In America, one thing most Jews and most adherents of the political right agree on is support for Israel. But in France, things are very different, as evidenced by the case of Éric Zemmour—a media personality and author of such books as The Suicide of France—who recently declared his candidacy for the presidency, and appears committed to outflanking the far-right National Front from the right. Michel Gurfinkiel writes:
Since Marine Le Pen took over the National Front in 2011, she has been eager to distance it from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extremism and to shear it of neo-Fascist or anti-Semitic undertones. Yet M. Zemmour has happily done the opposite. . . . Zemmour’s drift to the far right was compounded by his awkward—or even bizarre—stand on Jewish issues. On the one hand, he is the most traditional Jew ever to have entered French politics. Until college, he was educated only at Jewish schools, and he raised a somehow observant Jewish family.
On the other hand, Zemmour disclaims many of the political attitudes associated with Judaism: not just human-rights liberalism, but Holocaust awareness, Zionism, and pro-American conservatism as well. This led him to controversial, or even at times scandalous, statements on the Dreyfus case, the Vichy regime’s handling of French Jews during World War II, or even the right of the Sandler family, as French Jews, to bury in Jerusalem their children murdered by a jihadist terrorist in 2012.
Whether Zemmour did this tactically, to strengthen his image as a French patriot, or out of deeply held convictions remains to be seen. In the meantime, many conservative French Jews—and French Jewry is quite politically conservative nowadays—are ready to vote for him no matter what, even if many of the right-wing Gentiles who like his books may be unprepared for a Jewish president.
More about: Eric Zemmour, France, French Jewry, Israel & Zionsim, Marine Le Pen