Joann Sfar and the Jews of France
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Shmuel Trigano French Anti-Semitism Chaim Saiman When Do We Eat? JEWISH REVIEW Volume 6, Number 1 Spring 2015 $7.95 OF BOOKS Steven Englund Dreyfus: History and Fiction Amy Newman Smith The Woman from Mossad Adam Kirsch Lincoln's Jews Michael Weingrad Joann Sfar, French Jewry, and the Rabbi's Cat Abraham Socher Bellow's Laughter Ruth R. Wisse Jacobson's Dark Allegory Editor NEW FROM MAGGID BOOKS Abraham Socher MAGGID Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush NEW Art Director VOLUME Betsy Klarfeld Associate Editor Amy Newman Smith Intern Rebecca Weiss Jewish Book Council Award Stickers: Winner: Black ink on gold foil Finalist: Blue ink on silver foil Editorial Board Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Shlomo Brody Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison COVENANT & A GUIDE TO THE Moshe Halbertal Jon D. Levenson CONVERSATION COMPLEX: Anita Shapira Michael Walzer Genesis, Exodus & Leviticus Contemporary Halakhic J. H.H. Weiler Leon Wieseltier Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein NEW NEW Publisher Eric Cohen Associate Publisher & Director of Marketing Lori Dorr The Jewish Review of Books (Print ISSN 2153-1978, JOSHUA RUTH KINGS JEREMIAH Online ISSN 2153-1994) is a quarterly publication Torn in Two of ideas and criticism published in Spring, Summer, The Challenge of the From Alienation The Fate of a Fall, and Winter, by Bee.Ideas, LLC., 165 East 56th Promised Land to Monarchy Alex Israel Prophet Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10022. Michael Hattin Yael Ziegler Binyamin Lau For all subscriptions, please visit www.jewishreviewofbooks.com or send $29.95 ($39.95 outside of the U.S.) to Jewish Review of Books, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834. Please send notifi- cations of address changes to the same address or to [email protected]. SPECIAL FOR PASSOVER For customer service and subscription-related issues, please call (877) 753-0337 or write to [email protected]. NEW FROM ERICA BROWN Letters to the Editor should be emailed to letters@ jewishreviewofbooks.com or to our editorial office, 3091 Mayfield Road, Suite 412, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118. Please send all unsolicited reviews and manuscripts to the attention of the editors at [email protected] or to our editorial office. Advertising inquiries should be sent to [email protected] or call (212) 796-1665. Review copies should be sent to the attention of the associate editor at our editorial office. Koren Ethiopian Haggada Seder Talk The Jonathan Sacks Haggada Journey to Freedom A Conversational Haggada New Essays & Commentary JEWISH REVIEW A Division of Koren Publishers Jerusalem OF BOOKS KOREN MAGGID www.korenpub.com www.jewishreviewofbooks.com JEWISH REVIEW Volume 6, Number 1 Spring 2015 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com LETTERS 4 Stubborn Soul, Animal or Vegetable?, Life and Literature, David and Goliath FeatURES 5 Shmuel Trigano A Journey Through French Anti-Semitism There is a problem with the inevitable reflexive warnings after every vicious attack not to slip into Islamophobia. A short personal history of how France got here. 8 Michael Weingrad Drawing Conclusions: Joann Sfar and the Jews of France The great French comic artist is now working at the height of his considerable powers, and he is obsessed with questions of Jewish identity and life in Europe. REVIews 11 Adam Kirsch Lincoln and the Jews Lincoln and the Jews: A History by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell 14 Ruth R. Wisse Coming with a Lampoon J: A Novel by Howard Jacobson 17 Jenna Weissman Joselit Jewish Geography Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way by Hasia R. Diner • The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire by Adam D. Mendelsohn 20 Gary Stein The Abrams Case and Justice Holmes' Philo-Semitism The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind—and Changed the History of Free Speech in America by Thomas Healy 23 Allan Arkush Lands of the Free Jews & Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe & the United States edited by Simon Rabinovitch • Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia by Joshua Shanes • Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia • by Simon Rabinovitch • The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe by Joshua M. Karlip • In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel by Adam L. Rovner 27 Walter Laqueur Love in the Shadow of Death Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman 30 Robert Alter Unsettling Days The Hilltop: A Novel by Assaf Gavron, translated by Steven Cohen 34 Amy Newman Smith A Spy's Life Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad Spy by Ram Oren and Moti Kfir 36 Alvin H. Rosenfeld Climate of Opinion The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel edited by Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm 40 Steven Englund An Affair as We Don't Know It An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris 43 Abraham Socher Live Wire The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 by Zachary Leader • There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction by Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor READING 47 Chaim Saiman The Fifth Question Whatever kind of Passover Seder one attends, there is a fifth question, usually whispered, that arises some time after the first four are asked . THE Arts 49 Mitchell Cohen Going Under with Klinghoffer The new production of The Death of Klinghoffer at the Met this fall brought out protestors and defenders again. The opera’s defenders spoke of “truths” of art. But what, exactly, are those truths? LAST WORD 55 The Editors High Fives On the cover: Celebration! by Mark Anderson. LETTERS Stubborn Soul amud plagiarized from the 1926 English edition of statements belittling Beilis, thus adding insult to in- Kol ha-kavod to David G. Roskies for his recogni- Beilis’ memoir, The Story of My Sufferings. Zipper- jury. Zipperstein focuses on Malamud’s remark that tion of the genius of the stubborn soul of Grażyna stein even adds an additional charge of plagiarism, Beilis “died a bitter man.” Zipperstein wonders how Pawlak, whose mind gave birth to the idea that saying that “Malamud lifted passages almost directly we can possibly disagree with Malamud’s assess- our friend Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett would from Life Is with People, much as he did from Beilis’ ment, given all that Beilis suffered, including trag- eventually deliver after years of nurturing by Jerzy memoir.” Given this acknowledgment of Malamud’s edies and disappointments, following Beilis’ release Halbersztadt (“POLIN: A Light Unto the Nations,” plagiarism, we are at a loss to understand why Zip- from prison. Winter 2015). perstein felt it necessary to make the sophomoric In addressing Malamud’s “bitter man” remark in I vividly remember my first meeting with Paw- comment that “even paranoiac relatives can have our book, we grant that “there may be an element of lak in the lobby of the Forum Hotel in 1994 where genuine cause for complaint.” Since we have genu- truth” to what Malamud said. We then argue, based she dismissed the superficiality of foreign Jews who ine cause for complaint, we are not paranoid. on documentary evidence, that while Beilis had came to Poland in those years, shed a few tears, Zipperstein writes that Malamud was “hounded cause to be bitter at the end of his life, he was prob- left, and forgot what they saw, thereby laying down ably less bitter than others would have been in his the gauntlet. I'm glad Roskies reminded us of her place. Our evidence includes what is probably Beilis’ great achievement and the pioneering work of Jerzy last recorded utterance, his 1934 letter to Oskar Gru- Halbersztadt. zenberg, the Russian-Jewish lawyer who had been Michael H. Traison Beilis’ lead defense counsel at the trial in 1913. In via jewishreviewofbooks.com this letter, written while Beilis was in failing health and close to death, he stated: “I am happy. God per- mitted me to live and I am able to write to you.” That does not sound very bitter to us. (By the way, in the Animal or Vegetable? listing for our book in this review, the author’s name Jeremy Wanderer’s interesting review of two books “Mendel” is misspelled as “Medel.” The price listed regarding sacrifice (“Silence of the Lambs?”) in the for the book is also wrong: It is $15, not $29.95.) Winter 2015 issue unfortunately gets off to a bad Jay Beilis start when his first sentence refers to the offering Jeremy Simcha Garber of a one-year-old lamb together with wine and a Mark S. Stein vegetable on the altar. Unless one thinks of bread as a vegetable, vegetables were not offered in biblical Steven J. Zipperstein Responds: sacrifices, after Cain’s rejected one (and that was not Family loyalty is nobler than literary acumen. On accompanied by a lamb). these grounds, Beilis’ heirs are to be commended Micah Bloomfield for their dogged defense of their famous, tragic New York, NY ancestor. But hounded by them Bernard Malamud certainly is: The appendix to Blood Libel: The Life Jeremy Wanderer Responds: by Beilis’ heirs” when The Fixer first appeared in and Memory of Mendel Beilis is nearly 70 pages of The first sentence of the review is ambiguous per- 1966. This is a vast exaggeration. David Beilis, the legalese-inflected bombardment. Just one example haps, but not outright mistaken. The sacrifice son of Mendel Beilis and the father of Jay Beilis, cor- from page 278: “Having plagiarized so extensively, imagined in the sentence was the korban olah, the responded with Malamud, sending him two letters.