I explore the paradoxical construction of race through fashion among the Parisian children and grandchildren of upwardly mobile immigrant North African Jews. Faced with the conflation of North Africanity and inassimilable difference, Sephardi youth escaped some forms of French racism by enacting others. By essentializing and individualizing Jewishness through conspicuous consumption, they made Frenchness possible for “Arab Jews” in ways foreclosed to Arab Muslims. But these same practices also helped fashion and biologize their exclusion from the French nation. Rather than encourage the deconstruction of “modern” identity narratives, Sephardi youth liminality thus encouraged the reessentialization of class, ethnicity, religion, and nation.
Pen) to signal the colonization of mainstream politics by hard right understandings of national identity, immigration, and even secularism. At the time, the French government was working to control public expressions of religion-banning the veil and the kippah from public schools; organizing a national body to officially "represent" Muslims-while calling for public debates about national identity and belonging. Although Muslims were clearly more at risk of being "denationalized" in this context, many French Jewish elites also found themselves forced to insist that Jewish Frenchness was unproblematic, particularly in contrast to Muslim foreignness. 2 The disconnect that many young North African French Jews and their parents 3 felt from France over the linked issues of anti-Semitism and Israel threatened this attempt to frame Jewish identity and Frenchness as a powerful foil for young Muslim alterity. In this article, I explore some of the conflicting Jewish discourses about Israel and French anti-Semitism that have emerged in the shadows cast by this threat of "denationalization." I look at discourses from French Jewish intellectuals, national Jewish organizations, and the Jewish press from the mid-2000s until after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks. Anti-Semitism changed quite dramatically over the course of this period and yet was persistently characterized by many elite Jews as remaining the same. But while often denying that anti-Semitism had empirically changed, Jewish discourse itself shifted. In the early 2000s, many Jewish accounts of French anti-Semitism worked (in often internally contradictory ways) to disconnect French anti-Semitism from the conflict in Israel/Palestine. After 2012-as Islamist attacks augmented theft-driven, street corner anti-Semitism-some accounts of anti-Semitism made Israel the key to understanding anti-Semitic violence.
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