Talking about Antisemitism in France Before and After Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher

Abstract

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.

Common difference: Conceptualising simultaneity and racial sincerity in Jewish-Muslim relations in the United Kingdom

“…The constructions of Jewish and Muslim minorities in Europe more broadly has been attracting growing attention of anthropologists and researchers from other fields, including explorations of complex examples of interactions between Jewish and Muslim actants in organised initiatives of Jewish-Muslim dialogue (Roggeveen, Vellenga and Wiegers, 2017;Van Esdonk and Wiegers, 2019), everyday encounters (Everett, 2020;Sheldon, 2022a;Sheldon, 2022b), the intersections between imageries that have become to be associated with the two groups (Anidjar, 2008;Judaken, 2018;Katz, 2015;Klug, 2014;Mandel, 2016;Meer, 2013;Meer and Modood, 2012;Meer and Noorani, 2008;Renton and Gidley, 2017) and the overlapping experiences of Jewish and Muslim communities (Arkin, 2013;Arkin, 2018;Bunzl, 2007;Everett, 2018;Everett and Gidley, 2018;Mandel, 2008;Özyürek, 2016;Özyürek, 2018;Silverstein, 2018;Werbner, 2013).…”

Media and Anti-Semitic Discourse in France

“…[4] Anti-semitism's crime largely happens due to prejudice against Jews who regarded them as powerful people in the economic, financial and media fields. [5] One of the phenomenal antisemitism case in France the abduction and murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006. Ilan Halimi was a young Jew who was kidnapped and tortured for 24 days before being killed by a criminal gang called Les Barbares.…”