“We’ve spent 20 years trying to explain to politicians who did not want to see it that there is an Islamist antisemitic threat in France,” said Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, the French managing director of the American Jewish Committee in Europe. “That becomes more complicated when it looks like Jews are racist, when racism in all its forms gets legitimized and when a cohesive Jewish position gets profoundly split by Mr. Zemmour.”
The French Jewish community of about half a million people is the largest in Western Europe. Some of them, particularly those of Sephardic descent living in poor suburban areas where episodes involving antisemitism from the Muslim community have become more common, find Mr. Zemmour’s uncompromising anti-immigrant and anti-Islam message appealing.
“There is a part of the Jewish community that sees in him the man who will resolve problems of security and violent Islamism,” said Francis Kalifat, the president-elect of the Council of Jewish Institutions in France. “But you have to see his whole message, which, while full of love for the grandeur of France, drags the country back to what was most detestable in its history.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/world/europe/eric-zemmour-france-jewish-bernard-henri-levy.html
