Devorah Lauter
Arrest of top presidential contender shakes France’s Jews
PARIS – Shock waves continue to ripple throughout France as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, considered the likely Socialist Party candidate to challenge President Nicolas Sarkozy in French presidential elections next year, remains in a New York City jail on charges of sexual assault.
Saturday’s arrest of Strauss-Kahn appears to significantly change the political playing field in France, as some recent polls had showed that the 62-year-old head of the International Monetary Fund was the most popular among those considered to be possible presidential contenders.
Draft of anti-Jewish measure changing views of Vichy head
PARIS – Nearly 70 years to the day since the passage of a pivotal anti-Semitic law in Vichy-occupied France, new evidence about who drafted the law is transforming some historians’ views of France’s wartime head of state, Philippe Petain.
Until now the Oct. 3, 1940 law — dubbed the Statute of Jews and legislating anti-Jewish discrimination that went above and beyond the demands of France’s Nazi occupiers — was believed widely to have been the brainchild of at least two French ministers and their collaborators.
Sarkozy’s crackdown roils France; Jews more circumspect
PARIS – With a preponderance of voices from the international media, human rights groups, the French clergy, and some politicians denouncing French President Nicolas Sarkozy for fueling negative ethnic stereotypes with his new immigrant-focused security crackdown, many Jewish community representatives in France are taking a more measured stance.
In July, Sarkozy launched some security-related initiatives that included a proposal stripping French nationality from foreign-born individuals who attack police officers and starting a program to rapidly deport Roma — or Gypsy — migrants to Romania and Bulgaria. The French leader also is dismantling hundreds of illegal Roma homes in shantytowns in France.
