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 Fascism and France Today
Zeev Sternhell is one of our era’s pre-eminent historians of modern France. In a series of path-breaking works, Sternhell has argued that fascism is far from being a foreign import to France, but actually has its intellectual and political roots in French soil. While historians still debate his painstaking and provocative interpretation, there is little…
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Opinion Did Right-Wing French Jews Provoke Anti-Semitic Violence?
In late July, the French newspaper Libération revealed that the Ministry of the Interior is considering outlawing the Ligue de Défense Juive (the Jewish Defense League, known in French by the acronym LDJ). The ministry opened this dossier following the dismal ruckus outside the Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue two weeks earlier in Paris. According to…
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Opinion France Must Reckon With Its Anti-Semitism Problem
When a crowd of people took the Bastille, the hulking prison in eastern Paris symbolizing the power of the monarchy, on July 14, 1789, they launched the French Revolution. This explains why popular demonstrations on behalf of the revolutionary ideals of 1789 — liberty, equality and fraternity — most often conclude at the towering column…
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Books 100 Years Later, Revisiting Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ and World War I
This year marks the centennial of two landmarks of modernity: World War I and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” Both events have their origins in 1914, but neither ever truly ended: Upon his death in 1924, Kafka left behind an unfinished manuscript, while the peacemakers at Versailles left behind an unresolved war. Beyond their incomplete natures,…
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Opinion France’s Quickly Changing Face
Last week, as France woke up to the results of the second round of municipal elections, the on-line newspaper Rue 89 breathlessly announced: “Miracle at Lourdes!” The event, to be sure, was more dazzling than a cripple throwing off her crutches or a blind man again seeing: a Socialist had won the mayor’s race! It…
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Culture Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks Reignite Charges of Anti-Semitism
On this side of the Atlantic, the imminent publication in Germany of Martin Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” (“Schwarzen Hefte”) has caused few if any ripples. For better or worse, the philosopher who theorized about “absence from the world” has been largely absent from our world. Yet in Europe, a surf-like pounding in newspapers and magazines has…
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Opinion Why All of France Should Shiver When Demonstrators Shout: ‘Jews Out’
Eighty years ago, on February 6, 1934, the French Republic had a near-death experience. On that wintry evening, tens of thousands of protestors, mostly young and mostly male, massed along the boulevards of Paris. Their aim was to bring down the Republic—or, as they called it, “la gueuse” or whore. In the eyes of contemporaries,…
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Culture Dreyfus Affair Continues To Intrigue and Confound After a Century
● An Officer and a Spy By Robert Harris Knopf, 448 pages, $27.95 ● Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century By Ruth Harris Picador, 572 pages, $28 Why is it that people named Harris tend to have affairs with the Dreyfus Affair? Just three years ago, the British historian Ruth Harris published…
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