French anti-Semitism: Another view

If the French thought the way Americans do, I suppose they’d ask each other, “Why do you vacation in America? Don’t you know Americans are Francophobes/racists/gun nuts/warmongers?”

I’ve visited France frequently since 1952, when I spent the first of three summers at an international camp on Lake Annecy in the French Alps. My wife and I have returned there often over the past 40 years, introducing our children and grandchildren to France in the process. Since 1994, I’ve served on the board of a foundation that meets annually on Lake Annecy; its various exchange programs seek to unleash individual potential in an international context — for example, by housing American students with French families and vice versa.

I don’t love all French people, any more than I love all Americans. But just as I love American values, I do love French values — which aren't necessarily better than ours, but are most assuredly different.

‘Don’t think — just do it’

Gérard Gasarian, a French acquaintance of mine who teaches at Tufts University, has observed that the French are all talk and no action, whereas Americans are all action and no talk. Most American TV commercials and public policy alike, Gérard contends, can be boiled down to a single theme: “Don’t think — just do it!” Conversely, the French tradition of rigorous critical analysis (“Don’t do it — just think!”) is actually an excuse for inaction — a good thing in some instances (the French avoided our Iraq trap) and a bad thing in others (the French failed to stand up aggressively to Hitler).

Of course, it would be nice if the French were more like Americans and vice versa. But for my purposes, a few weeks in France each summer suffice to refresh my perspective and recharge my batteries.

Besieged in Paris

Some Americans perceive an increase in anti-Semitic incidents in France and other European countries. Two Paris synagogues were recently besieged by demonstrators protesting Israel’s invasion of Gaza. A mediocre French comedian named Dieudonné garnered attention for delivering anti-Semitic stand-up routines and inventing the controversial quenelle gesture, an apparently inverted Nazi salute. (His fame accelerated this year when France’s president, its highest court, and several cities tried to ban Dieudonné’s performances). But these and similar clashes reflect not so much French mainstream attitudes as the rage of young Muslim immigrants over their exclusion from mainstream society.

The Internet, almost since its birth, has carried reports that the Jews of France are quaking in their boots, hiding behind locked doors, or packing their bags. Perhaps some Jews are, but my admittedly limited experience has been quite the opposite: If anything, French Jews seem less self-conscious and defensive about their Jewishness than American Jews.

It’s not unusual, for example, to see Orthodox Jews casually strolling the streets of major French cities. In Strasbourg in 2002, I was astonished to see a teenage Orthodox Jewish boy openly embracing his girlfriend on a busy downtown street. At the history museum in Metz, the catalogue for an exhibit about the venerable Jewish presence in Metz contained a causal quip to the effect that “Any time two Jews get together, you get three different opinions.” These, I submit, are not the words and deeds of people worrying that the Gestapo is coming.

Where monks once walked

The place I’m most familiar with is perhaps the most intriguing example. For as long as I can remember, Talloires on Lake Annecy was a picturesque village of some 350 souls with two Catholic churches but no sign of any other religious presence — Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, whatever. But in 1978, an abandoned thousand-year-old Benedictine priory there was restored as the European Center of Tufts University — the largest institution in the village. The Center’s first director was a Tufts Professor named Seymour Simches, who happened to be Jewish. (The Center’s current director, Gabriella Goldstein, also happens to be Jewish.)

Then in the ’90s, the local boutique was acquired by a Moroccan Jew named Loly Bournay. In keeping with the secular French tradition that religion is a private matter, she kept her Jewish background to herself. But word got around. The result was neither boycotts nor demonstrations but neighbors dropping into the store to tell Loly that they thought they had Jewish ancestors, too.

Nine years ago, a woman named Nora Slutsky — born in Turkey, raised in Israel, formerly married to an Israeli resident of France, employed in nearby Geneva — moved into the village with her young son. Shortly after, a real estate developer from Philadelphia named Michael Karp, having fallen in love with France, acquired the annex to the town’s famous Auberge du Père Bise as a vacation home for his family. All of a sudden there’s the teensiest beginning of a Jewish presence in Talloires — but that’s the sort of thing that only an American journalist like me seems to have noticed.

Five years ago, Loly Bournay, the boutique owner, celebrated her 60th birthday by throwing a party in the garden of the Tufts Priory and inviting her Talloires neighbors as well as her relatives from Israel. To my mind, there was something momentous about dancing the hora and singing “Hava Nagila” in a building created in the 10th century for Benedictine monks, but no one else seemed to give it a second thought.

Nora Slutsky tells me that neither she nor her son has experienced anti-Semitic behavior. “All his friends know he’s Israeli,” she says, “but he’s never encountered any problem.”

Of course, in a nation that hosts Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish populations, Talloires may be an exception — a kind of “safe, secluded bubble,” as Nora puts it. With its beautiful “lake of dreams,” its nearby castles that have stood for centuries, and its surrounding mountains that have stood for millions of years, it’s the kind of serene refuge where life’s petty cruelties seem to fade away, just as they once did for the Benedictines.

And you ask me: “How could you spend your vacation in France?” Let me ask you: Where would you have me spend it? At the Jersey shore?