In Paris in 2017, Kobili Traore murdered his sixty-five-year-old Jewish neighbor, Sarah Halimi, after beating her for at least 30 minutes while reciting Quranic verses and shouting anti-Semitic epithets. This was not the first time anti-Semitic violence, now frequent, turned deadly in 21st-century Paris; it wasn’t even the first such incident in the 11th arrondissement. But what shocked French Jews, and eventually a wider segment of the French public, was the way the media and then the courts treated the case. Michel Gurfinkiel writes:

As terrorists were launching thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, mobs were destroying Israeli cities, and Jews were being harassed and attacked on the streets of the U.S. and Europe, a group of nearly 100 American rabbinic and cantorial students signed an “appeal to the heart of the Jewish community.” The document, which was circulated online and then published in the Forward, echoed the anti-Israel rhetoric that was then pouring forth from the halls of the academy, major newspapers and television stations, and various celebrities and activists. Alvin Rosenfeld comments: