A professor at the University of Houston and the Women’s Institute of Houston, Robert Zaretsky is also a culture columnist at the Forward.
Robert Zaretsky
By Robert Zaretsky
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Film & TV How a Holocaust Film Earned Jacques Rivette’s Deepest Contempt
With the death last week of Jacques Rivette, a certain idea of French cinema took one step closer to death. Along with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, Rivette was one of the enfants terribles of the so-called Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. Rebelling against the reign of studios and what they scorned as…
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Opinion Every Single Frenchman Can Don a Kippah and It Still Won’t Help French Jews
To be or not to be…willing to wear a kippah in public? That is the question the French Jewish community, with Hamlet-like intensity and introspection, has been debating over the last few weeks. Even France’s non-Jews are making their opinions known, most notably by donning kippot in symbolic gestures of “solidarity.” It is, inevitably, a…
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Culture New French History Offers a Ray of Hope for Jewish-Muslim Relations
The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims From North Africa to France By Ethan B. Katz Harvard University Press 480 pages, $35 In August 1961, two Algerian Jews, Simon Zouaghi and Martin Benisti, disembarked in Marseilles. The two men — one a butcher, the other a cook — had uprooted themselves and their loved ones…
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Opinion Are French Jews Falling for Marine Le Pen’s Xenophobic Siren Song?
In France, we have just been reminded that historical time is now divided by an avant, before, and après, after, November 13. The results are in from the first round of regional elections, and they are striking. Marine Le Pen’s xenophobic and authoritarian Front National political party has made big gains, finishing first in six…
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Opinion Believe It or Not, What Happened in Paris Was Not About the Jews
Like so many others, I was glued to the Internet during the first hours of Friday night’s terrorist attacks. Like so many others, I was trying to contact friends in Paris. Like so many others, I was scrambling to follow the attacks as they unfolded, jabbing at the keyboard when my networks could not keep…
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Culture Remembering André Glucksmann, a Man of Courage and Conviction
After a long struggle with cancer, the French intellectual André Glucksmann died this week in Paris at the age of 78. With his death, a certain idea of France — that of a nation imbued by a republican spirit as generous as it is rigorous — grew a bit dimmer. Glucksmann spent his life à…
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Opinion Is a New Edition of ‘Mein Kampf’ Really Such a Bad Idea?
Last year, Ben Carson, the leading candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, urged Americans to read “Mein Kampf.” Hitler’s classic, Carson explained, reveals the true nature of President Obama’s agenda. He neglected, however, to illustrate his point with the GOP’s favorite bogeyman, France. This is a country, after all, where only old or dubious…
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Culture Resisting the Familiar Narrative of Resistance in France
How could anyone govern a country, Charles de Gaulle once asked, that has 240 different kinds of cheese? Less well known is the question he posed as leader of the Free French during World War II: How can anyone liberate a country that has nearly the same number of resistance movements? Okay, he didn’t really…
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