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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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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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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