Mitchell Abidor

Mitchell Abidor is a writer and translator who has published over a dozen books on French radical history.

La Revue Blanche
Tablet’s French literary ancestor was founded by three Warsaw-born brothers who were high school friends and classmates of Marcel Proust, and who published everyone from André Gide to Paul Claudel. Then came the Dreyfus affair.
byMitchell Abidor
Leopold Bloom’s Real-Life Model
The friendship of James Joyce and his student and instructor in Jewish customs, the Italian businessman Ettore Schmitz, better known as the novelist Italo Svevo, gave birth to one of literature’s greatest characters. It also unites the giant of literary modernism with the founder of psychoanalysis.
byMitchell Abidor
Author Eric Zemmour, the French Jewish Trump, Storms to Top of Presidential Polls
With his ability to control his own narrative, the one-man show is a symptom of the Americanization of French politics
byMitchell AbidorandMiguel Lago
Socialism Without Antisemitism
From Karl Marx on down, early socialist movements and many of their successors gave themselves over to virulent antisemitism—with the shining exception of Comte Henri de Saint-Simon and his disciples
byMitchell Abidor
Proust’s Madeleine Was Originally a Slice of Toast
The publication by Gallimard of the earliest manuscript of what would become ‘In Search of Lost Time’ lays bare the autobiographical origins of Proust’s key themes, including his ambivalence about his Jewishness
byMitchell Abidor
The Paris Commune at 150
France’s second revolutionary sequel was a failure. But it looks better than its successors.
byMitchell Abidor