Sunday, April 1, 2018

The Meaning of France's March Against Anti-Semitism

Of last year, a 67-year-old Jewish woman in Paris named Sarah Halimi was beaten to death and thrown off the balcony of her third-story apartment in a public housing complex by a neighbor who shouted "Allahu Akbar." It took 10 months and a public outcry that began with France's Jewish community, the largest in Europe, before prosecutors officially called the attack an anti-Semitic hate crime.

Another is a growing sense, one that has been compounded by every terrorist attack here in recent years, that something has gone wrong in France, and its institutions are struggling to keep pace.

The murder of a woman who had narrowly escaped deportation as a child in Nazi-occupied France at the hands of a young Muslim neighbor unlocked something here, a sense of public outrage that seemed to transcend even the horrible facts of the case.

Some held signs that read, "In France, we kill grandmothers because they're Jewish." Others wore buttons with Knoll's picture.

As people began gathering at the start of the march, I ran into Alain Finkielkraut, one of France's most prominent public intellectuals, a philosophy professor who had participated in the French student uprisings in 1968 but shifted rightward over the years and whose 2013 book, L'Identité Malheureuse, or The Unhappy Identity, is about immigration and its discontents.

The rally was a call to decry anti-Semitism, but it also ran up against a total aversion in France to what's called communautarisme, which can loosely translate as American-style identity politics, in which members of ethnic or religious groups derive a strong part of their personal identity-and political clout-from their backgrounds and histories.

Last week, before Knoll's death, I had met with Elisabeth Badinter, one of France's most influential intellectuals and old-school feminists, and had asked her what she thought could be done to stop anti-Semitism, radicalization, terrorist attacks, everything we're seeing in France today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/the-murder-of-mireille-knoll-in-france-might-be-the-last-straw-for-french-jews/556796/ 

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