French Jews are not particularly ecstatic about the prospect of an FN win. Newsweek interviewed Jews in Paris’ Le Marais district, the historic Jewish “Pletzle,” and several expressed concerns at Le Pen’s momentum. Marine Le Pen’s father is virulently anti-Semitic, and ran his party along those points of faith, complete with crematorium jokes. A 51-year-old Jewish shopkeeper named Jerome told Newsweek about a video he’d watched on YouTube, showing Le Pen rubbing her hands together in satisfaction over Friday’s mayhem.
Marine Le Pen is boycotted by mainstream French Jews. The Ukraine oligarch Vadim Rabinovich, founder of the European Jewish Parliament, met with the FN leader last July, only to be condemned by the European Jewish Congress, whose president, Moshe Kantor, said in a statement: “That any European Jew would ever consider themselves available to fig-leaf racists and anti-Semites is shocking in the extreme.”
An old FN supporter told Newsweek, “The attacks were a catastrophe for the country, our government is a catastrophe, it doesn’t control our borders.” For him, and for millions of others in wounded France, Le Pen represents a willingness to rid the country of Islamists, and to make sure no one new comes in. How she would define the difference between a terror-harboring Islamist and just a swarthy guy going to shul is what frightens Parisian Jews.
