A professor at the University of Houston, Robert Zaretsky is also a culture columnist at the Forward.
Robert Zaretsky
By Robert Zaretsky
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Opinion It’s Not About Leaving France — Our Question Is How To Stay
“Is there a future for Jews in France?” I might just as well have poured a Dr Pepper into the wine glass of Nicolas Weill. The cultural and literary journalist for Le Monde looked at me from across our corner table in a small restaurant specializing in provincial fare. “This sort of question is an…
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Opinion How France’s Le Pen Family Feud Is Manna From Far Right Wing Heaven
When I arrived in Paris last week for a research trip, little had changed from my many previous trips. Though spring, the weather was drizzly and cold; despite the economic crisis, charming stores displayed tempting breads and books; and notwithstanding the “défense de fumer” signs, café terraces were dense with cigarette smoke. And while Marine…
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Culture The Novel France Can’t Put Down Depicts Muslim Future — Or Does It?
● Soumission By Michel Houellebecq French and European Publications Inc, 320 pages, $49.95 Though it pretends to be about France’s near future, Michel Houellebecq’s controversial “Soumission” is also about its recent past. Set in the year 2022, the novel portrays a country riven by conflicting ideologies and worldviews, teetering on the edge of civil war….
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Opinion Why ‘Jew’ Is Rarely Spoken Word in France — Even After Kosher Grocery Terror
Many observers, both French and foreign, have hailed Sunday’s march in Paris as a historic milestone. More than a million citizens, along with dozens of world leaders, joined together as a sign of resistance to last week’s acts of terrorism, and as the gauge for the persistence of democratic ideals. The event had all the…
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Opinion Was Terror Attack Tied to ‘Muslim Future’ Satire?
By now, news of the massacre at the offices of the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo has reached the U.S. In perhaps the fullest account on this side of the Atlantic, the New York Times reports that the masked assailants—two according to a witness, three according to the police—burst into the lobby of the paper’s offices…
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Opinion Does Home Invasion Signal Beginning of End for French ‘Israelites’?
It is thanks to the sort of crime usually relegated to local police blotters that France will need to reflect, in 2015, on the sort of republic it wishes to be. In early December 2014, three young thugs broke into a young couple’s apartment in the Parisian suburb of Créteil, tied up the couple, ransacked…
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Opinion Will France Recognize a Palestinian State?
‘Le moment venu” — when the moment is right. This has long been the default response of the French minister of foreign affairs when asked if and when his government will officially recognize the Palestinian state. Over the past few weeks, forces both domestic and foreign have brought this particular moment ever closer. But it…
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Opinion A French Jew Gazes Longingly Back at Vichy
A glance at the current best-seller list in France reminds us that not only will we always have Paris, we will also always have Vichy. Eric Zemmour’s “Le France Suicide” has just elbowed aside Valérie Trierweiler’s memoir of her (short) time as the partner of President François Hollande, “Merci Pour Ce Moment,” as the country’s…
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