Lessons from Entebbe: Post-War France, French Jews, and Israel

• In Event: The Image of Paris in Post-War Jewish Literary Memory

Abstract

Well before the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks and the subsequent spike in Jewish emigration to Israel, the expression Boeing-Aliyah already referred to those with means living increasingly between Israel and France. Never before have French Jews had so much or such close contact with eretz yisrael. With over 200,000 French Jews already living in Israel, polls show 80% of France’s remaining Jews have considered aliyah. Although progressively restrictive views of secularity and the rise of modern terror and new antisemitisms have provoked higher rates of emigration among French Jews since the second intifada, the focus of this paper goes beyond this last wave of immigration. It elucidates how Shoah survivor and Entebbe hostage Jean-Michel Goldberg’s 1980 Écorché juif already exposes the traumatic body of the Jew hidden beneath France’s post-war master narratives, linking post-war memory, France’s Jews and Israel to a new era of French Judaism and a new genre of French Jewish literature.

While Zionism threads its way through French Jewish cultural production beginning in the late nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Israeli independence, the figuration of Israel and French-Israeli relations will undergo profound changes. This paper initiates a conversation about the complex ways in which French post-war writers, intellectuals and historians confront the past, its narratives, and Israel. Through close textual and contextual analysis, it addresses how, in the wake of mass destruction, “sifting the ruins” of a once “sweet France,” writers exposing the devastating consequences of Vichy laws and the Holocaust also bear witness to transforming relations between French Jews and Israel. Although many know of the 1976 Entebbe hijacking, few have explored its multidirectional relationship to “the Jewish question” in France. Tracing key moments in the history of French Jews and relations between France and Israel, this paper examines transforming post-war attachments in a little-known and oft-times comical post-Holocaust cautionary tale that documents the twisting double binds of French Jews in the post-war period, the rise of modern terror, new configurations of Israel in French Jewish literature, and what is now referred to as an Israelization of French Judaism.

Author

• Gayle Zachmann, University of Florida