Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the French Jews Who Did Not Surrender

May 17 will be a landmark date in the family of actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Her grandfather Pierre Louis-Dreyfus will be 102. Beyond a highly lucrative career as a banker, Pierre is a noted war hero, one of the 42 still-living Compagnons de la Libération, a lofty distinction for war resisters.
Like Louis-Dreyfus, a number of these honorees are Jews, such as Nobel-Prizewinning biologist François Jacob, also an author and member of the Académie française who will be 90 this year. As a wartime combat medic, Jacob performed heroics, braving enemy fire to rescue the wounded, and was repeatedly wounded himself, before making his landmark discoveries in the genetic mechanisms of bacteria, messenger RNA and others.
In “The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity” (Princeton University Press), and other works so far untranslated into English, Jacob also proved himself an incisive and elegant writer. Like Jacob, Louis-Dreyfus, the scion of a family of Paris’s ritzy 8th arrondissement with a fortune based on armaments, leapt into the fray after the 1940 German invasion of France. After extensive Resistance activity, he trained as a machine-gun expert and joined a bombardier command, flying 81 bombing missions over the Western Front (Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) for a total of 185.5 combat flights hours.
Renowned for his relentless work ethic, the elder Louis-Dreyfus must have instilled some of his determination in his descendants. His son, Gérard C. Louis-Dreyfus (known as William Louis-Dreyfus) is ranked by Forbes Magazine seventh among France’s billionaires with a fortune estimated in 2007 at $3.4 billion.
Shunning the showbiz milieu of their half-sister Julia, both of Gérard’s daughters from his second marriage, Phoebe Louis-Dreyfus Eavis and Emma Louis-Dreyfus, have embraced the profession of social worker. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics informs us, social work is a “profession for those with a strong desire to help improve people’s lives.” As indeed old Pierre Louis-Dreyfus, François Jacob and their brave compatriots did when their nation experienced humiliating defeat. They remind us that at the lowest point in modern Gallic history, some French people did indeed fight back.
Watch a 2008 French TV interview with François Jacob in two parts:
Entretien Avec Francois Jacob 1-6
Uploaded by hanakus2006. – Technology reviews and science news videos.
Entretien Avec Francois Jacob 2-6
Uploaded by hanakus2006. – Technology reviews and science news videos.
Watch as Julia Louis-Dreyfus follows in the tradition of the mishpocha with a 2007 PSA to get out the vote:
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Most Popular
- 1
Opinion The dangerous Nazi legend behind Trump’s ruthless grab for power
- 2
Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
- 3
Culture Did this Jewish literary titan have the right idea about Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling after all?
- 4
Opinion I first met Netanyahu in 1988. Here’s how he became the most destructive leader in Israel’s history.
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Gaza and Trump have left the Jewish community at war with itself — and me with a bad case of alienation
-
Fast Forward Trump administration restores student visas, but impact on pro-Palestinian protesters is unclear
-
Fast Forward Deborah Lipstadt says Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown has ‘gone way too far’
-
Fast Forward 5 Jewish senators accuse Trump of using antisemitism as ‘guise’ to attack universities
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.