There is nothing like an inferno to rouse men from a summertime torpor. France has been treated to a series of forest fires in the past month, sometimes touching popular holiday destinations. Bruno Karsenti sees another conflagration on the horizon, and he analyzes a new type of arson. The scene is the country’s National Assembly. The pyromaniacs are lawmakers from the radical left France Insoumise (LFI) party, who recently introduced a resolution calling Israel an Apartheid state. LFI’s behavior, he argues, conceals a profound failure of the left in Europe, for which Jews and non-Jews will pay a heavy price.
K. had originally planned to devote this entire issue to reprints of some our articles on Marcel Proust. Paris’ Museum of Jewish Art and History is now running an exhibit on the Jewish roots and influences of the author. On June 28, our magazine hosted a soiree at the MahJ that included a private visit to this exhibit, on display through August 28. Antoine Compagnon, a long-time professor at the Collège de France and a newly-inducted immortel of the Academie Française, member of the scientific council of the exhibition (Marcel Proust. Du coté de la mère) and author of a book named Proust du côté juif (Proust: From the Jewish Side), deserves much credit for focusing attention on the Jewishness of Proust. We are reprinting this week three of our pieces on Proust and Jewish identity. The first is from our contributor David Haziza, who discerns in In Search of Lost Time the possible affinities with the Talmud and even the Kabbalah. Milo Lévy-Bruhl, in our second reprinted article, reviews Compagnon’s book Proust du coté de la mère. He examines how In Search of Lost Time was received by a rising generation of Jewish writers in the interwar period, including Albert Cohen, André Spire and Edmond Fleg. He situates Proust, the man and his family history, in the dialectic of emancipation and return that have cadenced Jewish existence since the French Revolution. Avishag Zafrani, in our last article for this week’s reprise, delivers a reflection on the visual aspects of the mahJ’s Proust exhibit. We stress that our reading of Proust as a Jewish author is meant to add to, rather than substitute for existing interpretations.
