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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Culture Uncertain Future for Jews in French Provinces
An Uncertain Future: Voices of a French Jewish Community, 1940-2012 By Robert I. Weiner and Richard E. Sharpless University of Toronto Press, 344 pages, $29.95 Much rarer than Dijon’s mustard and wine is the small and, until recently, vibrant Jewish community that called this small French city home. But as its title warns, “An Uncertain…
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Opinion Imagine an Israeli Arab Alfred Dreyfus
Once again, France is having an affair with the affair — the Dreyfus Affair. On November 4, Le Monde published a controversial essay by Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, titled “Israel: Justice or Tribalism,” in which she views contemporary Israel through the prism of this 19th-century event. Israel, she concludes, lacks the political and legal ingredients…
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Opinion France Confronts Sins of Past — And Present
Despite its claim as une ville fleurie (city of flowers), Drancy is a dim and dreary northern suburb of Paris. This was fitting, however: President François Hollande was there in late September to address the town’s grim role as the transit camp for French and foreign Jews to Auschwitz, and the burden this past places…
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Culture Remembrance of Jews’ Past
It was 30 years ago that Yosef Yerushalmi’s” Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory” was first published. The shortest book by Yerushalmi, a prolific professor of Jewish history at Columbia University until his death in 2009, it has had the longest reach. The issues raised in the book, Yerushalmi suggested, are not “necessarily confined to…
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Culture The Jews Who Plumbed Hitler’s Brain
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts By Daniel Pick Oxford University Press, 368 pages, $35 More than 20 years ago, Neal Gabler declared that Hollywood was the creation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In his remarkable book “An Empire of Their Own,” Gabler in fact suggested that the Meyers…
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Opinion Terror on the Rue des Rosiers
Thirty years ago today, a terrorist commando exploded into the famed Jewish restaurant Jo Goldenberg’s, located on the rue des Rosiers in the Marais district of Paris. Spraying machine gun fire and grenades, they killed six people, wounded nearly two dozen others and escaped by foot into the neighborhood’s dense warren of streets. None of…
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Opinion France’s Jewish Archbishop
In the United States, no one born abroad can grow up and become president. In France, any citizen can grow up and become president, or archbishop of Paris — even the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. August 5 marks the fifth anniversary of the death of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. With his passing, France lost…
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Opinion Jewish Leader of Hungary’s Anti-Semites
If history does act with cunning, as Hegel claimed, recent events involving Hungary’s extreme right wing Jobbik remind us that it does not always keep a straight face when doing so. A better Hungary, according to Jobbik, the country’s third largest party, is a Hungary emptied of its Roma and Jewish communities. As a result,…
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