They’re not willing to sacrifice their Jewish identity in exchange for their security as individuals.
By coincidence, on the same day “The Twilight of French Jewry, the Twilight of France” was published in Mosaic, I came upon some highly pertinent remarks by Christine Angot in Le Monde’s weekly literary supplement. Angot, a staunch liberal now in her mid-fifties, is a prize-winning playwright and novelist whose plotlines are largely drawn from her own life as the product of a dysfunctional family. (The French term for this is autofiction.) The subject of her remarks was a television program in which she had participated for Arte, the quality French-German channel, about Chateauroux, the town in central France where she was brought up.
Some Americans may remember Chateauroux as the locale of a U.S. army base in the 1950s and early 60s. Until recently, it could be described as quintessentially “deep France”: a sleepy local capital, surrounded by dark woods and rivers. Things are changing, however, as Angot realized with a start on her filmed visit there. Muslim immigrants are taking over many parts of the town, including her former neighborhood of public housing, and turning them into semi-independent enclaves, what the French police refer to as “no-go zones.” As she put it in Le Monde:
When we arrived—all of us, the TV crew complete with their cameras and sound booms, and the writer who grew up there—we had to account for ourselves, to show our identity cards, to prove who we were, to state exactly where I had lived. . . . And then, the director’s first name—David, his full name being David Teboul—supplied material for unsavory jokes…. Some of the locals tried to intimidate us, saying that television was a cartel of the Jews… All this was uttered in a very menacing tone.… We shot a few scenes under a running fire of jibes and jeering, and as we left we were told to pay our compliments to the Talmud…. I swear we felt most uncomfortable.