(Jewish Group) With antisemitism rising, a Jewish family wonders -- is it safe to be Jewish in France

With antisemitism rising, a Jewish family wonders — is it safe to be Jewish in France (or America)?

Three days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, two weeks after an armed gunman held a rabbi and three congregants hostage at a Texas synagogue and less than a day after swastika-waving Neo-Nazis chanted “The Jew is the devil” outside an Orlando shopping plaza to deafening silence by the Florida governor, I saw Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic.” It’s about a family that narrowly survived the Shoah and their agonized debate over the country they call home.

I guess you could call the play relevant and its lessons important for us – even if it’s not set in the U.S.

Harmon, the Drama Desk Award-winning writer of “Admissions,” “Significant Other” and “Bad Jews,” has penned an incisive play about five generations of a French family, splitting its runtime between the 1940s and 2010s. He set his drama in France because it’s where his own family is from, but there’s more to it than that.

France, as writers like Jeffrey Goldberg have observed, inspired by some of the same events as Harmon, is in many ways a bellwether for European Jewry. It was the first European country to emancipate its Jews, affording them full citizenship and a full entrée to national contradictions. It is the country of Celine and Proust, the slander of Dreyfus and the “J’Accuse” of Zola, the Vichy puppet state and the Resistance. Three-quarters of French Jews survived the Holocaust and the country maintains the largest Jewish population on the continent, many of its Jews having found sanctuary there from persecution in North Africa.

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