Peter Stroo

We keep telling the French Jews to leave. It's not that easy. Had coffee with my French colleague. It could have been me, except for Dreyfus. It could have been me, if I hadn't broken my parents' heart and left anyway. A story. " I'm French. That is what I tell myself when the news come in, as if loyalty were still a kind of protection. My mother’s people have been in Alsace since the sixteen hundreds. We are cousins of Alfred Dreyfus— the name is still said in the family the way other people say the name of a grandfather who came home from the trenches. My father was an orphan of the Shoah. He arrived with nothing, the French police arrested and sent his parents to the Nazis, and stripped him of his citizenship for 12 years. But he decided France was worth loving anyway. He taught us the Republic was not perfect, but it was ours to cherish and make better. I believed him. I finished Sciences Po in the happy 2000s and walked out into Paris feeling that, for the first time, Jews were completely at home. I wanted the big corporate firms. I had the grades, but I do not work on Saturdays. In those years that was still a requirement, not a preference. So I built a private practice, not so bad. My husband is an engineer. Between us we pay the taxes, the school fees, the mortgage, vacations in France. In 2023 we went to Israel before the catastrophe. We were happy to be French Jews. We told ourselves we were the proof that it worked. Of course there were problems... but not like now. There is always the other tax, the one that never appears on any form. Kosher food costs more. The shops are fewer. Schools... The need to always stay a model citizen—never the one who asks for special treatment, never the one who makes the room uncomfortable, never the one who reminds anyone that the Republic’s universalism has always had exceptions. We paid the four hundred and fifty euros a month for each of the three children so they could go to the Jewish school, because the public system is no longer a place you send a child with our last name. I smiled at clients who made jokes about Jewish lawyers ethics but expected me to twist the laws for them as a matter of course. I stayed honest. I proved, year after year, that I belonged. Now many clients are "uncomfortable". Some say it is “because Palestine.” Others do not say anything; their partners simply will not sit across from a Jew. I watch the billing time like a hawk. Last month they sprayed my plaque in the street with a "Zionist w...re" and a "Palestine map." Outside, the city is still sweeping glass from the weekend. A synagogue in the nineteenth was ransacked. Groups warned m people not to go for afternoon prayers because the streets were not safe. I know the figures—more than thirteen hundred acts last year, half of every religious crime in the country, and we are less than one percent. I know friends are leaving. Nearly four thousand already this year. And I see the new arrivals to France. They do not arrive as model citizens. They do not hide their names or their calendars or their demands. They lay down their own rules in the neighborhoods, in the schools, in the streets, and the Republic that once asked me to prove I was French enough now asks nothing of them but taxes me extra to care for them. Their Djihadi Antisemitism is" an opinion", not as the old poison it is. I am still expected to be the quiet one, the integrated one, the one who pays the extra private guards when they overwhelm the police. If we go, my mother stays. 1/2