Contemporary Authors

• The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2015
• Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2015
• Colonialism and the Jews Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 2017

1. The burdens of brotherhood : Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France https://lccn.loc.gov/2015010848 Katz, Ethan, author. The burdens of brotherhood : Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France / Ethan B. Katz. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Harvard University Press, 2015. 465 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm DS135.F83 K378 2015 ISBN: 9780674088689 (alk. paper)

• Ethan Katz - http://www.ethankatz.net/about.html

  About Me
  I am a historian and author who seeks to write the critical history of the present. That is, I attempt to give in-depth, evidence-based historical analysis on questions of evident contemporary relevance, forcing us to step away from what we think we know to consider other deeper causal factors and multiple possible outcomes. My work focuses on modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with specialties in the history of modern France and its empire, modern Jewish history, and Muslim-Jewish relations.

  Publications and Collaborations

  My first book is a history of Jewish-Muslim relations in France since World War I, entitled The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France. The book was published in autumn 2015 by Harvard University Press and recently won a 2015 National Jewish Book Award. In summer 2015, I also published a collection of essays, Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (University of Pennsylvania Press) that reconsiders how Jewish studies and the larger "secularism debate" can be brought into fruitful conversation.

  Currently, I am embarked on a set of new projects. Along with my co-editors Lisa Leff and Maud Mandel, I am currently completing a new collected volume, Colonialism and the Jews, which we hope will offer the most robust treatment to date of the relationship between Jewish history and colonial history and will appear in 2016 with Indiana University Press. I am also in the early stages of a new project provisionally entitled Freeing the Empire: The Jewish Uprising That Helped the Allies Win the War. This book seeks to chronicle the riveting and fascinating yet little-known story of an uprising in Algiers from 1940 to 1943 that proved vital to the success of Operation Torch. In the process, the work will examine larger issues such as the meaning of the choice to resist and the complexity of the relationship between colonialism and the Holocaust.
  ​

  Teaching
  ​
  At the University of Cincinnati, I teach courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level on modern Europe, the Mediterranean, Jewish history, Jews and Muslims, religion in the modern world, modern France and its empire, and historical methodologies. I have been invited to present at universities throughout the United States including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UCLA, Michigan, Brown, Columbia, Amherst, Williams, and Boston College, as well as in France and Israel.

  ​
  Scholarships and Awards
  I am grateful for numerous fellowships and awards. These include, most notably: The National Jewish Book Award; a Chateaubriand Fellowship of the French Embassy to the United States; a George L. Mosse distinguished graduate fellowship from the University of Wisconsin; dissertation grants from the Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Society for French Historical Studies; faculty research fellowships from the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan (declined), and the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati.

• Marginalia - http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/about/contributors/ethan-katz/

  Ethan Katz is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France, which will be published (2015) by Harvard University Press, and co-editor of Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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• Jewish Review of Books
  https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1720/the-view-from-paris-a-rejoinder-to-ethan-katz-and-maud-mandel/
  Word count: 2765

  CONTROVERSY
  The View from Paris: A Rejoinder to Ethan Katz and Maud Mandel
  By Shmuel Trigano | Summer 2015
  1 Comment E-mail Print
  Shmuel Trigano's original article on French anti-Semitism can be found here.

  Katz and Mandel's reply can be found here.

  "Unlike Professor Trigano,” Ethan Katz and Maud Mandel write, “we have the luxury of writing from the other side of the Atlantic.” Indeed.

  Professors Katz and Mandel not only write from the other side of the Atlantic, they view the anti-Semitic violence we Jews are living through here in France through American-made binoculars. There is, perhaps, nothing wrong with citing the work of other American academics on recent French history as if it were definitive (“as John Bowen and Joan Scott have convincingly shown,” and so on), or writing as if something like the multicultural policies of American university campuses (or even America) could address the difficult and distinctively European social issues France and French Jewry face right now, but the stridency of their tone is surprising. My essay, which attempted to condense 30 years of history, scholarship, and increasingly painful experience into an account of my “journey through French anti-Semitism,” makes “historical leaps,” “overlooks” this, and “ignores” that; my views are “distorted,” my claims are “unsubstantiated,” my factual claims are “simply untrue,” and my emphases are “undue.” I might have expected more from academic colleagues; after all I have edited two journals and written 11 books on the subject, most recently a collection of pieces titled Fifteen Years of Loneliness: French Jews 2000–2015. But the attempt to reduce my arguments, observation, and analysis to a mere state of mind, and to do so in such heated prose, is, in the end, revealing.

  One thing that particularly exercises Katz and Mandel is my statement that it is problematic that after virtually every condemnation of a vicious attack by a Muslim or Muslims upon Jews there is a warning not to slip into Islamophobia or conflate Islam with terrorism. As I wrote, this is a public ritual that involves “exculpation of Islam from any responsibility” for the violence. It’s pretty clear that they think that I myself have slipped into Islamophobia here. I am “quick,” they say, “to criticize Islam as a whole,” and have fallen “into a vision of Islam as characterized from the Qur’an to the present by an unceasing, immutable hatred of Jews.” But of course hatred doesn’t have to be unceasing and immutable to be both a genuine historical phenomenon and dangerous. It is not me, but Katz and Mandel who are indulging in wishful historical thinking here.

  Further, whether Mark Cohen was categorically right that “the pre-modern history of anti-Judaism was far more severe and persistent in Christian Europe than in the Islamic world” may be less clear than they think. Certainly it was different. They might usefully consult David Littman and Paul Fenton’s massive collection of texts L’Exil au Maghreb, la condition juive sous l’islam 1148–1912, for instance, or compare the 1066 massacre in Granada to the depredations of the First Crusade in 1096. With regard to more modern times, they might consult, among others, a book I edited covering the period from 1940 until 1970, The Exclusion of the Jews from Arab Lands. And, of course, modern forms of radical Islam, such as Salafism and Wahhabism, are, yes, precisely modern, but that does not mean that they are not Islamic movements or that their teachings do not have deep roots in the tradition.

  If these modern forms of radical Islam were not so widely and firmly entrenched and if there were large Arab and Islamic institutions, rather than just a few courageous individuals, that loudly and unequivocally condemned the violence, then such lectures on why Muslim anti-Semitism in France was not historically inevitable might have more relevance. As it is, the apparent function of both the politician’s automatic discourse and the present professorial chiding is to keep one from thinking about the nature of empirical Islam as it actually exists in the mosques and on the streets—and what might be required of it to achieve real social integration in France.

  Nor will it do, as Katz and Mandel almost suggest, to make of the current crisis a conflict between so-called Algerian Jews (including, they write, “Professor Trigano himself,” though the category has not existed for more than half a century and we have, in fact, been “technically”—one notes their adjective—French since 1870) and the Muslim community. In fact, I went into some detail on the origins of the current situation in French politics of the 1980s.

  Katz and Mandel are, if anything, even more incensed by my political genealogy of the present situation in which French Jews find themselves. The core of my analysis was that President Mitterrand backed SOS Racisme in order to co-opt the “Marche des Beurs” (which threatened the Socialist Party’s power) and create the specter of a fascist threat in the form of Le Pen by forming an “anti-fascist” front. Given the still-fresh memory of the Shoah, it was politically and symbolically important that SOS Racisme grew out of the French Jewish Students’ Union. In imputing a large historical responsibility to Mitterrand and his administration, I am precisely not blaming immigrants and Muslims, as Katz and Mandel would seem to think. What I am saying is that both the Jewish community and Muslims were politically instrumentalized by Mitterrand to terrible historical effect.

  Katz and Mandel’s description of SOS Racisme itself is extraordinarily, almost comically, uncritical: “Working together to create a just and peaceful France, these activists put aside their differences . . .” Their only real critique of my account of the political use and eventual effect of this movement in French politics is to argue over whether “Jews=Immigrants” was its most important slogan. Suffice it to say that it was significant, for the equation it asserted underlay the pervading silence that would, for a long time, greet anti-Jewish violence. It was a conflict between two groups somehow alien to French society rather than within it.

  In their conclusion Katz and Mandel acknowledge that “anti-Jewish attitudes and violence are certainly on the rise in France.” And then they go on to another kind of ritual automatic discourse. Since “racism, as is well-known, must be measured by . . . structural limitations that prevent full participation in a given society,” and since Muslims face such limitations and Jews do not, one ought not speak “merely of rising anti-Semitism”—merely!—when “other French citizens are being systematically targeted for discrimination.” Their language here is unintentionally revealing: Anti-Judaism is described passively as being “on the rise,” while Muslims are described as being “systematically targeted.” But of course it is we Jews who feel with good reason that there is a target on our backs. With their little sociological syllogism whose major premise is an unexamined dogma, we are debarred from discussing jihadis killing Jews, or beatings on the street, or the fear we feel on walking into a synagogue or out of a kosher market, because it would “present a skewed picture of the nature of bigotry in contemporary France.”

  As Katz and Mandel say, these are challenging times for France. Fortunately, at least some prominent politicians and policymakers here seem to have stepped back from the kind of wishful ideological thinking to which my American interlocutors are still beholden, but I fear that it is too late. For this is not merely a matter of the proper social and historical description of the situation—though that is where one must begin—but a real national and even Europe-wide political problem. In France, the separation between state and religion was preceded by the formal renunciation of collective status by both Jews and Christians (more precisely Catholic clergy) in order to join the post-revolutionary nation. This was forcibly imposed by the state, and one may think whatever one wants of the process, but it worked. I have considerably less hope than Professors Katz and Mandel for the efficacy of “left-wing multiculturalism.”

  As I write this reply, two more news reports appear on my computer screen of violent attacks against Jews who were targeted—that is the correct word—on the streets of Paris. In one of them, a woman was attacked and beaten by three men who shouted “Hitler did not finish his work.” Such words and actions are no longer uncommon here. They may not be “structural limitations,” but they have restructured our lives. Katz and Mandel write that they “do not wish to trivialize Professor Trigano’s personal experiences,” but they trivialize and misconstrue much more than that.

  Jewish Review of Books
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  About the Author
  Shmuel Trigano is a professor of the sociology of politics and religion at Paris University and founder of the Popular University for Judaism. He is the author of 23 books including, in English, The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah: The Unthought in Political Modernity (SUNY Press) and Philosophy of the Law: The Political in the Torah (Shalem Press). He has just published, in French, Fifteen Years of Loneliness: French Jews 2000–2015 (Berg International).

  Comments
  daized79 on June 19, 2015 at 5:44 pm
  I posted on the execrable piece by Katz and Mandel. And of course Prof. Trigano's response is much classier and eloquent than my own. Although i think I hit some points he doesn't and would appreciate his feedback. One thing I forgot to mention there was that the use of "anti-Judaism" did not escape me after Prof. Trigano's mention of the claim from the Left that Muslims are Semites (!--don't we mean ethnic Arabs?) and therefore can't be antisemitic. Which contains the semantic (excuse the pun) fallacy that the German coinage of "antisemite" means anything more than anti-Jewish. If we must drop the word altogether because the Leftist robots will explode if you tell them that Muslim Arabs are antisemitic, so be it. But it is a childish argument from the Left that lies either in true ignorance or amoral war-by-any-means mentality.

  Here is that previous post:

  I am disheartened that even in the name of "hearing all sides," JROB would publish this biased rant of a critique. Surely someone could have critiqued Trigano's piece with a more neutral viewpoint. Just some examples:

  "[T]he author falls into a vision of Islam as characterized from the Qur’an to the present by an unceasing, immutable hatred of Jews. As numerous scholars such as Mark Cohen have documented, the pre-modern history of anti-Judaism was far more severe and persistent in Christian Europe than in the Islamic world. No serious student of Islamic extremism today, no matter how critical, would claim that jihadists . . . have simply followed Islam’s traditional teachings regarding Jews. Rather, numerous analysts have shown how the leading ideologies . . . which emphasize lethal hatred of Jews . . . are distinctly modern. Such extremists draw selectively on texts like the Qur’an to justify what are in fact radical departures from mainstream tradition. Clearly, the attack at Hypercacher is no more a simple outgrowth of what Professor Trigano calls “the traditional Muslim disparagement of non-Muslims” than was Baruch Goldstein’s Purim massacre of 1994 in a mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs the logical outcome of the ancient Jewish injunction to destroy Amalek and his descendants."

  Wow. First of all, the author said no such thing. Nobody claims Muslim antisemitism is "immutable." That said, it has always existed. The authors of this piece tellingly speak of "emphasis" on "lethal hatred" being modern. Perhaps. Perhaps before the "lethal hatred" was not emphasized over other religious obligation and perhaps before the "emphasis" had been on non-lethal hatred. In fact, I would agree both of those are true. But what a mealy-mouthed way of trying to discredit Trigano and praise Islam. Added together with antisemitism being worse in the Christian world and we are left indeed with high praise of this most tolerant religion. So basically if you don't torture and kill Jews as often as the Christians or don't discriminatorily tax them wuite as heavily or don't deprive them of quite as many civil rights, then you're not antisemitic? And certainly not lethally so?

  It is hard to claim that modern emphasis on lethal hatred of Jews is indeed a break from mainstream tradition when that mainstream tradition had only dealt with Jews as powerless dhimmi. Certainly Mohammed emphasized a lethal hatred of the Jews who had the power to stand up to him in Arabia. The point is that the rise of the Jews in Israel, a previously Muslims land, is something new for Islam to encounter and, relying on that "mainstream tradition," Islam does not generally have good or neutral reaction. In that sense, ironically, some of the antisemitism is indeed caused by Zionism, but only because the Jews are not supposed to have power or self-determination. And if you think that's an okay response, just go hang yourself and get it over with. But again, it is only the emphasis on the lethal hatred--the hatred has always been there as has the episodic lethality.

  And Baruch Goldstein and Amalek? Really? First of all, there is NO Jewish movement that thinks gunning down innocent Muslims is okay. NONE. I don't know what Goldstein thought or didn't think he was doing, but if I had to guess, he thought he was taking revenge for Jewish life (if you need a biblical source for your analogy, how about Reuben and Simon at Shechem?). But second and more importantly, you are once again (the first time was comparing Islam to Christianity) trying to praise and defend Islam by saying see these people are as bad or worse! This is a common (in every sense of the word) and intellectually bankrupt tactic from the Left and has no place in the pages of this magazine.

  "Professor Trigano’s article also equates Muslims with foreigners. As noted above, his critique of the Mitterrand government in the 1980s contrasts Muslims as “newly arrived immigrants” with Jews, whom he insists should never have been identified as a “community of immigration.” Such a distinction belies the complexity of the recent history of Muslims and Jews in France. France’s Jewish population more than doubled in the mid-to-late 20th century due to a large migration wave from North Africa that included Professor Trigano himself. While the Algerian Jews who made up one half of this migration were technically “French,” so too were Algerian Muslims, who had held French citizenship since 1946."

  France's Jewish population doubled only because France had partnered up with Germany in exterminating a quarter of its Jews a decade earlier. I understand the unease at which a Jew says, "I got here first so I'm not an immigrant but you Griener are." But of course in reality the Jews have been in France since the 5th Century at least, the Muslims didn't exist then. France and Jews have been intertwined for over 1,500 years, and have had cultural influence on each other in a way that France has not with the Arabs and Islam have not. That is not to say there has been none--the French wars with the Muslims in the Middle Ages certainly led to cross-cultural influence. But not of the same depth and caliber. The French Jews, at least since the founding of the Republic, have always considered themselves very "French" and comported themselves accordingly. Has this been true of Muslim immigrants? Especially actually religious Muslim immigrants?

  More specifically, you make the assertion that Algeria's Muslims were French citizens since 1949 while Trigano made the assertion that Algeria's Jews had been French citizens since 1870. I don't know which is true or what citizenship meant (that is, it seems, the supposed area of the authors' expertise), but there is a huge difference between 1870 and 1949--and not just in number of years but in eras, one is before WWI and one is after WWII. The political and cultural changes globally and in France are too great to mention.

  After hearing about the harkis, one thing we can all agree on is that France is a "sh**** little country."

• ISLAMiCommentary
  https://islamicommentary.org/2015/11/the-burdens-of-brotherhood-jews-and-muslims-from-north-africa-to-france-book-q-a/
  Word count: 2216

  https://islamicommentary.org/2015/11/the-burdens-of-brotherhood-jews-and-muslims-from-north-africa-to-france-book-q-a/

  The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Book Q & A)
  [ 0 ] November 20, 2015
  Column » ‘By the Book’ with Joseph Preville
  by for ISLAMiCommentary on NOVEMBER 20, 2015:
  shared spaces in post-World War I France? Historian Ethan B. Katz examines the “triangular affair” between Muslims, France, and Jews in his new book, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, Nov. 2015). Katz states that “it is impossible to understand the history of Jewish-Muslim relations in France if we fail to place the French state at the heart of the story.”
  He argues that Muslims and Jews “related to one another through their respective relationships to the French state and society and to definitions of French national and imperial belonging.” Katz draws on a wealth of sources to show how Muslims and Jews interacted with each other in common and communal ways. “To date,” he writes, “the lived interactions of ordinary Jews and Muslims in France have been almost entirely overlooked in both collective memory and scholarship. A complex history of varied encounters risks being lost in the powerful current of contemporary events.”
  Katz is Assistant Professor of History at University of Cincinnati. He was educated at Amherst College and University of Wisconsin-Madison. His scholarly work has appeared in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Journal of European Studies, Jewish Quarterly Review, and Journal of North African Studies. He is a contributor to A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day (Princeton University Press, 2013), edited by Benjamin Stora and Abdelwahab Meddeb.
  Ethan B. Katz discusses his new book in this interview.
  Why do you think it is important to place Jews and Muslims “within a single story” to understand their history in France?
  Even though historians have tended to study Jews and Muslims in France separately, the two groups’ fates have often been intertwined. In addition, their respective histories in France can be better understood when the two groups are compared. In the late nineteenth century, France decided to give full French citizenship to Jews in Algeria but not to Muslims in Algeria. Both advocates and policymakers defended the decision by actively contrasting Jews, as allegedly Western, modern, and civilized with the larger native Muslim population, depicted as barbaric, primitive, and disconnected from Western norms.
  It’s also important to note that large numbers of Jews and Muslims from North Africa who came to France had much in common: language, food, dress, music, even certain rituals. Therefore, their daily encounters often did not fit our contemporary assumptions – or those of French policymakers at the time – about sharp inter-group divisions.
  One of the chapters in your book is intriguingly called “Jews as Muslims and Muslims as Jews.” What is meant by that?
  Ethan Katz
  That chapter centers around World War II and the Holocaust. There are two reasons that I gave it that title. The first has to do with the relative power and status of the two groups. During the 1930s, despite France’s increasing antisemitism, Jews were far more able than Muslims to integrate into the French republic and even to have significant roles in policymaking, including on issues that affected deeply the lives of Muslims. During the war, the situation changed dramatically. As we know, Jews became ostracized and faced ultimately lethal persecution. What people are often surprised to learn is that Muslims in wartime France had a more ambiguous racial status, akin even to that of “Aryans.” Muslims were courted by the Nazis, Vichy, and political movements of every stripe. This power reversal helps explain the second reason for the chapter title: numerous Jews from North Africa and the Middle East sought during the war to disguise themselves as Muslims in order to escape anti-Semitic persecution. A few Muslims from intermarried families, meanwhile, found that their Jewish ancestry became a cause of doubt about their own racial identities, despite their Islamic religious practices and convictions.
  What do Jews and Muslims have in common? The history and nature of their relationships have depended, to some extent, on geography (where they have lived together) and their shared experiences. What are some other commonalities?
  Both Jews and Muslims had a combination of affinities that made it much harder for them to integrate into French society (thus I refer to these affinities in the book’s title as “burdens”). In terms of religion, both groups have long been non-Christian minorities in a country that is at once culturally Catholic and avowedly secular. Under French colonial rule in North Africa, Jews and Muslims each experienced the possibility of integration and the harshness of discrimination and repression at the colonizer’s hand (though to varying degrees of course). In a place where one is supposed to be “French first” in public, many members of each group have had strong political attachments to movements and entities outside of France – for Jews primarily Zionism and eventually the state of Israel; for Muslims, North African and Arab nationalist movements and then nation-states, as well as the pro-Palestinian cause. But I also emphasize in the book that these burdens were almost never equivalent between the two groups.
  What have been the primary causes of tensions between Jews and Muslims?
  People tend to assume Jewish-Muslim tensions in France have been some kind of spillover from the Middle East conflict. But the reality is far more complicated. French internal dynamics have been absolutely crucial. During the colonial period, most Jews in France and Algeria were full French citizens, whereas most Muslims were colonial subjects facing systematic discrimination. These differences in status fostered tremendous gaps in income, education, acculturation, and skills between the Jews and Muslims who came to France in the 1950s and 1960s and many of their descendants. All of these inequalities were also compounded by the decision of France in 1961-1962, as it left Algeria, to include all Jews from Algeria as “European” French citizens and to classify most Muslims from Algeria — who had recently gained equal status – as non-Europeans no longer entitled to French citizenship. Then, since the late 1960s, the local visibility of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has grown significantly, and the period since the late 1980s has seen the rise of both an Islamophobic French Far Right and the influence of global Islamism. Together, these factors have made for a frequently combustible combination.
  In an op-ed for the Jewish Daily Forward you wrote that “both Muslim-Jewish violence and friendly relations can occur in the same spaces. Internalizing that truth will prove vital in determining the future of both peoples.” Do you have any policy recommendations for the French government? Also, how can PM Netanyahu, Mahmoud Abbas and other politicians apply this understanding to their work on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process?
  The point I wanted to make there was that there is nothing inevitable about violent conflict even between groups with opposing political or religious loyalties. And that coexistence requires the cultivation of an atmosphere of mutual respect. I think that since the attacks of January 2015, the French government has begun to take steps to try to foster a climate of much greater tolerance for Muslims. I am encouraged by the plans underway to incorporate the Parisian banlieues — the frequently troubled, under-resourced outskirts of Paris where large numbers of Muslims tend to live — into the city. But I also think that France’s government needs to rethink its insistence on the alleged “neutrality” of public space. My book reminds us that at certain historical moments one could bring “French plus” identities into the public sphere and still feel fully French. Likewise, in the Middle East, I think it is far too easy for Israeli and Arab leaders to focus solely on competing political claims and fail to acknowledge the humanity and intertwined fate of those on the other side. If such basic interconnections are lost, then assumptions about unmitigated conflict can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  As Muslim refugees flood into Europe and adjust to their new lives, and as citizens of those countries adjust to the influx, are there lessons to be learned from the way Muslims and Jews have managed their relationships with each other and with Christians who may look upon them as ‘the other’?
  The current refugee crisis — where most of those seeking haven are Syrian Muslims — is a stark reminder of Jews’ and Muslims’ interwoven paths through European history. That is, those countries that have most actively embraced the lessons of the Holocaust are, almost without exception, those most prepared to accept significant numbers of Muslim refugees today as a moral imperative. Another lesson from French history pertinent to the refugee crisis is that when both Jews and Muslims can integrate more easily into European societies and norms, the two groups are more likely to coexist amicably with one another and the wider French population.
  French Jewish & Muslim community leaders unite in prayers and solidarity after the Paris attacks in a peace event and memorial in Paris. (photo via journalist Mohammed Shafiq on Twitter)
  Parallels have been drawn between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia – both of which, by all accounts, are on the rise. Do you find a lot of anti-Semitism in Muslim communities and Islamophobia in Jewish communities? Or do you find these sentiments are stronger amongst other communities?
  In France both antisemitism and Islamophobia have been on the rise in recent years. Politically, the Far Right focuses much more of its racist rhetoric now on Muslims than Jews but retains anti-Semitic elements as well. Since the early twenty-first century, state reports have repeatedly shown that Jews have been the most frequent targets of racist attacks. And it is clear that a disproportionate number of the perpetrators of these incidents have been Muslims. An opinion survey by the polling firm Fondapol taken in autumn 2014 also showed that negative attitudes toward Jews were found much more often among Muslims than within the larger French population. Meanwhile, studies show that Muslims have been the second most frequent targets of racist aggression, and that structural racism in France — meaning, racism that becomes an obstacle to basic life opportunities — affects Muslims more than any other group. There is far less polling on Jewish attitudes specifically toward Muslims than vice versa. Yet a recent, illuminating study by Kimberly Arkin of a selection of Jewish private schools in Paris suggests that some young Jews are forging identities closely aligned with Jewish ethnicity and Israel, and that rely in significant part on openly racist attitudes toward Muslims.
  The topic of your book is a popular one. Mark R. Cohen has written extensively on Muslim-Jewish co-existence. And Maud S. Mandel has written on Muslim and Jews in France. How does your scholarship add to the conversation?
  Both Cohen and Mandel have done important work that has influenced my own. What I have tried to do in my book that I believe is distinct is to deconstruct the categories of “Jew” and “Muslim” in the French context and to ask how encounters between individual Jews and Muslims became defined as “Jewish-Muslim relations.” Mandel’s book emphasizes how the French state and certain Jews and Muslims forged a narrative of conflict that in fact helped to create the tensions it claimed to describe. But my book examines a longer time period than Mandel’s (which begins in 1948) and focuses more on the social fabric of ordinary people’s lives. In so doing, I try to remind us that for much of the twentieth century, political outcomes we now take for granted remained uncertain. Moreover, my book gets at the messy realities of everyday life that often cut against categories of conflict being forged at the political level.
  In the wake of the Paris attacks of November 2015, there have been certain events that have brought together leaders from the Jewish and Muslim communities in France. Can you comment on this coming together and what you think it may signify about this moment and the future.
  The events that have brought leaders from the two groups together – such as, most notably, a memorial event at the Bataclan concert hall where the deadliest attack occurred — have allowed expressions of shared mourning and shared vulnerability. The latter is crucial. Historically, Jews and Muslims in France have often each felt vulnerable in the wider context of French politics and culture. That vulnerability has been a source of unity in certain moments and tension in others. For the moment, the work of ISIS is so jarring that many of France’s Jews and Muslims seem to feel deeply threatened in ways that are fostering potential unity. It is far too early to know if such an outlook is likely to continue — but one can only hope.

  Joseph Richard Preville is Assistant Professor of English at Alfaisal University/Prince Sultan College for Business in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Tikkun, The Jerusalem Post, Muscat Daily, Saudi Gazette, and Turkey Agenda. He is also a regular contributor to ISLAMiCommentary.
  Julie Poucher Harbin is Editor of ISLAMiCommentary.

• Publishers Weekly
  http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-674-08868-9
  Word count: 198

  Katz, an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, traces the interaction of French Jews and Muslims from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia from WWI to the present. He focuses on their different patterns of contact in Strasbourg, Paris, and Marseille, revealing how their relationship has really been a "triangular affair, with France as the third party." Early in this period, Katz shows that the French elites favored the generally better-educated Jews, who were seen as more ready to participate in France's "civilizing mission." With anti-Semitism widespread during the 1930s, the relationship shifted, and under the Vichy regime (1940–4) the situation was reversed. Beginning in 1948, the Arab-Israeli conflict impinged on the relationship, as did the 1954–62 French-Algerian war. Katz notes that only recently have Jews and Muslims become delineated categories in France, and that today Muslims are more often seen as France's "defining Other." There is a great deal of interesting anecdotal material, though the book lacks adequate sociological and historical data. Katz's prose can be ponderous, and he is prone to using idiosyncratic terminology. Still, this is generally a detailed, informative, and often colorful look at the ever-changing relationship between France's predominant non-Christian immigrant minorities. (Nov.)

• New Books Network
  http://newbooksnetwork.com/ethan-katz-the-burdens-of-brotherhood-jews-and-muslims-from-north-africa-to-france-harvard-up-2015/
  Word count: 283

  The Burdens of Brotherhood
  Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France
  HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2015
  June 28, 2016 Roxanne Panchasi

  In The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jewish-Muslim relations from 1914 to the present. Arguing that interactions between Jews and Muslims must be understood in and through the respective, changing statuses and relationships of both communities to the French state, The Burdens of Brotherhood pursues the history of this “triangular affair.” Drawing on a range of archival, press and media sources, as well as oral interviews, the book emphasizes everyday lives and mutual perceptions in and between spaces private and public, local and transnational. Its chapters move from the diversity and legacies of wartime experiences, to family and community gathering places in three different French cities (Paris, Strasbourg, and Marseille), to the routes and mobilities of people, cultures, and politics across the Mediterranean. The Burdens of Brotherhood revisits the First World War, the interwar years, the period of Vichy and the Occupation, the French-Algerian War, and the final decades of the twentieth century. It also traces the impact of international movements and politics on ethno-religious communities and identities in the French context, from forms of Zionism and anti-imperialism to the vicissitudes of the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948. Towards the end of our conversation, Ethan and I had a chance to speak about the recent French past, including the events of January 2015 that he addresses in the book’s conclusion. Written with the present in mind, The Burdens of Brotherhood offers vital historical perspective and insight on issues of urgent concern with important implications for the future.

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