June 3: A Trump Conviction and an Israeli Proposal That Never Was

Hamas demands U.S. guarantees; Biden to close border; Hunter begins gun trial

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The Big Story

The Scroll was off on Friday. Naturally, two major stories broke. 

The first came on Thursday afternoon, when former President Donald Trump was found guilty of all 34 felony counts of falsification of business records brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. We covered the details of that case in our Thursday Big Story, so here we’ll limit ourselves to observing that the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president—and current leading challenger to the sitting president—coming on a single misdemeanor paper crime gerrymandered into 34 separate felonies via a “creative” legal theory is the sort of thing you’d traditionally expect from countries south of the United States.

Not anymore. In fact, the Bragg conviction follows two previous landmark judgments against Trump in New York, both of which also made use of “creative” legal maneuvering:

• Writer E. Jean Carroll successfully won an $83.3 million civil judgment against Trump for a sexual assault that allegedly occurred in 1995 or 1996 (Carroll was not sure which). The case, bankrolled by Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman, normally would have been well beyond the statute of limitations, but in 2022 the New York State Legislature passed a law that, for one year only, allowed victims of sexual assault to sue their abusers regardless of when the assault took place. 

• New York State Attorney General Letitia James won a $450 million civil fraud judgment against Trump for exaggerating his net worth in order to receive more favorable loan terms. This was the first time in history that New York sued a defendant under the state civil fraud statute, §63(12), on the theory of overvalued assets in a case in which no counterparty claimed to have been defrauded. James also requested (but did not receive) the death penalty for The Trump Organization—the first time in history that a large business has been threatened with dissolution under §63(12) without a showing of victims or losses. 

As for the Bragg case, don’t just take it from us. Elie Honig—a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, with sterling anti-Trump credentials—wrote in New York magazine on Friday:

The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor—in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere—has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.

Honig went on to describe the prosecution as a “Frankenstein Case” that “push[ed] the outer boundaries of the law and due process.” Or, as the Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone put it in an essay for The Platypus Review earlier this month, “Critics of Trump’s prosecution are correct that it is a Stalinist Beria-style ‘show me the man and I will find the crime’ targeting not of an offense but a person whose guilt is presumed.”

The second major story broke on Friday afternoon, when President Joe Biden gave a speech announcing what he described as an “Israeli” proposal for an “enduring cease-fire” in Gaza. The proposed deal superficially resembled previously reported Israeli proposals but, crucially, called for a “permanent end to hostilities” and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as part of Phase 2:

The speech came as a shock to the Israelis, who, subsequent reporting revealed, had agreed to a broad “framework” in ongoing negotiations with Hamas but did not expect Biden to make the terms public and did not consider the deal their final offer. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Monday that the deal presented by Biden was “incomplete” and that there were “gaps” between it and the Israeli offer; he also echoed comments from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant from over the weekend that Israel would not accept an end to the war until Hamas is destroyed. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Hamas leaders said “they haven’t seen an Israeli proposal that matches the potential deal Biden described.” Both sides agreed that the Israelis had not committed to a “permanent end to hostilities,” which they characterized as a Biden invention.

Netanyahu and Gallant might have been surprised by Biden’s speech, but a certain former U.S. president was not:

In other words, if you think this stunt was about pressuring Hamas, rather than the Israelis, to end the war, we’ve got a floating pier in Gaza to sell you. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Tablet Deputy Editor Jeremy Stern interviews former Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Member of Parliament Benjamin Haddad on the Jewish Question in France

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The Rest

→Hamas negotiators are demanding a “detailed proposal in writing that reflects what Biden described and includes a comprehensive and lasting cease-fire,” according to Arab mediators quoted in The Wall Street Journal. The same article notes that the Israeli proposal Hamas received committed only to a period of “sustainable calm” and not to the “permanent end to hostilities” described by Biden, and that Hamas’ Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, feels no pressure to make a deal, given his belief that Israel’s Gaza campaign “is turning the country into an international pariah.” A report in the Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, shared by @Osint613 on X, added that Hamas is demanding “written guarantees from the United States, obliging Israel to adhere to the agreement.”

→In Israel meanwhile, two of Netanyahu’s nationalist coalition partners, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, have threatened to leave the government—thus forcing new elections—if Netanyahu agrees to the Biden proposal. “If, God forbid, the government decides to accept this offer of surrender,” Smotrich told reporters on Monday, “we will not be a part of it.” 

→President Biden is expected to announce an executive order “shutting down” the U.S. southern border as early as Tuesday, according to a report in Politico. The order will cite Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which authorizes the president to “suspend the entry of all aliens” if he deems their entry to be “detrimental to the interests of the United States”—which is exactly the same authority we cited in our Feb. 5 Big Story on the failed Senate border deal, when Biden was claiming he’d already “done all I can do” on the border and needed Congress to grant him new authority. According to the Politico story, “administration officials have discussed an average of 4,000 daily border crossings over the course of a week” as the metric that would trigger the shutdown. Few further details are available, but in the shutdown authority unveiled as part of the February deal, the government was required to continue processing 1,400 “asylum seekers” per day—equivalent to more than half a million per year—even while the border was “shut down”. 

→Here’s a roundup of some other recent border news:

• The New York Post reported Sunday that since 2022, the Biden administration has granted de facto amnesty to more than 350,000 migrants by quietly terminating their asylum cases without a decision, which means they are legally free to roam inside the United States.

• A Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report released in May found that DHS has “not been monitoring” humanitarian parole expiration for 77,000 Afghans granted two-year paroles after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. According to Fox News reporter Bill Melugin’s summary of the findings, DHS has “no process or component whatsoever for monitoring parole expiration for the Afghan parolees, or any humanitarian parole recipients in general.” The Biden administration has granted humanitarian parole to more than 1 million migrants since 2021.

• The Post also reported on Sunday that the administration had granted more than 3.3 million federal work permits to migrants, many of whom are in the country illegally. U.S. law requires asylum seekers to wait 180 days before applying for a work permit, but under the Biden administration’s expanded parole authority, parolees are granted immediate eligibility for a federal work permit and a Social Security card. The expansion of these work permits, the Post notes, was in turn critical for recent legislation in California and Illinois allowing noncitizens to become police officers.

→Jury selection started Monday in Hunter Biden’s Delaware gun case, in which the First Son faces three firearms felonies and a maximum of 25 years in prison. Hunter is charged with:

1. A violation of U.S. Code §922(a)(6) for lying on Form 4473, which asks potential gun buyers if they are an “unlawful user of” or “addicted to” drugs. This charge carries a 10-year sentence because, ironically, then Sen. Joe Biden demanded a doubling of penalties for 922(a)(6) violations in the 1994 crime bill.

2. A related charge of violating §924(a)(1)(A) for lying to the gun dealer, with a potential five-year sentence.

3. Illegal possession of a firearm by a person who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” under §922(g)(3), which carries a potential 10-year sentence.

For a refresher on the behavior that got Hunter into trouble, we can turn to a report from Joe Simonson and Andrew Kerr of The Washington Free Beacon from June of last year. Citing texts and emails recovered from Hunter’s laptop, Simonson and Kerr reveal that in the 48 hours leading up to Hunter’s Oct. 12, 2018, purchase of a .38 revolver, Hunter was dodging bills from his accountant (for $800,000 he owed in back taxes), bank (for upwards of $65,000 in credit card debt), and ex-wife, while wiring money to his dead brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, and her sister, both of whom were his lovers at the time. The day before the gun purchase, he arranged to buy crack from an individual known only as “Q” at a 7/11, and that evening he withdrew $800 from an ATM. Seven days after the purchase, on Oct. 19, Hallie texted Hunter a picture of crack paraphernalia he had left on a table; four days later, she threw the gun into a trash can behind a grocery store across the street from a high school, where it was discovered by a homeless man searching for cans and bottles. The man reported the gun to police. 

Hunter has claimed he was sober on the day of the gun purchase, but in his memoir, he wrote that he was smoking crack “every 15 minutes” around the time he bought the gun, and federal prosecutors have claimed they discovered cocaine residue on Hunter’s gun pouch. In a separate video, dated Oct. 18, 2018, a nude Hunter can be seen waving around a different gun while cavorting with a prostitute in a hotel room. Crack cocaine residue and paraphernalia are visible in the background.  

→Chart of the Day:

That’s from a Thursday article in The Wall Street Journal on the “axis of evasion”—the de facto economic bloc, centered around China, that has sprung up to evade U.S. economic sanctions. China receives discounted oil while Iran, Russia, and Venezuela receive hard currency and access to sanctioned goods—such as electronic components for drones and other advanced weapons—from China. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Tablet Paris: An Introduction, by Marco Roth

Ten years after bloody Islamist attacks sent thousands of French Jews fleeing to Israel, France feels surprisingly resilient—while American Jews fear what comes next

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The Jewish Question in French Politics

Former Prime Minister Manuel Valls and rising parliamentary star Benjamin Haddad sit down with Tablet to talk Islamic separatism, anti-Jewish hatred, rebuilding a Republican left, and whether the center can hold

by Jeremy Stern

In the first act of Prayer for the French Republic, Joshua Harmon’s 2024 play about a French Jewish family struggling to decide whether to remain in France, the son, Daniel—who wears a kippah in public, despite his mother’s pleading—comes home with his head and face bloodied. “Who did this to him?” his mother cries. “Who do you think?” responds the father.

The audience understands that the assailants are French Muslims or Muslim migrants, though the fact remains unspoken. By the third act, the family decides to leave France for Israel. But in the end, the biggest factor in their painful decision is not the real threat of Islamist violence that began the drama. It is the belabored but entirely hypothetical threat of Marine Le Pen and her right-wing National Rally party winning the next election. The Benhamou family is therefore spurred to question their future in France because of the danger posed by the country’s Muslim immigrant population—and ultimately leaves because the political party that promises to reduce Muslim immigration to France might win. Harmon tips his hand in an unintentionally funny scene, when the family refuses to consider migrating to the United States not because they are French, but because of the still more severe threat to Jewish safety posed by Donald Trump.

No one could mistake Prayer for a French play, given the distinctively American confusion that pervades it. But in the pains it takes to avoid appearing Islamophobic at all costs, seeking refuge instead in the more comfortable threat of right-wing Jew-hatred (remember the Nazis!), it does reflect an intellectual trap that has ensnared the left in France as much as its counterpart in the United States. Which is why when I saw the play on Broadway in January, I thought—as I often have since Oct. 7—of Manuel Valls.

France’s Socialist prime minister from March of 2014 until December 2016, Valls has a legitimate claim to be the man who did more than any other to hold France together during its greatest crisis in half a century. During a spate of anti-Jewish terror incidents in 2014, and the even more deadly equal-opportunity terror wave that followed in 2015-16—including the killings at Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher kosher market in Paris, the Bataclan massacre, and the mass murder in Nice on Bastille Day—France was riven by debates over the sources and meaning of Muslim terror, not to mention the basic ability of the state to protect its citizens. Did the conservative Muslim and Islamist networks in France have decisive influence over the killers, or were they all “lone wolves”? Was it a coincidence that the Bataclan was owned by two Jewish brothers, and that Charlie Hebdo was seen as being “Zionist-controlled”? To what extent could Israel’s military actions in Gaza at the time be blamed for the bloodshed in France?

Valls, a member of the Socialist Party since 1980, would have none of it. He not only led a flurry of legislation to expand counterterrorism surveillance and intelligence capabilities, travel restrictions, monitoring, and detention, and emergency measures like house arrests, searches and seizures, and augmented security for Jewish schools, businesses, and synagogues. As cries of Juif, la France n’est pas a toi (“Jew, France is not yours”), “Jews, out of France,” and “the story of the gas chambers is bullshit,” were heard throughout a "Day of Rage" march in Paris, featuring a witch’s ball of tens of thousands of far-right, anti-abortion activists, royalists, and Salafis performing the “quenelle” (a reverse Nazi salute popularized by the antisemitic Iran-backed comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala), Valls also gave a series of sober, nondemagogic, at times Churchillian speeches and interviews tying the security of French Jewry to the survival of the Fifth Republic itself.

“Antisemitism, this old European disease,” Valls said in a speech after the Day of Rage, “has taken a new form. It spreads on the internet, in our popular neighborhoods, with a youth that has lost its points of reference, has no conscience of history, and who hides itself behind a fake anti-Zionism.” “It is legitimate to criticize the policies of Israel. This criticism exists in Israel itself,” Valls elaborated in a later interview. “But this is not what we are talking about in France. This is radical criticism of the very existence of Israel, which is antisemitic. There is an incontestable link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Behind anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”

“The choice was made by the French Revolution in 1789 to recognize Jews as full citizens,” an impassioned Valls explained. “To understand what the idea of the republic is about, you have to understand the central role played by the emancipation of the Jews. It is a founding principle.”

The former prime minister, who was born in Barcelona, said of the steep rise in the departure of French Jews for Israel during the terror wave that, “If 100,000 French people of Spanish origin were to leave, I would never say that France is not France anymore. But if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.”

After he praised Jacques Chirac for being the first president to officially acknowledge France’s complicity in the Holocaust in 1995 (“He had the courage to free us from ourselves”), Valls was savaged by the National Front (now rebranded “National Rally”) party for what they called his “hatred of France.” His willingness to stand accused of such nonsense—including the charge, made by an ex-minister of foreign affairs, that he was under the control of his Jewish wife—contrasted sharply with then-President and fellow Socialist François Hollande, who sought to avoid the impression of “taking sides” by supporting French Jews too much against their attackers.

After eventually supporting and then falling out with Emmanuel Macron, Valls—a lifelong member of the political left, whose cabinet as prime minister included members of the Radical Party of the Left—has since declared the Socialist Party to be “dead,” and has wandered the political wilderness, including his strange decision in 2019 to stand for mayor of Barcelona in order to prevent the election of a Catalonian separatist. Of late, he’s written a book, Le courage guidait leurs pas (“Courage Guided Their Steps”), about Clemenceau, Louise Michel, Camus, Malraux, Charb (the assassinated caricaturist of Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad cartoons), and others, and occasionally airs his opinions in the outlets whose audiences enjoy hearing from him nowadays—namely, those on the right.

The “I didn’t leave the left, the left left me” man or woman is by now a tired and annoying archetype in America, and often unconvincing. Valls came by his political journey more honestly, in the face of much steeper professional stakes, and in circumstances when the costs of his conviction-laden style of leadership were much higher. Which is why I thought of him, and what he must be thinking, in the days after Oct. 7, when “pro-Palestinian demonstrators” chanted “gas the Jews!” in Sydney, “fuck the Jews!” in London, gave Nazi salutes in Paris, and as American city streets and university campuses erupted in a frenzy of Jew hatred—with the institutional backing of the country’s left, of course.

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I spoke with Valls in a suite at the Pavillon de la Reine, a hotel in the fashionable Marais district of Paris formerly known as the Pletzl, where Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the East settled between 1880 and the 1930s. As it turns out, Valls grew up in this neighborhood in a Spanish family with no particular relationship to Judaism or Jews. He arrives in modified former statesman dress: glasses, blue cardigan, and tie. Our translator, Tablet’s critic-at-large and ambivalent Francophile Marco Roth, tells me that Valls speaks in the splendid cadences of the French state.

“My father, who was a painter, was friends with Vladimir Yankelevich, who was a great literary critic and theorist,” he says. “Yankelevich was very perceptive, even in the ’60s, of the link between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. He wrote an important book in ’67 [Le Pardon], which I read when I was young, about how the sort of high-minded anti-Zionism was actually antisemitism. And after I was president of the Young Socialists in France after 1982, I visited Israel many times, and had relationships in the Labor Party and also Mapai. I had a classical understanding of Israeli politics … I deplored the assassination of Rabin and mourned the loss of Shimon Peres to Netanyahu. It was a very typical, socialist Israeli profile.”

Valls’ understanding changed in the 2000s, first with the Second Intifada and then the infamous Durban conference. At the time, Valls was mayor of Évry, a town 30 kilometers south of Paris. “I saw firsthand these antisemitic acts committed by young people who were the children of North African immigrants,” he says. “Broken shop windows, breaking into synagogues and attacks on Shabbat, that sort of thing. And you understood that there was an antisemitic tendency that was starting to emerge from Muslim immigration. And little by little a part of the left, not the whole left, but a part of the left, began to align itself with this tendency.”

His experience in Évry, he says, has influenced his understanding over the last quarter-century of anti-Zionism as a socially sanctioned but poorly veiled form of an ancient hatred. “I decided I would always state this clearly in whatever political role I was in—and with the awareness that should the Jews leave France, this would be a trauma and a profound change for the idea of French civilization … There is a civilizational link between and dependence between Israel and France. These are thoroughly linked, the civilizational idea of France and the civilizational idea of Israel.”

When I ask if he believes there are implications for the peace and security of France if Hamas is not defeated in Gaza, Valls explains that “there are two front lines in Europe. Ukraine is one. And then there is the struggle against Islamism, which is a front that runs through Europe and the world, including of course in the Muslim world. Islamism, Salafism, the Muslim Brotherhood, political Islam, Iran—which are at the same time different from each other but also complementary in that they are all at war with us. They are in a civilizational war with the target of changing the Muslim community in Europe.”

“If we give into Hamas,” he says, now looking past me, “if we fail to bring our support to Israel in this difficult moment, there would be a big breach in Europe. It would be seen as a sign of weakness. This is why the best way of fighting against all kinds of antisemitism is to support Israel. But we must support Israel in its struggle against Islamism, which is the same struggle in a different form that we are waging here. The French were astonished by the resemblance between what happened in the Negev and what happened here at Bataclan.”

“I've sadly become fashionable again since October 7th,” he says, “because I've always been saying the same things over and over again on Islamism and antisemitism. But by the way, I don't really like ‘antisemitism’ as a word now, because Jew-hating and Israel-hating are the same thing.”

I mention that the night before, when my Tablet colleagues and I had dinner with Bernard-Henri Lévy and his friends at the Quayside landmark Lapérouse, Salman Rushdie, who happened to be dining in the room next door, popped in to say hello to his comrade Bernard (and to congratulate the rest of us on what looked to him like a large amount of wine that had been drunk). Rushdie, of course, has had a fair amount to say about the uses of the term “Islamophobia.”

“The battle of words, or language, is important,” says Valls. “I am thinking, for example, of what people are trying to impose on us in our understanding of Gaza in order to discredit Israel. ‘The Nazification of Israel.’ ‘Apartheid.’ ‘Colonization,’ a word that comes from the white West and its humiliation of the colonized. And now, of course, ‘genocide,’ which is the word being used to discredit Israel and to put its existence into question. And ‘Islamophobia’ is part of this war of language. I've always found Salman Rushdie's explications of this subject to be enlightening. Including in his most recent book, Knife, which I tore through.”

Valls recounts Rushdie’s explanation of how the term Islamophobia was invented mainly by the Iranian regime to deflect criticism of Islamism and to discredit people like himself, for instance, who are opposed to any kind of totalitarian ideology. He chafes at “the political left that has shown no support for Rushdie or Charlie Hebdo,” which he says is particularly inexcusable on the part of the French—owing to their experience, within living memory, of the Algerian Civil War of the 1980s, when Algerian artists and the country’s intelligentsia were exterminated.

“France's good luck is that there are still many intellectuals, both on the right and the left, who refuse to accept this conceptualization and will support Rushdie. People like Bernard-Henri Lévy, [Pascal] Bruckner, Caroline Fourest, politicians like me, and academics here who are fighting against this alliance that we see also in the States between Islamism and wokeism.”

Does Valls, who was the Socialist head of government less than eight years ago, still consider himself a man of the left?

“Yes,” he says solemnly, now looking down at his shoes. “To twist a beautiful phrase from Albert Camus: I will die on the left despite itself, and despite me.” He says there are times that he despairs of the left because of what he sees as its incomprehension of an evolving world. He acknowledges that journalistic outlets on the right are now the only “safe space” where politicians and intellectuals like him can express themselves and defend their ideas, and that “this is a problem.”

Valls believes that after the 2008 financial crisis overturned the social democratic consensus in France, and pushed the diminishing middle class into the arms of populists, a significant portion of the country’s left went looking for a substitute base of support. “The French working class is gone,” he explains, “and there's a new proletariat. It is composed of minority Muslim and African immigrants.” And of course,” he is now speaking in invisible air quotes, “they’re in this position because of capitalism, and therefore they've been put there by the Jews. They've been oppressed by the white Occidental world and colonized by them—therefore, Israel. So we are all guilty. And one must try to understand this proletariat, including their acts of resistance, of which Hamas is a part.”

“This is obviously a grotesque reading, but it seems to be working. Especially among the young, and especially on university campuses.”

So what kind of leftist is he? “My left is—I'm a universalist of equality between men and women. Freedom of conscience and of religion, but in its place in the private sphere. You must defend democracy, defend Salman Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo, and all of the teachers who were killed here in France. Universalism and secularism, that's my left. I define myself first and foremost as a French Republican, and so I'm frightened by the vicissitudes and the craziness of the left.”

Valls says there were two clear moments in the last several months. One was Oct. 7. The other was Nov. 12, when 100,000 people demonstrated in Paris against antisemitism. “Emmanuel Macron made a real mistake by not participating, saying he did not want to appear divisive,” says Valls. “Muslim organizations also did not participate, apart from some personalities here and there. But the most important thing is that, for the first time since the Dreyfus affair, the right-wing populists—who are really no longer the extreme right of the past, it must be said—participated in a demonstration against antisemitism, whereas a part of the left didn't participate. It wasn't just [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon, but also unions and activists, and all of these people chose not to participate because they believed that a demonstration against antisemitism was in fact a demonstration in support of Israel. This is an amazing, astonishing anthropological or political or sociological fact or event.”

When I ask if there is a political left in the Western world that Valls admires or identifies with, he responds, without hesitating, “No.” “Social democracy is in crisis,” he explains, “because it won. It thought that with the fall of the Soviet bloc, history was over, and Europe was social democracy. But it hadn't quite understood the essential thing, which is that there was also an identity crisis … People need to have a culture and an identity. They can't be dispossessed of it. Whereas globalization does, in fact, deprive people of this sense of cultural belonging.”

I am under the impression, I tell him, that unlike the Anglosphere, France has been more or less immune to wokeism. “It is true that in France there's a profusion of books against wokeism and its culture,” he says. “And I think we have the best specialist on Islamism, Gilles Kepel, who you know, and also Hugo Micheron. But we also of course have had famous intellectuals who often were complicit in Stalinism, and those who were seduced at the moment of the Iranian Revolution by the Ayatollah Khomeini and what he represented. Especially Foucault, who’s of course had a huge influence on your country. Really, it is the whole political and intellectual left that's in a state of crisis.”

Meanwhile, there is no question that what passes for the hard right in Europe is rising. In the European Parliament elections, which will be held this weekend, Marine Le Pen’s party is polling in first at 33%, ahead of Macron’s Ensemble alliance at 15%, the Socialists, led by Raphaël Glucksmann, at 14%, and France Unbowed, led by the Jew-baiting Jean-Luc Mélenchon, at 7%. (Of Glucksmann, Valls told me, “He's very clear on Ukraine and the criticism of Putin. But on Israel, he's holding a slightly less courageous position, less than his father. But the other day he was chased out of a demonstration by extreme left militants wearing kaffiyehs. So he's being put back into his Jewish identity in any case.”)

At the same time, European elections are often less a harbinger of national election results than a way for voters to blow off steam. Nor does Marine Le Pen’s version of the right appear to pose any particular threat to French Jews. The political figure to Le Pen’s right, the former presidential candidate and political pundit Eric Zemmour, who is also running for a seat in the European Parliament, is himself Jewish, and has a significant following among French Jews. So for better or worse, the battles of greatest concern to French Jews will be fought on the left, where Valls has made his lonely stand.

As we said goodbye, I thought of the Synagogue des Tournelles, where my Tablet colleagues and I attended a Yom HaShoah service a few nights before. Originally built for Jews from Alsace-Lorraine, the Roman-Byzantine style building has since become a home for predominantly North African Jews, although the clergy remains mostly Ashkenaz. In his sermon, the rabbi made a point of placing the massacre of Oct. 7 on a continuum with the Shoah and with the expulsion of Jews from the Arab world from 1948 until the early 1970s. For France’s dwindling numbers of Ashkenazi Jews, the 1940s remains the great catastrophe in the lives of their families, whereas for the Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan Jews of France, it is the 1960s. Oct. 7, as Valls understood, is the through line for all of them.

Read the rest of the essay, including Stern’s interview with French politician and pundit Benjamin Haddad, here.