Recently arrived on Broadway, Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic focuses on a French Jewish family between 1940 and the present. Ari Hoffman writes in his review:
The play’s central question is whether this confused bunch should move to Israel. It is no idle parlor game, as the Jewish agency reports a 430-percent increase in the number of aliyah files opened in France since October 7.
The ability of Prayer to answer that conundrum, though, is hobbled by the blind spots that mar its vision. It only sees threats from the Jews as emanating from the right. Set just before France’s last presidential election, in 2022, its villains are President Trump and the leader of the National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, who was beaten by President Macron in that contest but has since grown in political strength, possibly heralding a populist moment.
While there is no gainsaying the legacy of Vichy or the long arm of Pétainism, it is exceedingly strange that a play about anti-Semitism in France ignores the motherlode of anti-Semitism—a tidal wave of immigrants implacably hostile to Israel and Jews and a leftist class that has made common cause with them. From the banlieues to the heart of Paris, rage at Israel finds Jewish victims close at hand. By and large, the terror is not coming from the right. . . . The tribune of the country’s left, Jean-Luc Melenchon, meanwhile, is emerging as one of Hamas’s apologists. He once accused a Jewish minister of thinking not “in French” but in “international finance.”
Read more on New York Sun: https://www.nysun.com/article/the-words-that-prayer-for-the-french-republic-leaves-out