The author of these lines is 47 years old. He is French and he is Jewish. For decades, this dual identity did not weigh on him in the slightest. He carried it with a discretion tinged by an awareness of history and a quiet sense of pride.
Everything changed 18 months ago. Admitting this costs me: I have had to overcome a certain fear to publish this op-ed. The fear of isolation; the fear of being reduced to a condition I would have preferred not to have to justify. It is first and foremost this fear that I wish to express. Because the mere fact that it is uncontrollable says a great deal about our country and the direction it is taking.
"It's not easy to be Jewish": What happened to make these words by Charles Péguy, written in 1910 in his essay Notre Jeunesse (Memories of Youth), applicable to France in 2025? Antisemitism has become part of the zeitgeist. It is present every day, almost unconsciously. It no longer emerges only on those rare occasions that a vigilant society once recognized and punished – as in 2014, when shows in which [antisemite comedian] Dieudonné insulted Jews and, mixing vulgarity with abjection, mocked their past suffering and present anxiety, were shut down. Today, thousands of little Dieudonnés thrive, from the Assemblée Nationale to university lecterns. Their calm hatred is becoming a dominant ideology.
Words have lost their meaning
This collapse, like all moral failures, began with a matter of vocabulary. Words have lost their meaning. Two in particular, whose misuse has greatly contributed to offending Jewish sensibilities in France: "genocide" and "Zionist."
"Genocide": It was not as a reference, for example, to the Sudanese war in 2023, with its tens of thousands dead and millions displaced, that this term has become firmly established in public opinion. No, it was carefully turned, with a certain perverse sophistication, against the country created to serve as a refuge for the survivors of the extermination of three-quarters of Europe's Jews. And it has been hammered home until it produced the ultimate offense: equating Israel with the Nazis. Jews, who are, in their hearts and in their very being, orphans of the Holocaust, now find themselves cast as the heirs of their executioners. It is a dagger driven, day after day, into the wounded memory of the Jewish people.
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