Interview with Marie Brenner

It started as random crimes against property.
Delinquents burning down a shul, or smearing graffiti on school walls.
Then bullies began knocking Jewish schoolchildren to the ground and
calling them names. And then, at a demonstration in Paris, leftists,
pro-Palestinians and Arabs delivered the ancient anti-Semitic slogan:
“Kill the Jews! Death to the Jews!” Although those cries went largely
unheard in the French media, the problem could no longer be ignored —
the third-biggest Jewish population on the planet was under siege.

Is
France anti-Semitic? How much? Can anti-Semitism be checked in a
country that’s ten per cent Muslim — and faced with its own concerns
about terrorism?

Marie Brenner, writer-at-large for Vanity Fair and a prolific author,
went to France last fall to find out. More than 100 interviews later,
she filed a story — “France’s Scarlet Letter” — that appears in
Vanity Fair’s June issue.

Bonjour Paris
has been following this story for several years. As readers were
starting to grapple with this explosive Vanity Fair piece, we spoke
with Marie Brenner about the answers she found and the questions she
raises.

BONJOUR PARIS: Your piece goes very far to
document something France likes to deny — that there’s a disturbing
degree of anti-Semitism there that no one seems quick to condemn. Given
that, should Americans — and, in particular, American Jews — simply
refuse to go to France?

BRENNER: I don’t believe in boycotts. They hurt the victims. They’re a tactic of the Nazis.

BONJOUR PARIS: What’s a better response?

BRENNER:
Americans and American Jews should do everything possible to go to
France. And not just as tourists — when they’re in France, I hope
they’ll talk to the leaders of the Jewish communities, attend services
if they are Jewish. American Jews can contribute to their causes to
help the victims; they can make the victims of these attacks feel that
American Jews are there to help and are aware of their story.

BONJOUR
PARIS: French Jews have been targets of violence. If French
anti-Semites see Americans who they think they can identify as Jews,
are the Americans at risk?

BRENNER: American tourists can be in
central Paris and not be in any danger.  I had no unpleasant
experiences in all the time I was reporting.  A lot of hysteria
has attached itself to this.

BONJOUR PARIS: But underneath the hysteria is a very real anti-Semitism. How did you get interested in this story?

BRENNER:
I went to Paris around the time of the Jewish holidays in 2002. I had
heard about a retired Jewish cop who had received one of the first
telephone calls in 2000 about a fire at a temple in the suburbs of
Paris — and when [[[ ]]] HE investigated the fire, he learned that
someone had thrown Molotov cocktails into the site.

BONJOUR PARIS: What did you expect to find?

BRENNER:
I knew Paris pretty well, but the way French Jews lived in Paris was
unknown to me. I had no sense of the double reality of the French
Jewish establishment — the fact that the Jews of central Paris had
almost no relationship with the Jew of the outskirts, although the
distance is more or less similar to the distance between Manhattan and
parts of the Bronx. This startled me.  It seemed to me that the
Jewish establishment in Paris had little interest or perception of that
world. And, in fact, they referred to it as “out there.”  I would
ask media people, intellectuals, people at dinners, “Have you spent
time in Drancy or Blanc-Mesnil?” And they’d say, “No, we don’t go out
there.” So I thought I would. I took an apartment near the Sorbonne. I
would spend my days in the banlieues and come into central Paris — and
it would seem I had been in Iceland. But the more time I spent “out
there,” the more it seemed to me I had come across a group of victims
— hundreds of victims — who could not get their stories out.

BONJOUR PARIS: Why not?

BRENNER:
What inspired it?  It’s a complicated situation. But let’s start
with the French Jewish “establishment.”  They didn’t want to know
the problems, and when they found out, they failed to act. That’s the
first untold story: the French Jewish establishment, which is badly
under-funded, was inert in the face of the attacks, or paralyzed.

BONJOUR PARIS: Your focus, though, was on Jews who reacted fast and forcefully.

BRENNER:
The article really is a close look at two brave people — Sammy
Ghozlan and Shimon Samuels — who tried to bring the attention of the
world to the situation in the Jewish community in France. Ghozlan is a
retired police detective, a Sephardic Jew, who lived in the outskirts
of Paris and had a Hassidic band that worked the bar mitzvah
circuit.  When I met Ghozlan, he began telling me extraordinary
stories of how he heard about the first attack.  He thought the
synagogue fire had been just an accident until a detective who was an
old friend told him about the Molotov. That was when Ghozlan began the
work that has made him famous in parts of France — gathering
information on the attacks and trying to call attention to them. But
he’s been more effective as an investigator than a news broker: Since
he started his investigation, attacks on Jewish sites in France and on
French Jews has increased.

BONJOUR PARIS: Why has there been so little interest in this story in France?

BRENNER:
It starts with the French police. For a long time, the police did not
want to recognize these as acts of anti-Semitism. And they’ve hesitated
to take strong steps against hooligans in the banlieues because they
fear being called Nazis, and they worry about overreacting.

BONJOUR PARIS: And then there’s the French press….

BRENNER:
…which has participated in a near-total media blackout. Most media
outlets simply looked the other way. When Clement Weill-Raynal, one of
France’s leading journalists and a Jew, saw that Agence France Presse
refused to cover the story, he compiled a thick dossier about AFP’s
blackout.  But AFP was not the only problem. Two blazing and
seminal books about the growing hostility of French Muslims came out
— and received almost no media attention for months.

BONJOUR PARIS: Every American news agency and magazine has an office in Paris. Where was the American press?

BRENNER: One editor said to me, “The American reader only wants to know where to eat and where to shop in Paris.”

BONJOUR
PARIS: Your article ran for 12 full pages in Vanity Fair. Clearly,
someone has decided the American reader can stand to deal with this
topic.

BRENNER: The Iraq war changed everything.  America
is furious with the French. The war showed us a truer picture of France
in crisis. And what’s happening to French Jews is part of that crisis.

BONJOUR PARIS: What should France be doing? 

BRENNER:
France should be actively prosecuting the people who caused the
attacks.  Even now, the victims are very afraid to speak out.

BONJOUR PARIS: Why?

BRENNER:
The French judicial system is very lax. Thirty-seven percent of the
French who are sentenced are let go.  Victims do not feel
protected.

BONJOUR PARIS: Do you think your article will change anything?

BRENNER:
Too soon to tell. But one early reaction isn’t encouraging. When the
publicity head of Vanity Fair called Agence France Presse and offered
them my piece, the local people for AFP said, “No one has persuasively
made the case.” They wouldn’t even take a look at it.