TAUBMAN SYMPOSIA: Jews in Crisis? Anti-Semitism in France Today
Jonathan Judaken (University of Memphis)
Sunday, May 6 / 3:00 PM
Bronfman Family Jewish Community Center, 524 Chapala Street, Santa Barbara
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With the largest Muslim population in Europe, the headlines of newspapers seem to indicate that France is on the frontlines of the so-called ëclash of civilizationsí and Franceís Jews appear to be at the forefront of the conflict.  From the destruction of synagogues and cemeteries to the attacks on individuals, most graphically the horrific slaying of Ilan Halimi in February 2006, anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe and in France. How serious is the threat? Are the French anti-Semitic?  Is Paris the new Berlin of the 1930s?  Is the French government once again engaged in a politics of appeasement by failing to adequately address the matter?  This lecture will respond to these questions by putting them in historical perspective, examining the relationship between France and the Jews from the French Revolution through the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy France and into the present, providing insight and understanding to the situation of anti-Semitism in France today.  Jonathan Judaken is an Associate Professor of modern European cultural and intellectual history at the University of Memphis. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartre and 'the Jewish Question': Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual and Theorizing Antisemitism (forthcoming).

Sponsored by The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a program of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, is cosponsored by UCSB Arts & Lectures, Department of Religious Studies, Congregation BÌnai BÌrith, and Santa Barbara Hillel. This event was funded, in part, by a grant from the Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara. It is part of the Campus Outreach Program, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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