at Airport, Is Accused of Sexual Attack [NYT]
Earlier: Is Marine a Different Animal?

• A State Department spokesperson called “outrageous” the comments of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, condemning the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. [Haaretz]

• Madonna, Malawi, and Kabbalah. [NYMag]

• Former Israeli president and convicted rapist Moshe Katsav will not have to do jail time pending his appeal. [AP/WP]

• This is way old, but I learned today that President Obama has a Jewish half-brother. [WP]

• The Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim participated in a rare performance in Gaza as a show of solidarity. [AP/Haaretz]

Not enough people remember this awesome post-9/11 rant in Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour (caution: Lots of cursing, and equal-opportunity use of racial stereotypes in the Spike Lee manner).

Le Pen fille has inarguably repudiated her father’s anti-Semitism, although some would argue that it has morphed into her party’s strong anti-immigrant platform and its more-than-whiff of Islamophobia. Arthur Goldhammer, a top blogger on French politics and affiliate of Harvard’s Center for European Studies—oh, and a cousin-of-The-Scroll—found the profile “a remarkably uncritical piece, in my view, quite shocking in the degree to which it lends itself to her effort to differentiate herself from her father.” I asked him over email to tell me more about what Le Pen the Younger represents and what she could mean for French Jews and for Israel.

How is Le Pen like her father?
It is true that Marine Le Pen has worked hard to dissociate herself from her father’s anti-Semitic image. She has explicitly described the Holocaust as the great tragedy of the 20th century and recently expelled a party member who was photographed giving the Nazi salute. But she has retained Bruno Gollnisch, whom she defeated for the party leadership and who, like her father, who remains honorary president of the party, has been convicted of questioning the existence of the Holocaust. Both he and her father marched in the front rank in Sunday’s May Day party parade. Her party does enjoy substantial support from the working class, but working-class anti-Semitism has long existed in France. Ms. Le Pen has focused her message on the economic crisis, but remember that her two likeliest main opponents have Jewish affiliations: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, is Jewish, and President Nicolas Sarkozy has a Jewish mother. Her attacks on “international financial capital” and on the IMF as the agent of international capital revive age-old extreme right stereotypes associating “international capital” with Jewishness. Indeed, “rootless cosmpolitan” was a code-word for “Jew” in the 1930s, and Le Pen’s attacks on Strauss-Kahn as a man who has abandoned his country to serve the interests of finance in a foreign capital are heard as a dog-whistle by anti-Semites.

A quick reminder: Why should Jews be cautious of the National Front?
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party’s former leader, referred to the Holocaust as a “minor detail” of the history of World War II and once referred to a Jewish minister, Michel Durafour, as Durafour crématoire, a pun on the French for “crematory oven” (four crématoire). In 1999, he was convicted by a German court of “minimizing the Holocaust.” Others involved in the founding of the Front National came out of extreme right-wing movements associated with anti-Semitism.

Is the difference between her and her father more style or more substance?
It’s quite a bit of both, and her father is reportedly not happy with her reorientation of the party line. He also allegedly advised her not to expel the young member who made the Nazi salute, for fear of alienating “older elements” in the party, who have no problem with this sort of thing.

Do you think Jewishness and anti-Semitism will enter into the presidential campaign?
Covertly, via the kind of symbolism I mentioned above. But even before Marine Le Pen assumed the leadership, anti-Arab and more generally anti-immigrant sentiment had replaced anti-Semitism as the party’s main “social” theme. Since French anti-Semites consider French Jews to be foreigners anyway, the xenophobic line appeals to those hostile to Jews without having to name them.

How does Israel fit into this? As an influential member of the EU and the U.N. Security Council, France is an important country for Israel right now.
The FN has not shown hostility to Israel in recent years because of its emphasis on anti-Muslim themes. Muslims are a much larger “alien” group in France today, and since Israel is an object of Muslim hostility, there has been no reason for an anti-Islamic party to take an anti-Israel line.

Is Sarkozy moving to his right in response to her? And if so, doesn’t that indicate that she has tapped into a broader current in French politics and society?
Sarkozy has long emphasized law-and-order themes, and he has repeatedly promised to tighten enforcement of immigration laws. These issues helped him appeal to extreme-right voters in 2007, and he was thought to have “destroyed” the FN by co-opting its issues. But Marine Le Pen has been able to take back those voters, and in response Sarkozy has tried to revive some of his hard-right themes, but thus far without much effect.

Finally, is there anything more French than—as Marine Le Pen’s mother did—leaving your husband for his biographer?
No comment.

Marine Le Pen, France’s (Kinder, Gentler) Extremist [NYT]
Le Pen in the Times [French Politics]

• Here is a remarkable story told by a Syrian lesbian blogger about her father. Spare some prayers for the people of Syria this weekend. [A Gay Girl in Damascus]

• An appreciation of Stanley Siegelman, a poet and longtime Forward contributor who died earlier this month at 87. [Forward]

• Don’t forget, never forget: Yom HaShoah is this Sunday, May 1. [ADL]

• A pregnant Israeli woman and her Jewish husband—both of whom lived in China—were among the dead in a terrorist bombing in Morocco. [Haaretz]

• Holocaust survivors traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby congressional staffers to allow them to sue a French railroad. [JTA]

New Yorker film critic Richard Brody’s “DVD of the Week” is 1940’s The Great Dictator, a late Chaplin film (hear him talk!) that presciently confronted the Nazis and anti-Semitism head-on.

Meanwhile, the talk of France (besides Libya) is a book by the grandson of a prominent minister in Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government that argues that most of the entire group of Frenchmen that did not actively resist Nazi occupation—including the book’s titular “Very Nice People,” and including the author’s grandfather, who is commonly seen as heroic—share responsibility for the deportation and eventual murder of thousands of French Jews. That individuals like his grandfather committed small, brave acts to save individual Jews is nearly beside the point, the author argues. “In the end it was not at all necessary to be a monster to participate in the worst,” he tells the Wall Street Journal. “There was an anti-Semitism of the state. Men like my grandfather were prepared to do absolutely anything to preserve a little fragment of national sovereignty.” Though most have criticized the book, some Frenchmen have come to its defense: Its detractors, said one such defender, are “right-thinking conformists,” parroting a “warmed-over couplet about the Pétainist-Resistant who with one hand sent Jews to the gas chamber and with the other, claimed to have saved a few.” The speaker is, of course, Lévy.

I’d submit this isn’t a coincidence, or even, entirely, unrelated. In his masterpiece, Power and the Idealists, Tablet Magazine contributor Paul Berman writes of a generation of Frenchmen, largely mapping on to the American Baby Boomers, who grew up wondering what they would have done during the Occupation. “The militants who had fought in Spain or in the Resistance were the Series A generation,” Berman explains.

The militants of their own generation, his and Kouchner’s, had to recognize that, by contrast, they were strictly Series B. They were the generation of the second rate—the less-than-Malraux, less-than-Camus generation. The students were résistants who had nothing to resist. They pretended to resist, even so, and pretending merely aggravated their self-doubts. They dreamed, therefore. They went to the movies.

For their knowledge that their parents lived in historical times, they compensated both by policing those among their parents who behaved incorrectly and by dramatically reenacting those times with whatever new struggle happened to be at hand.

The “Kouchner” in Berman’s paragraph is Bernard Kouchner, a charter member of this group of Boomer-era French intellectuals, as well as the founder of Doctors Without Borders. Until recently, he was also France’s foreign minister—which brings us back to Sarkozy, who appointed him; and who is himself descended in part from Greek Jews; and who now, as French president, perhaps wishes, with Lévy, to avoid again staining the French flag by associating it with mass slaughter. Thus concludes your occasional lesson that the past is neither dead nor past.

Man in the News: Nicolas Sarkozy [FT]
How Bernard-Henri Lévy Started the Libyan War [FrumForum]
Vichy’s ‘Very Nice People’ [WSJ]

• Charlie Sheen needed bodyguards. Naturally, he hired ex-IDFers. [JTA]

• Leo Steinberg, a hugely important art historian, died at 90. [NYT]

• French Jews rallied against Marine Le Pen and her father, National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, in Paris after a radio station planned (and then canceled) an interview with her. [JTA]

• The best cocktails for Purim. [Jewcy]

• The American town of 20,000 people or more with the largest percentage of its population under the age of 15 is the Hasidic enclave of Kiryas Joel in upstate New York. [Business Week]

Here is a lovely dispatch from the burial of Shifra Lerer, a onetime star of the Yiddish stage, who died Saturday at 95. In 1996, she satirized Jane Fonda in “Shvitz! My Yiddisheh Workout.”

One way to understand Obama’s presidency is as the stewardship of a leader who must subtly make his countrymen confront a fact they would prefer to avoid—namely, that the age of American prosperity is over. From that perspective, passing healthcare legislation was all-important to his presidency because without the economic boom of the post-World War II era, the state is now being forced to care for its aging population by dividing up a shrinking pie. As for Obama’s foreign policy, it is not a matter of making the United States appear to behave in a more modest and polite fashion after eight years of George W. Bush’s stubborn unilateralism. Rather, reality itself has humbled us.

But if the American century is coming to an end, it’s not just on account of Bush’s failures or the worldwide economic crisis, but because of a larger historical divide that we have barely begun to fathom—the end of the Cold War.“There was a balance of terror during the Cold War that people didn’t acknowledge,” Marc Weitzmann, a French journalist, literary critic, and novelist, told me recently in Paris. “The violence of the Cold War was sent to the Third World. These conflicts existed in faraway areas, places that we didn’t care about, like the Middle East. Now they’re fought out everywhere. As it turned out, the Berlin Wall wasn’t between East and West Germany, it was protecting the citizens of the West from violence.”

Weitzmann and I were having lunch near his apartment, at the Hotel du Nord, a quiet restaurant on the site of the 1938 Marcel Carné movie of the same name. A short, powerfully built 51-year-old man with a shock of red hair and intense blue eyes, Weitzmann speaks English with the fluid wit and mania of a New Yorker. He splits his time between Paris and New York, where he’s become close to writers like Philip Roth and Paul Berman. Weitzmann and I first met more than a decade ago, when he was still safely in the mainstream of Parisian literary culture and writing regular book reviews for Les Inrockuptibles, a leftist weekly that resembles a combination of Rolling Stone and the New York Review of Books. In the aftershocks of Sept. 11, Weitzmann’s former colleagues came to consider his qualified support of Bush, the war in Iraq, and Israel heretical. His intellectual re-orientation began when Weitzmann moved to Israel to write a book about the recent massive Russian migration, the post-Cold War world, and globalization. The end of the peace process and the onset of the second intifada caught him by surprise, and he started to investigate his Jewish roots, a legacy that was largely obscured by his parents’ communist convictions. It is perhaps partly his family history that makes him especially sensitive to the significance of the Cold War, a conflict fought on four continents between two nuclear superpowers for nearly half a century.

The Cold War is again drawing attention from the French intelligentsia, with articles recently featured on the covers of news magazines and intellectual journals. This indicated that France is among the first countries to wake to the fact that it is not a post-Sept. 11 world but one still shaped by the Cold War and its conclusion, an aftermath that we have yet to account for properly. The spectacular nature of Sept. 11 and the consequences of those attacks obscured the remarkable fact that a war that had so profoundly shaped the modern world had only recently come to an end.

If Germany was the Cold War’s strategic battlefield, Weitzmann told me, then France was its “ideological battleground,” which makes his home country an ideal perch from which to understand the reality we inhabit now. A case in point is the part former President Jacques Chirac’s France played in opposing the Iraq war.

“There was anti-Americanism on top of it,” said Weitzmann, “but the French just wanted peace restored, and peace of mind. But they never understood that during the Cold War things were never that stable to begin with. The Cold War was a great time for Europe, especially France. There was stability and prosperity, and it was all protected by the Americans, and Europe didn’t even know it. This schizophrenia was possible as long as the Cold War went on, but as soon as it was over, the contradictions appeared. The French were afraid of the new context, so they hung on to what they knew in order to explain it: The U.S. was evil, and the Jews were manipulating things.”

Weitzmann’s new novel, Quand J’Etais Normal, or When I Was Normal, is about the insecure political context that has beset post-Cold War France. Set in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq war, when Paris was sharply divided between pro-war and anti-war camps, it is the story of a French Jewish family—“a chaotic family,” according to Weitzmann—muddling through a landscape of political chaos, paranoia, and Jewish anxiety and insecurity.

“The anti-war demonstrations were composed of Chirac supporters, leftists, and Muslims,” Weitzmann said. “And the pro-war demonstrators were basically Jews. The Jews were scared of the climate in France, and for good reason: These anti-war demonstrators were openly anti-Semitic. Along with images of Chirac, you had Hamas songs. There are both 5 million Muslims in France and also the biggest Jewish community in Europe today.”

Weizmann says that anti-Israel rhetoric has largely disappeared from French political discourse even if anti-Israel sentiment hasn’t changed much. In contrast to the Chirac years, said Weitzmann, “with Sarkozy there is no link between popular resentment toward Israel and the official government position.” But hostility toward the United States has different roots, which the election of Obama did little to quell. “The fact that a black man is president impresses Europeans for the wrong reasons,” Weitzmann said. “They see Obama’s election as a victory for Third Worldism. In the end, his election was a message from America to Americans, not to the world.”

The United States, Weitzmann argues, are no longer capable of playing the role of world leader because the world itself has changed. “Coming out of World War II,” Weitzmann said, “the American idea was that the U.S. is the only country capable of fighting terror regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets. Europe needed to be rebuilt, and the U.S. was the only free country able to lead the way. The legitimacy of that leadership depends on the fiction that there is indeed a Western world to be led.”

Weitzmann explains that by fiction he doesn’t mean that the idea is false, only that every identity is created, and this is how America’s postwar identity came about. “The idea that there is such a thing as the West is how the U.S. legitimized its leadership.”

In other words, the real challenge to American leadership is not the economy or even the desire of some U.S. policymakers to reduce our international profile but a lack of legitimacy. “World War II was the moment that the idea of what America was and the reality coincided,” Weitzmann said. “You liberated the camps, you beat the Nazis, and so on. But now the landscape is different. Now what you think you are is in conflict with what others think of you.”

The question then is not just whether the United States is capable of leading but whether anyone is interested in or capable of following. Western Europe is scaling down its global commitments. France and Britain are planning to share aircraft carriers, as their economies won’t permit them to operate independent modern navies. “Europe is trying to exist without military power,” Weitzmann said, “but there is no economic power without military grounding.” The irony is that a U.S. victory in the Cold War revealed Europe’s impotence. “Bush’s big mistake,” Weitzmann argued, “was that he did not understand that if Europe is militarily impotent, if Europe is effectively dead, then the U.S. has lost its legitimacy to lead the West.”

It’s worth remembering that French intellectuals condemned the naiveté and imperial greed of our political classes for almost 50 years after the end of World War II and, as Weitzmann said, ignored the fact that their freedoms were ensured by American economic and military might. If Weitzmann’s frightening thesis is correct that there is no longer a West for the United States to lead, it’s a concern that was shared by members of the Bush Administration. In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld distinguished between Old Europe, which included France, and New Europe, the Central and Eastern European states once behind the Iron Curtain. In the wake of the Cold War, New Europe still looks to Washington for leadership. Whether we’re capable of leading there and elsewhere, like the Muslim Middle East, remains to be seen.

In the end, though, the American century was never about history, or the notion that it was simply our turn in the great historical cycle. Rather, we are self-generated, self-willed, born of the desire to recreate ourselves. We took that privilege and responsibility upon ourselves. It is difficult to imagine what the United States is without the idea that we bear a great responsibility for the fate of others and are willing to lead.

Houellebecq and Lévy enjoy nothing here like the celebrity that attaches to them in France. But for those who know their work, either valuing it or despising it, the idea of an encounter between the two men has an undeniable piquancy. What, after all, could these unlikely interlocutors possibly have to say to each other?

“We have nothing in common,” Houellebecq declares in the very first letter, as he fires an opening shot across Lévy’s bow. “A specialist in farcical media stunts, you dishonor even the white shirts you always wear. … A philosopher without an original idea but with excellent contacts, you are, in addition, the creator behind the most preposterous film in the history of cinema.” Lévy is the epitome of “champagne socialism,” he continues, whereas he, Houellebecq, is “just a redneck. An unremarkable author with no style.” Lévy refuses to take the bait in his response, instead calmly suggesting various approaches their correspondence might follow. And so the conversation begins.

Like wary pugilists, they take their time feeling each other out, jabbing, dodging, moving around. Houellebecq expresses his passion for literature, even down to Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Lévy remarks on his Jewishness, a theme he will return to in greater depth later. “There are Jews who suffer; I’m a Jew who fights … a happy Jew.” As media stars, they are accustomed to role-playing; each has fashioned a public persona so well-honed and familiar that it risks turning into a parody of itself, if it hasn’t already done so. When Houellebecq appears on television, he says, he assumes the guise of a “permanent guest,” with “a little shtick, with a few gimmicks,” that allows him to conceal his “innermost self,” making it “all but inaccessible.” Lévy says he hates revealing himself.

Yet one of the pleasures of this book is its personal revelations. Each man describes his background, his upbringing, and most notably the influence of his father, which seems to have been decisive for both of them. Lévy’s father, born poor in western Algeria, made a fortune in France’s wood industry. Houellebecq’s, from the French working class, was a ski instructor and alpine guide whose clients included former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. “Our fathers were clearly very unalike,” Lévy says, but that’s not true. Both of the older men cultivated a fierce sense of independence bordering on eccentricity. The elder Lévy was “bourgeois but despised the bourgeoisie … a captain of industry who disdained captains of industry.” He had no friends and by the end of his life was spending his days playing chess with a computer. Houellebecq père refused to associate with the other ski instructors or with his clients. “Here was a man who sacrificed everything in life, absolutely everything, to a single imperative: not being dependent on anyone.” In both cases, obviously, the father passed on to his son that same stubborn, unyielding sense of individuality—an individuality that in its less appealing moments translates into narcissism—together with an emotionally painful yet intellectually productive loneliness.

But such disclosures are mere prelude. The fireworks—the core of the book—arrive with the ninth letter and Houellebecq’s almost casual remark (assuming anything he says can be taken as casual) about modern Russia. He has recently been to Moscow, where the music of the early Beatles—“Love Me Do,” “Ticket to Ride”—has been discovered and enthusiastically adopted. Life may be hard for the Russians, Houellebecq says, “but they live, they are filled with a desire to live that we have lost. And I wished I were young and Russian.” This comment is a red flag waved in the face of the human-rights campaigner Lévy, who, in high dudgeon, reminds Houellebecq that Putin’s Russia is brutally repressing the Chechens. It’s a country that assassinates its dissident journalists, revives an anti-Semitism that is never far beneath the surface and “has the nerve to explain to the world that it has nothing to do with democracy and human rights.” This Russia, he says, “fills me with horror.”

Houellebecq, however, does not yield: “Russians certainly do not feel that they are living in a democracy; I think for the most part they don’t give a damn and who am I to disagree with them.” And so positions are staked out, swords drawn. “I have always felt the deepest mistrust for those who take up arms in the name of whatever cause,” Houellebecq writes. Who cannot sympathize with Lévy’s passion for democracy, yet, after our Iraq experience, who can deny that Houellebecq has a point, or fail to understand his disdain for moral crusades?

Houellebecq proceeds to tell a story about his father during World War II and the German occupation. The elder Houellebecq neither collaborated nor resisted. Like the vast majority of his countrymen, he was just trying to get on with his life. When two Resistance fighters killed a German officer in the Paris Metro, he said of the act that it was “not very interesting.” This unwillingness to take a stand, this unheroic, apolitical quietism, was in some sense bequeathed to the son, who says: “I have infinitely sympathized with, felt and finally embraced the maxim of Goethe: ‘Better an injustice than disorder.’ ”

Now Lévy’s hair is on fire. Houellebecq has challenged his very raison d’etre, struck not at his heart but his soul. If not to battle injustice, what is the point of living? Houellebecq’s anecdote about his father is “unacceptable” because it suggests a moral equivalence between the French resisters and the German occupiers. That’s bad enough, but it’s the line from Goethe that really sets him off. What about Dreyfus? What about the Tibetans? Goethe’s remark excuses every kind of complacency, justifies every injustice. “I hate that line. … It’s a line that kills, it’s the most odious line of all time.”

Houellebecq refuses to be a battler for justice in Lévy’s mold. He wants only to be left alone to selfishly pursue his modest vices. Men are not “morally admirable” creatures, he tells Lévy; they are all too ready to form a mob, to turn themselves into savages for the sake of some cause or movement. Later, Houellebecq will compare mankind to bacteria, an image Lévy rejects as misanthropic and “repugnant,” but Houellebecq has already twisted the knife with a paradox that must have caused Lévy immense pain: “I find it extremely unpleasant that choosing to take the standpoint of selfishness and cowardice may, in the eyes of my contemporaries, make me more likeable than you who advocate heroism; but I know my peers and that’s precisely what will happen.”

This argument never comes to a resolution. It dribbles out, to be picked up a few letters later, dropped again, then resurrected in a different form. Public Enemies isn’t a rigorous or coherent book. Lévy and Houellebecq contradict themselves, digress, make logical and illogical leaps. A letter that concludes with a discussion of hatred is followed by one about Cocteau’s eczema. There are long passages, like Levy’s description of an encounter with Louis Aragon, that will be of limited interest to most American readers. And at times each man seems intent on proving that he is the more self-pitying. “Few other writers are abused as much as I am,” Lévy says early in the correspondence. “If anyone in France right now has the right to be paranoid, it’s me,” Houellebecq writes in one of his last letters. Lévy is not wrong when he observes that paranoia “casts its shadow … over this correspondence.”

Like any conversation, this one has unstructured ebbs and flows. It’s like a late-night undergraduate bull session, except that in this case the participants know what they are talking about. When they mutually rhapsodize about the occupation of writing, you believe both of them, even though the committed intellectual Lévy and the quasi-aesthete Houellebecq have very different allegiances and aims.

And like a bull session, the book touches on all the big subjects: politics, culture, philosophy, religion—especially religion. It’s surprising to learn just how much his Judaism means to Lévy, a secular Jew who never entered a synagogue before he was 25. He calls himself a “positive” Jew who has taken a “journey back,” but for him Judaism is neither a body of doctrine nor a set of rituals, not even a source of identity. Instead, it’s “a way of living,” a plunge into the world of human affairs; “its real concern is man’s relationship not with God but with his fellow man,” he says.

For his part, Houellebecq says he doesn’t believe in God (“though I implicitly recognize a certain validity in the Jewish destiny”). Nonetheless, if we can accept “God is dead” as a religious statement, then Houellebecq is religious, perhaps even more so than Lévy. For Lévy can lose himself in his humanitarian ideals, the work he does on behalf of others (heaven is other people?), whereas Houellebecq, trapped in the carapace of his atomized being, confronts the void on his own. As a dedicated reader of Pascal, he takes the idea of God very seriously: “A world with no God, with no spirituality, with nothing, is enough to make anyone freak out completely,” and in his work, in his life, he’s constantly reaching for the Absolute —even though there’s no Absolute for him to reach for. No wonder he’s depressed.

Near the end of the book, Houellebecq tells Lévy, “our letters have become one of my few joys.” Lévy says something similar. So, what do these two men who have “nothing in common” finally have in common—besides celebrity, paranoia, and a legacy of independence inherited from their fathers? Lévy lists a few items, including “a joyous love of reading” and “pessimism without rancor.” But he also mentions “the animosity they inspire,” and that seems to be the key. The book is appropriately titled Public Enemies. Each man stands outside of society, prodding, poking, hounding his countrymen to lift themselves out of the unreflective routines of their daily lives. What Lévy asks of his fellow men is easy to understand, even if it’s not easy to attain: a commitment to justice, at all times, in all places. Houellebecq demands something that is less easily defined: an awareness of existence that is authentic and honest even if it is ugly. “I hold a mirror up to the world,” he says, “but the world does not find its reflection beautiful.”

One thing they discover in the course of their correspondence is that although they may be very different in their ideas and their approaches to life, they have the same enemies. Of course they do. Not many people want to take on the burdens Lévy and Houellebecq demand of them. Insisting that people live up to their human responsibilities, pointing out the limitations of the world as it exists, is a job that used to be reserved for priests and rabbis, but now it’s performed by self-appointed prophets and self-hating clowns. There is something of the prophet in both Lévy and Houellebecq—and also something of the clown.

Barry Gewen is an editor at The New York Times Book Review.

Today, France has the third-largest Jewish population in the world, about 600,000, with approximately half that number living in Paris. Despite successive waves of anti-Semitic violence, expulsion, and disfavor throughout history, France has generally been a pays d’accueil, a welcoming country for Jews. While the population has waxed and waned, there has been a continuous presence of Jewish communities in much of what is now France since the 1st century, and possibly before.

Paris has seen an enormous ebb and flow of Jews since the first Jewish community was established in the 6th century just south of what is now the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The Parisian Jewish population surged in the late 19th century, with more than 100,000 Jews coming to France after fleeing pogroms and poverty in Russia, Poland, and Romania. And, in 1870, the Jewish population of Algeria received French citizenship, making it easy for Jews to immigrate. In July 1942, some 13,000 Jews living in Paris were arrested in a mass roundup by the French police and killed at Auschwitz. The Jewish population of France didn’t see growth again until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Jews of North Africa immigrated in droves to France after countries like Tunisia and Algeria declared independence. This doubled France’s Jewish population almost overnight.

Today, the second generation of North African Jews has given a positive boost to Jewish French life, creating and sometimes resurrecting communities in Paris and other cities from which so many left during World War II. Jews have also moved to new areas of Paris and its suburbs and redefined certain traditional Jewish neighborhoods like the Grands Boulevards, the 9th Arrondissement, and Rue des Rosiers in the Marais. Lubavitchers and other Hasidic sects have also come to France, directing Orthodox schools, kosher restaurants, and grocery stores.

Contemporary Parisian life is very different from the 1960s, when I spent a year there as a student. That was a time when Jews who had been in France for generations were still in the majority, as were their traditions and their palates. In more recent years, as the children of these French Jews intermarried and became more adventurous about trying different recipes, Paris has seen a new and exciting openness in its Jewish population.

Many years ago I discovered Le Monde des Épices (the world of spices), a tiny shop on the rue François-Miron near the Marais, the area where Jews were ordered to live in the 13th century after being expelled from the city limits. As the years pass, this food emporium, first on my list of places to visit, seems to get better and better. Inside, signs written on cracked pieces of pottery label burlap sacks filled with bulgur for taboulleh and barrels overflowing with homemade preserved lemons from Morocco. Olives are marinated with a variety of pungent flavors: orange peel, fresh garlic, kumquats, cranberries, parsley, Indian Tellicherry peppers, and star anise from Asia.

In the postwar years, the shop, originally opened in 1945 by Samuel Izrael, a Polish immigrant, catered to a largely Jewish clientele, mostly Eastern European refugees who came for the homemade pickles. By the time I first discovered the store in 1964, the shop was frequented by recent immigrants from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Spices like cumin and coriander were completely new to me then. Today, most people who walk in don’t have a clue that it is a Jewish store; it caters to all lovers of exotic cuisine. The spices themselves illustrate a colorful history of food in France, a history that stretches back for centuries.

The heart of Jewish Paris is a central square near the Metro St. Paul, often referred to in Yiddish as the pletzel. As holidays approach, Parisian Jews flock here to buy skullcaps, prayer books, challahs, and cakes.

Like the Lower East Side of New York City, the Marais is now filled with chic fashion boutiques and bars, transforming it from a quaint shtetl into a buzzing neighborhood. Many of the old bookshops and restaurants have closed, but the shops that are left in this ancient quarter with its narrow streets still overflow with delicacies from Eastern Europe, France, Israel, and North Africa. Today you’ll find homemade farfel (tiny bits of pasta) and great falafel as well as fijuelas and other Sephardic delicacies.

In the past the pletzel has also served as a meeting place for Jews in less auspicious circumstances. Escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe in 1881, Jews flocked here in large numbers, more than half of them from Poland. During World War II’s police rafles (round-ups) of Jews, many called out to each other as they were separated to meet in the pletzel if they survived.

Whenever I visit the Marais, I stop in at Florence Finkelsztajn’s Traiteur Delicatessen. The quarter has two Finkelsztajn delicatessens, one trimmed in yellow (Florence’s ex husband’s) and one in blue (Florence’s). According to Gilles Pudlowski, a gastronomic critic of Polish Jewish origin who writes the popular Pudlo restaurant guides, Florence’s store is the best place to satisfy a nostalgic craving for Eastern European cooking. In addition to Central European Yiddish specialties like herring, chopped liver, and pastrami, Florence also sells pletzel—a round, flat onion bread; like a bialy, only larger— baked in the back of the shop. Eat the pletzel hot from the oven or as a big pletzlach sandwich stuffed with fillings as varied as the different ethnicities of Jews living in Paris today: Alsatian pickelfleish (corned beef), Romanian pastrami, Russian eggplant caviar, North African roasted peppers, and French tomato and lettuce.

What would Paris be without outdoor markets? You can see so many all over the city. But for me, “little Tunis,” the multicultural and bustling Belleville market, populated with French farmers and merchants from North Africa, is a must. In the restaurants and stores bordering the market, you feel as if you are actually in North Africa as Tunisians and others congregate at kosher and halal restaurants, bars, and bakeries. You also feel the influence of the Italian tenure in Tunisia: Italian bread, beignets shaped like the Italian manicotti, and canned tuna in olive oil.

In 1966 when Alexandre Zbirou came to France from Tunisia to study marketing, few good kosher restaurants existed in Paris. In 1976, he opened a French restaurant called Au Rendez Vous, La Maison du Couscous in the 8th Arrondissement near the Champs Élysées. Four years later, he turned it into a kosher Tunisian restaurant, the only one of its kind in the quarter. Today, there are more than 38 kosher restaurants in the 8th Arrondissement alone. “I saw Jews arriving in the quarter,” he told me over lunch at his restaurant. “They came and I was waiting for them. It was home cooking for Tunisians and Ashkenazim. After all, there are lots of mixed marriages here in France.”

Despite the kosher menu, his restaurant does not close on Friday night or Saturday. “I feel that we are rendering a service to kosher clientele, to give them a kosher meal for the Sabbath,” he said. Other restaurants, under the supervision of the Parisian Rabbinical Authority called the Beth Din, are either closed for the Sabbath or are open only to customers who pay in advance.

Sitting down at Zbirou’s restaurant, we were first served an array of kemia, similar to the ubiquitous mezze at Arab restaurants. We began with flaky brik, filled with potatoes, parsley, and hard-boiled eggs. At least a dozen salads followed, served on tiny plates, all brimming with bold colors and flavors. Some of my favorites were raw artichoke slivers with harissa, oil, and onions and turnips with bitter orange.

Recently, a second generation of North African Jews has opened a number of stylish kosher restaurants in Paris. One is the super chic l’Osmose, which calls itself a fusion and health-food restaurant. The evening that I dined there, the space was packed with well-dressed young French couples who could clearly afford the steep prices. The food, prepared by the Tunisian-born Jewish chef Yoni Saada and his family, is delicious and sophisticated. Our meal began with a long narrow plate filled with cumin-roasted almonds, fava beans, and tiny olives, and a tasty carrot-and-mango soup served in a champagne glass. The first course was a tomato cappuccino and a salmon tartare with avocado. The second was a sizable entrecôte steak with tiny roasted potatoes and a confit of onions. And for dessert: an extravagant plate of the now-classic molten chocolate cake topped with little marshmallow lollipops. The restaurant’s menu could have fit in anywhere, but only in Paris could it be both chic and kosher. Yoni confessed to me his great ambition: to be the first kosher Michelin-star rated chef in France.

What was most fun for me in Paris was to peek into the kitchens of home cooks. On a fall Saturday afternoon, I was invited for lunch at the home of my cousin David Moos, an investment banker, and his wife Carène, a divorce lawyer. As I walked to their apartment building on the outskirts of Paris in Boulogne, I passed by the Edmond de Rothschild Park and the Albert Kahn Museum and Gardens, both reminding me of the Jewish presence in this lovely suburb. David, Carène, and their three adorable children, Hanna, Simon, and Natan, live in a top-floor duplex strewn with the happy clutter of children’s playthings.

Carène comes from very humble Jewish origins in Algeria, where her grandmother was a cleaning lady for rich French colonists, but her food is not humble at all. David, whose family is of southern German and French Jewish background, loves her North African dishes. At this Sabbath lunch, Carène prepared many salads for the first course: fennel, avocado with lemon and cilantro, sautéed eggplant, eggplant caviar, sautéed mushrooms, and tchoukchouha (grilled peppers and tomatoes slowly cooked to a jam-like consistency).

The entrée was adafina, a Moroccan Sabbath dish, cooked overnight. Adafina varies according to the cook. Algerians who live near Tunisia, for example, might add white beans while some Tunisians add spinach. For dessert we had strawberries and raspberries topped with meringue. Afterward we sipped our coffee on the rooftop, where we could hear the sounds of children playing outside and enjoy a lovely view of the Eiffel Tower. It was a beautiful and relaxing Shabbat lunch in Paris.

CARENE MOOS’ DAF MAROCAINE (SABBATH MEAT STEW WITH CHICKPEAS AND RICE)

1 cup dry chickpeas
3 cups wheat berries
1 cup vegetable oil
2 onions, roughly chopped
1/3 cup raisins (In Alsace and the south of France, prunes or dates are often substituted for the raisins.)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons sea salt plus more to taste
3/4 teaspoon turmeric
½ teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon hot red pepper, such as cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon crushed pepper flakes
3 pounds chuck roast or brisket
12 small red bliss, Yukon gold, or new potatoes
½ teaspoon cumin
2 cups long grain rice
1 garlic clove, peeled, plus 1 whole head of garlic
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and halved
4 large eggs in the shell
½ cup honey

1. Two days before serving, fill 2 bowls with warm water. Pour the chickpeas into one bowl and the wheat berries into another. The next morning drain both and set aside separately.

2. Heat 4 tablespoons of the oil in a large ovenproof casserole. Add the chickpeas, onions, raisins, and sugar, sautéing for about 5 minutes.

3. Make a rub of ¼ teaspoon each of the salt, turmeric, paprika, hot pepper, and pepper flakes and rub on the meat. Put the meat in the casserole and scatter the potatoes around, then fill the pot with enough water to cover and bring to a boil.

4. In a separate bowl, mix the wheat berries with another 2 tablespoons of the oil, 1 teaspoon salt, and the cumin. Then place the berries in a cheese-cloth and loosely tie it up, keeping in mind that the wheat berries will expand as they cook.

5. In another bowl, mix the rice with the remaining 2 tablespoons oil, another teaspoon salt, the garlic clove, and the remaining turmeric, paprika, hot pepper, and pepper flakes. Tie the rice up in another piece of cheesecloth as you did for the wheat berries, again leaving room to expand.

6. Place the sacks in the casserole and add the head of garlic, the sweet potatoes, and the eggs. Bring the stew to a boil and simmer, covered, for an hour and 45 minutes.

7. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees and remove the cover, drizzle honey over all, and cook in the oven for at least 5 hours or until the vegetables are reddish brown. (You can also cook the adafina in a 200-degree oven overnight.)

8. To serve, remove the bundles of rice and wheat berries. Spoon the meat and vegetables onto a platter with a slotted spoon, and pile the grains and eggs in their shells around them.

Yield: 8 to 10 servings

FLORENCE’S PLETZLACH

1 scant tablespoon active dry yeast
4 tablespoons sugar
4 to 5 cups all-purpose flour
2 large eggs
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons salt
3 cups diced onions
¼ cup poppy seeds

1. Pour 1 cup lukewarm water into a large bowl. Stir in the yeast and the sugar. Add 4 cups of flour, the eggs, ¼ cup of the oil, and the salt. Mix well and knead for about 10 minutes or until smooth, adding more flour if necessary. Or use a food processor or a standing mixer with a dough hook.

2. Transfer the dough to a greased bowl and let rise, covered, for 1 hour. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and grease 2 cookie sheets.

3. Divide the dough into 12 balls, and roll or flatten them out into rounds about 6 inches in diameter. Put the rounds on the cookie sheets, and make thumbprints in the centers.

4. Brush the dough with cold water, and sprinkle about 1/4 cup of onion in each indentation. Brush the onions with the remaining vegetable oil, and sprinkle the poppy seeds on top. Let sit for 15 minutes, uncovered.

5. Bake for 20 minutes. Then, if you like, slip the pletzel under the broiler for a minute to brown the onions. Serve lukewarm as is or in a big pletzel sandwich.

Yield: 12 pletzlach

L’OSMOSE’S MOLTON CHOCOLATE CAKE

Cocoa powder, for dusting
2 sticks unsalted butter or pareve margarine, plus more for greasing
10 ounces bittersweet chocolate
6 large eggs
1 1/3 cups sugar
½ cup all-purpose flour
Pinch of salt
Confectioners’ sugar for garnish
Strawberries or raspberries for garnish

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees and grease a 9-inch round cake pan or 18 muffin tins with butter or margarine and lightly dust them with cocoa powder. Tap out the excess cocoa.

2. Melt together the butter and the chocolate in a double boiler. Remove from the heat and let cool for about 10 minutes.

3. Beat together the eggs and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer set on medium-high speed until pale yellow. Lower the speed, and pour in the chocolate. Add the flour and salt, mixing gently, until just combined. Do not over-beat.

4. Pour the batter into the cake pan or divide evenly among the muffin tins, filling them about half full. (At this point, you can cover and refrigerate the batter for several hours or overnight; just make sure to leave time to bring them to room temperature before baking.)

5. Bake for about 10 minutes for the muffins or about 20 for the cake. The center should still be soft, but the sides should be dry and set. Let cool for a few minutes before running a knife around each tin and inverting the cakes onto a cookie sheet. Quickly turn each cake back over and place on a large platter or individual serving plates. Serve sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar and garnish with fresh berries.

Yield: One 9-inch cake or 18 individual cakes

This column and its recipes are excerpted in part from Joan Nathan’s new book, Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, which has just been released.

• West Bank settlers yesterday protested the demolition of a single home. [NYT]

• Russia, in many ways one of Iran’s prime patrons, has seen its relations with the Islamic Republic deteriorate significantly since it voted for sanctions at the U.N. Security Council. [NYT]

• Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Reform movement, expresses bewilderment at why some in Israel, led by David Rotem, would push their conversion bill at a time like this. [JTA]

• Roger Cohen wonders why we haven’t heard more about the lives and deaths of the nine flotilla activists, including the one American, and wonders whether, say, a Jewish kid caught in some crossfire would receive the same non-attention. [NYT]

• Soon after the United States raised the Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic status from “bureau” to “delegation,” France went a step farther, raising it from “delegation” to “mission,” which includes an ambassador. [NYT]

The Jewish Agency, eager to attract as many Jewish immigrants to Israel as possible, recently began organizing a monthly, all-expense-paid “Aliyah Tapis Rouge,” or “Aliyah on a Red Carpet”—group immigrations from France to Israel. As a non-practicing American Jew living temporarily in France from a family with no particular Zionist passion, I had never really considered going to Israel, and I wondered what the big deal was. Why would anyone want to leave a peaceful welfare state for a country in constant conflict? I never truly came to understand why these French Jews were abandoning everything they had ever known for a place they’d only loved on vacation, but a part of the agency pitch worked its way into that portion of my heart that yearns always to belong (and hates winter). But mostly it was February and it was cold, and I just wanted to get the hell out of Paris, where I had been staying in the apartment of an old friend who lives in Vincennes, a short walk from the last stop on the métro’s No. 1 line, traversing east-west across the city. Just a little farther out, the city is ringed by the sprawling Parisian banlieues—the depressingly indistinct postwar apartment structures, built in the 1950s and 1960s at the collapse of the French colonial empire, that served to accommodate the vast influx of working-class immigrants from the former colonies.

Last year the Jewish Agency counted 1,909 French olim, or people making aliyah, making up slightly more than 10 percent of the total number of immigrants for the year. The agency expects a similar number in 2010. French Jews have a history of making aliyah in times of conflict, whether out of solidarity with Israel or fear of the repercussions in France. Following the Six-Day War of 1967, the number of French olim spiked to 5,000, gradually leveling off to a relatively steady 1,000 a year before climbing back to 2,000 during the real-estate boom of the mid-1990s. Tensions between Jews and Muslims in France mounted to what many considered intolerable levels after the start of the Second Intifada in 2000. Having lived for centuries in the same French-colonized countries of North Africa, these Jews and Arabs became enemies in the poor suburbs of Paris, their identities muddled by a mix of lingering colonial resentments and solidarities with an Arab-Jewish conflict several countries away. The number of French Jews who emigrated to Israel peaked at 3,000 in 2005.

At the airport in Paris, I saw that the Jewish Agency had literalized the VIP: As I waited among a disorganized cluster of homebound Israelis, we looked on in envy at the 60 French olim who walked by on an actual red carpet. On the plane I awoke at 5:00 a.m. to the sound of a woman speaking above me as she waited to use the bathroom. Noticing the thick winter scarf draped across my eyes, she leaned over to the woman behind me, her voice tinged with alarm, and said (in French): “That’s not a burqa, is it?”

***

For many French Jews, the banlieues have come to signify hostility and danger. Although they don’t always say it, the Jews associate the suburbs with Muslims, and they associate Muslims with anti-Semitism. While France does not gather ethnicity statistics, official estimates indicate that the country is home to Europe’s largest population of both Jews and Muslims, at approximately 600,000 and 6 million, respectively. In places like Sarcelles and Créteil, where large populations of Jews and Muslims both live, Jews have been shaken by recent incidents like the highly publicized kidnapping and murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi in 2006. Halimi, who was Jewish and worked as a cell-phone salesman in Paris, was lured to Bagneux, a suburb south of Paris, by a group of young African immigrants calling themselves the Barbarians. Initially demanding a ransom of 450,000 euros (about $540,000), the Barbarians held Halimi for three weeks, brutally torturing him. He was found naked and handcuffed in the woods near Bagneux, beaten and burned, and he died on his way to the hospital.

“We know very well it was just because he was Jewish,” Précylia Azau tells me over coffee one Sunday morning at the McCafé cart on the third floor of the Créteil Soleil Regional Commercial Center. Précylia has just moved back to France from Israel. She is thin and petite, her dark features and brown eyes reflecting her Sephardic heritage. She has a large smile that shows a wide gap between her two front teeth, and when she speaks French it is with an accent I assume to be Israeli. “When I find myself all alone in the street I get scared,” she says. “I feel safer in Israel than in France in spite of the bombs.”

Précylia epitomizes the unique ties linking French Jews to Israel. Twelve years ago, Précylia’s parents—both born and raised in France to Algerian parents—decided to move to Israel. Now 24, she has come back to live in her grandmother’s Créteil apartment as she recovers from a breakup with her boyfriend of seven years. Although she misses everything about Israel and says her visit is only temporary, she has begun working at a Jewish preschool and mentions the possibility of enrolling in college here. Through her smile I see a deep melancholy resting in the droop of her dark eyes.

Précylia respects the strict dress code of the Chabad Lubavitch movement she joined in Israel but still manages to look fashionable in a thin wool v-neck sweater and knee-length denim skirt. If I saw her on the street, I wouldn’t have any idea she was Jewish. Even so, she is certain people recognize her as an Israeli, and she says she’s more afraid taking the subway in Paris than she was volunteering as a nurse in Gaza during the war in 2009.

Although her precautions strike me as extreme, at first Précylia’s comments about French society reveal the permeating sense of tension I have always felt but can never quite put my finger on. “People here are cold,” she says. “They’re not lively. They’re dreary.” I ask her if she thinks people in France are anti-Semitic. “Arabs are, that’s for sure,” she says, and I stop nodding along. “I hate Arabs, because I’ve lost people I know because of them.” As she says this, I notice for the first time that she is still very young, even though we are nearly the same age.

When we leave the mall around noon, Précylia and I walk to her grandmother’s tiny kosher bakery a half-mile away. Précylia walks behind the counter and hands me a paper bag with two chocolate croissants. Heading back toward the metro I pass through the mall parking garage, which is garish and ugly, with beams and archways painted in bright pastel purples and oranges. Looking at Créteil spread out before me, I can’t discern any particular order to the streets below. The buildings look plopped down at random. Some have podlike protruding balconies fashioned in that jaunty 1960s mod way that surely must have seemed then to be a harbinger of some utopic future. If I lived here I would spend my entire life dreaming of somewhere else.

NEXT: Are French Jews a population in need of saving? [or view as a single page.]

• Netanyahu and Egyptian President Mubarak talk about the talks. Oh, and everyone is lowering expectations. [NYT]

• Tacit U.S. acceptance of Israeli nuclear weapons despite the Mideast’s ostensibly being a nuke-free zone has made it more difficult to fight Iranian and also Egyptian proliferation. [WP]

• Three assailants vandalized a synagogue in Nîmes, France, and hurled tear gas at a senior Jewish man, on Sunday. This was two days after a Jewish man was stabbed in front of a synagogue in downtown Strasbourg. [NYT]

• In a column critical of Obama, Jackson Diehl notes, regarding Israel (and Afghanistan), “Quiet diplomacy by the administration’s special envoys … has achieved what presidential lectures did not.” [WP]

• Elie Wiesel will have lunch at the White House today. And you thought the “charm offensive” was just a series of coincidences! [JTA]

• Lawyers for Haaretz reporter Uri Blau will hand over the confidential documents allegedly given him by accused traitor Anat Kamm. [Haaretz]

• The IDF’s new device of choice for breaking up West Bank protests is a truck, nicknamed “The Skunk,” that shoots out horribly bad-smelling liquid. [LAT]

• Reports have it that the meeting in Paris two weeks ago between Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Shimon Peres was quite tense, with Sarkozy repeatedly criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu. [Haaretz]

• Google made its first-ever purchase of an Israeli company, buying tech start-up Labpixies, which is involved in the search-engine business, for $25 million. [JPost]

• Prominent Jewish Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) told a politically conservative, Jewish-themed TV show that he told President Obama that the administration’s hard line on Israel “has to stop.” [Ynet]

• The Israeli government warned that it would oppose a peace plan that the United States writes and then imposes on the parties. A solution to the conflict, it said, must be “homegrown.” [WSJ]

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy cautioned that a failure of the international community to act on Iran would result in a “disastrous” Israeli strike. [Ynet]

• Israeli troops shot and killed an Islamic Jihad militant who was trying to plant explosives on the Gaza border. [NYT]

• Yom HaShoah celebrations in New York City over the weekend emphasized the passing of stories and memories on to the youngest generation. [NYT]

• Late Polish President Lech Kaczynski continues to be remembered as an unprecedented friend to the Jews and Israel—the first Polish leader to attend a Polish synagogue, for example. Prime Minister Donald Tusk (who was not on the plane) is also considered friendly to Israel. [JTA]

• U.S. officials continued to criticize Israeli building in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized again for the construction announcement’s timing while maintaining support for the settlements. My 10 am post will have much more. [LAT]

• While the main victors in France’s regional elections were leftist parties, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ultra-right National Front won a higher-than-expected 12 percent. Among other provocations, Le Pen has minimized the Holocaust. [JPost]

• The IDF chief-of-staff is in Turkey on a fence-mending visit. [Haaretz]

• Even as U.S. officials assert no tolerance for Iranian nuclear weapons, America has already, quietly, initiated containment policies. [NYT]

• The 2010 NCAA basketball tournament bracket was announced. Maccabi USA Head Coach Bruce Pearl’s Tennessee Volunteers drew a six seed and will play San Diego State Thursday evening. [ESPN]

• The French and Spanish foreign ministers are the most prominent supporters of an initiative that would see the European Union recognize a Palestinian state within 18 months. Israel is opposed. [Haaretz]

• One report states that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally approved Mossad’s killing of Hamas weapons man Mahmoud Mabhouh. (Much more on the Dubai murder mystery at 10am.) [Times of London]

• Despite an anti-blockade backlash throughout the Arab world, Egypt is moving ahead with plans to block off smuggling tunnels into Gaza. [WSJ]

• Alexander Haig, a secretary of state in the Reagan administration, died at 85, and was remembered as a friend and fond admirer of Israel. [JPost, Haaretz]

• In case you didn’t see it yesterday, you really must read about Yitta Schwartz, of Kiryas Joel, New York, who died in January at 93. A Holocaust survivor, Satmar Hasid, and mother of 16, she is estimated to have—from a 75-year-old daughter to a week-old great-great-grandson—over 2,000 living descendants. [NYT]

The Sarko-Slayer? [The Economist]

“OK, we’re getting out at the next stop, time to stand up,” the father says. He is wearing a cap, too. The family looks like a sports team. That’s when I notice the tzitzit sticking out from the youngest kid’s coat. They’re not wearing caps because of winter, or because of some peculiar stylistic taste, I realize. They’re wearing caps to cover up their kippot. That’s what it takes for a lot of Jews in Paris to ensure they have a peaceful subway ride.

In a single year, the number of anti-Semitic incidents has doubled in France, jumping from 399 in the first nine months of 2008 to 704 over the same period of 2009. According to the French home office, 123 of these incidents were acts of physical violence. “Although those high numbers are worrying, they have to be considered cautiously, bearing in mind that vigilance against anti-Semitism in France is really effective and a big concern for the whole society”, explains Guillaume Ayné, head of SOS Racisme, an anti-discrimination group. But specific events tend to leave a much deeper impression than either numbers or words

Ilan and Rudy

In January 2006, Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Sephardic Jew, was kidnapped by the self-proclaimed “Barbarians,” a goup of 25 people of different ages and origins, allegedly led by Youssouf Fofana, a 26-year-old French citizen of Ivory Coast extraction. The Barbarians asked for a ransom of 450,000 euros ransom, then about $550,000. “You’re Jews, you have money,” was how the kidnappers explained their actions. Twenty-four days later, Halimi was found in agony near a railroad, and he died on the way to a hospital. His body was covered with second-degree burns; he had scars and stab wounds on several parts of his body. During their trial, his perpetrators admitted taping his head, leaving only a tiny hole to feed him with a straw, beating him with sticks, burning cigarettes on his head, scratching his skin, stabbing him in the neck with a box-cutter, and inflicting other tortures. Fofana was sentenced to life in prison. Halimi’s ordeal shocked the whole country.

“This story traumatized me,” says Rachel Lebhar, a real-estate agent with rectangular glasses and black slick hair—a wig. “I’ve been more wary of non Jewish people since then.” I met Lebhar on Rue Petit, outside of Beith Hanna, a Lubavitch school and the heart of the Jewish community of Paris’s 19th arrondissement. Situated in the northeastern part of the city, the neighborhood counts more than a dozen synagogues, the most important concentration of Jewish places of worship in Paris.

The 19th arrondissement is far from resembling the picture-postcard views that tourists commonly associate with Paris. The buildings here are more functional than picturesque. The core of the Jewish community is concentrated around a few streets of religious bookshops and kosher butchers, supermarkets, and restaurants.

Other parts of the neighborhood are more diverse. On Saturdays, young Jews often spend Shabbat afternoon in Les Buttes Chaumont, a park they share with African and Arab boys. The 19th arrondissement is one of the most diverse areas of Paris, but there are no official numbers that break down the population of the district by ethnicity or religion, as such statistics are forbidden in France. The mix of different ethnic and religious groups in the district is unstable and triggers periodical clashes.

Halimi’s case was hardly representative of anti-Semitic violence in the 19th arrondissement, but it terrified many Jewish residents, and frequent anti-Semitic aggressions here regularly rekindle the trauma. The latest such incident happened in June 2008, when a kippah-wearing 17-year-old orthodox Jew named Rudy Haddad, was beaten by young Africans and Maghrebis on a Shabbat afternoon and then left unconscious on the street. Haddad was then taken to the hospital, where he spent three days in a coma.

“The atmosphere was really tense in the area in the seven to eight months following the attack on little Rudy,” says Rachel Touitou, a young mother of two. She lives a few blocks away from Rue Petit, where she’s waiting for Shirel, 11, and Alône, 6, to finish their school day at Beith Hanna. She recalls the aftermath of the attack on Haddad, a dart of fear in her bright blue eyes: “People coming to pick up their children were asked to hurry in order to avoid important gatherings in front of the school. I would take off my son’s kippah before getting in the subway, just in case. I never discussed it with other mothers, but I soon realized that many of them were doing the same.” She pauses, hesitating for a minute, and admits that she’s thinking about moving to Israel soon. “It has become really difficult to live here,” she says.

An average of 1,400 French citizens leave the country for Israel each year, according to the Jewish Agency. While the number of French Jews making aliyah had diminished in the last few years, it is gathering steam again with the recent rise of anti-Semitic violence. “We registered a peak during the second Intifada, but as the situation got better in Israel and therefore in France, less people felt the need to leave,” says Oren Toledano, head of the Jewish Agency’s aliyah department. “However, it would be an exaggeration to directly link aliyah with the rise of anti-Semitism. It may be an accelerating factor, but departures are first and foremost motivated by culture, religion and ideology.”

Two days later, Rachel welcomes me at her home, a modest two-bedroom apartment in a big complex on one of the busiest avenues of the arrondissement. This time, her husband, Stéphane, is there. He insists on telling me about their life in Paris and the reasons why they are planning a move to Israel. We sit around a wooden dining table standing in the middle of a minimally furnished living room, and he offers me kosher tahini-flavored chips. “It comes from Israel,” he says. “Try it!”

Stéphane, 42, grew up in Israel and then in France. His father comes from Libya. He moved to the 19th arrondissement 10 years ago. “I get insulted once to twice a month by young people when I’m walking,” he says. “‘You dirty Jew,’ that’s what they whisper when I pass by them.” He refuses to react. “I try to keep a low profile because I have kids, and because it could lead to the whole neighborhood erupting into violence. I’m staying quiet, but I’m really fed up. Jews don’t feel good anymore here. Jerusalem or New York are more welcoming cities.” Because he doesn’t speak English, he says, he opted for Jerusalem. The family is hoping to move in July.

I meet with the Touitou family one last time on a Friday night; they’d invited me over for Shabbat. I knock on the door, but soon realize that isn’t necessary: the television is on. Stéphane and Alône are wearing their kippot—a black velvet one with delicately embroidered yellow ducks paddling in a light blue pond for the 6-year-old. The family gathers around the table and stand in silence while Stéphane pours grape juice in a glass and recites kiddush. From time to time, Rachel takes a quick look at what is happening on TV, and Alône stares at me with a wide smile, a witty spark in the eyes. The adults go wash their hands and come back to pray again and share the salted bread that Stéphane ripped apart and threw to each of us.

Over dinner, I ask Stéphane about his childhood, and he tells me that he grew up in Israel but left the country to avoid the draft. What about Alône, I ask—would Stéphane want him to join the Israeli Defense Forces? “Of course,” he says. “If I had had a choice, I wouldn’t have left back then. I want him to be able to defend his country.” Later in the evening, however, while talking about IDF, Stéphane adds: “I wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone a man. Life is sacred.” Before I leave, the whole family gathers around the computer to show me on Google Earth the neighborhood they are going to live in once they move. “Look at all the palm trees,” Stéphane says. “It’s even better than the Côte d’Azur.”

Even though Stéphane’s take on the situation is pretty radical—only 6 percent of the estimated 500,000 Jews in France (70 percent of whom are Sephardic) was planning to leave for Israel in 2002, according to a survey by the Fonds Social Juif Unifié, or the Jewish United Social Funds, France’s equivalent of the U.S. Jewish Federations, he appears surprisingly moderate when asked about the people responsible for the insults he suffers on a regular basis. “They’re just young Arabs and Africans who mix up everything: Jews and Israelis, a political conflict and a religious war,” he tells me. Indeed, Stéphane is proud of his numerous North African Muslim friends, and never misses a chance to tell how his grandfather was saved by Muslims in Algeria. “When the French army came to take him and his family, they hid him in their house,” Stéphane says. “I wouldn’t be here today without them; I always bear this in mind.”

Jews, Money, and Israel

The violence that Jews are facing today in Paris has more than one cause. Sammy Ghozlan, a stout former police superintendent in his 60s, monitors aggressions for the Bureau National de Vigilance Contre l’Antisémitisme, or Anti-Semitism Watch National Office, which he runs. I meet him at a coffee house in the 19th arrondissement one afternoon. The weather is exceptionally cold, and it’s freezing even inside. Ghozlan keeps his black overcoat on, and immediately apologizes for not having shaved. “I’m grieving for my mother,” he explains. His untrimmed salt-and-pepper beard meets with his abundant hair.

“Jewish boys disturb the young people,” Ghozlan tells me. “Their boldness—speaking loudly and wearing tawdry brands, triggers jealousy.” This was the main motive of Halimi’s torturers. But Ghozlan is more concerned by what he sees as the links between the Middle East conflict and French anti-Semitic violence. “People think attacking a Jew is to take it out on Israel,” he says. France has a large Muslim immigrant population from Africa, about 5 million people, and some of them identify with the Palestinian cause.

Ghozlan’s solution to what he sees as a tinderbox is to campaign for the complete halt of what he calls “Palestinian propaganda”—which in his view ranges from wearing a Palestinian scarf to promoting an Israeli products boycott. “From solidarity to incitation, there’s only one step,” he says. While Ghozlan’s view of the threat may be too broad, there is also evidence to support his idea of a link between Muslim immigrants, the Middle East conflict, and violence against Jews in the streets.

A case in point is the anti-Zionist candidate list for the European Parliament elections of June 2009, created by Dieudonné, a famous immigrant comedian. It wasn’t a joke. It’s program was simple: to fight the interference of Zionists in the internal policy of France. While performing in one of Paris’s most prestigious theaters in December 2008, Dieudonne invited a French historian who denies the Holocaust, Robert Faurisson, on stage. A technician mimicked a Jewish prisoner interned in a concentration camp by wearing pajamas with a Star of David on them. Dieudonné, whose father is from Cameroon, later declared: “I don’t agree with all of Faurisson’s theses. But as far as I’m concerned, it is the freedom of speech that counts.” He was later fined 10,000 euros for the anti-Semitic insult.

The Representative Council of the Jews of France has recently denounced the fact that “daily anti Semitic talks and actions, often using the pretext of anti Zionism, have become dangerously ordinary.” Still, the situation in the 19th arrondissement has actually improved during the last year and a half. The test period was the Gaza War. While anti-Semitic incidents were common in other parts of Paris, the 19th was surprisingly calm.

“It was almost worrying,” says Rabbi Michel Bouskila, head of the Jewish Communities Council of the northeast region of Paris. Sitting behind a massive and elaborately carved desk in a vast empty room on the upper floor of his son’s clothing factory outside Paris, Bouskila smokes cigarette after cigarette as explains this unexpected turn in the situation: “During Ramadan, Muslim and Jewish religious leaders of the 19th met several times, united by a common ambition,” he says. “We would fight the plague that afflicts both communities, which is our ignorance of each other.”

Looking Forward

Laurent, a tall and thin middle-aged man with glasses and a thin dark beard, works in a shop on Rue Petit. He arrived in the 19th arrondissement as a child and never left it. His six children go to Beith Hanna too, but unlike the Touitous, who plan to leave for Israel as soon as they can, Laurent loves it here, and the thought of moving never crossed his mind. When I ask him to tell me about his daily life in the 19th, he was quick to answer, in a half-reproaching tone. “We don’t have any security issue here, if that’s what you are searching for,” he says. “We’re beyond this discourse now, looking forward instead of in the past.” I ask him about the attack on Rudy Haddad. “There was nothing anti-Semitic in this aggression,” he answers. “People got confused and misjudged it.”

I tell him about Rachel Touitou hiding her son’s kippah before getting on the subway. “I will never conceal my Jewish identity,” he says. “You only hide things you’re ashamed of. But I don’t want to criticize her; I understand she got scared for her child. You know how Jewish mothers are.”

Just before I leave, he adds, “Of course, if some incident should happen tomorrow, I would tell you the complete opposite of what I just told you now.”