‘France Has Lost Its Way’: U.S. Ambassador Charles Kushner on the French Response to Rising Antisemitism
SOURCE:Time Magazine|BY:Vivienne Walt for TIME France
Ambassador Charles Kushner spoke to TIME France about what he thinks is missing in the French response to rising antisemitism.
In late November, U.S. ambassador to France Charles Kushner—father of Jared—gave one of the only interviews since he took up his position last July. Speaking to Vivienne Walt for TIME France, he discussed the letter he had sent President Emmanuel Macron last July, accusing France of ignoring the rise in antisemitism and saying that “antisemitism has long scarred French life.” Published in the Wall Street Journal, the letter sparked an angry response from Macron and his foreign minister.
I learned by speaking to different Jewish communities that the majority of Jews in France live in fear and they feel totally abandoned by their government. People say, “I can no longer identify as anything Jewish, because I because I will be harassed.” Every week I’m watching this and I say, this is disgusting. I’m the child of Holocaust survivors. It feels very personal to me.
President Macron was very angry, and so was Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, saying it was not your business as a diplomat, and that you had just arrived and don't know the country.
They were upset because I told the truth, and I don't know that they could handle the truth. They just don't like it, because I think that they don't support the truth. For example, in 2023, President Macron himself, disgracefully, never attended the demonstration against antisemitism after October 7. So that it made him upset didn't make me lose any sleep. I don't pretend to be the best diplomat. I do aspire to be an honest person who represents our country gracefully and with honor.
I must tell you, United States Senators, United States Congressmen applauded my letter. A lot of business people. And the message was, France has lost its way.
I have four children. They were brought up not to hate people, not to discriminate, to be sensitive to what people have lived through, and it doesn't matter if you're Black or white or Jewish or Catholic or Muslim. On the other hand, children that are raised in homes in Gaza, you know, and I don't blame the children, but they are not in an open society. They are not given education where their minds are open to the world. They are taught hate, hate, hate.
You wrote in your letter than half of French kids in secondary schools have never heard of the Holocaust. I find this methodology disputable because other studies find much lower figures.[The statistic concerning people between 18 and 29 is by the organization Claims Conference, founded in 1951 for restitution claims of victims of Nazism. Other similar studies statistics. The polling agency Ifop found in 2018 that 21% of people between 18 and 24 had not heard of the genocide of Jews.]
And the Holocaust is in the school curriculum and the exam every new citizen and every child has to learn.
I'm told it's an accurate statistic, that 46% of young people between the ages of 18 and 29 have never heard of the Holocaust. Perhaps the kids aren't going to class or the teachers are pretty shocking. If you teach about World War II, how can you not teach about what happened to 6 million Jews?
One of my top priorities is to meet with the Minister of Education, whenever there is a minister of education. [France’s new education minister Édouard Geffray was appointed on Oct. 12, six weeks before the interview.]
It seems like perhaps the government is not necessarily at fault here.
I can tell you there are so many incidents that we have kept track of and that happened in this country, and the government does absolutely nothing. They come out with great statements, saying, “We're against antisemitism. This is terrible.” But you don't read about a lot of arrests. You don't read a lot of people that are punished severely.
The French would say you don't have a leg to stand on, with all this neo-Nazi talk in the US, and the Young Republicans chat group on Telegram, and Elon Musk’s maybe, maybe not Nazi salute. They find it hypocritical.
That argument is extremely shallow. Our President is withholding billions of federal money that goes to universities, including Harvard and the Ivy Leagues, and saying we are not going to give you one penny if you're going to permit antisemitism on your campuses.
It has been effective. The campuses have cracked down on antisemitism. I have a grandson who is a very good student. He's now studying in Israel for a year, but he's going to go next year to Harvard. His parents didn't want to send them to Harvard, and frankly, probably wouldn't have sent them to Harvard. If the President would not have taken the actions he took to go ahead and fight antisemitism on the campus, my grandson wouldn't have gone to Harvard.
We do have antisemitism in America. We have it beyond proportions I never would have believed. But the difference between France and the United States is in France, you have the administration that taps you on the hand and lets you go your way. In America we have a President that kicks you hard in the backside.
Vice President J.D. Vance called the Telegram texts a “stupid joke,” and basically dismissed the whole thing as just banter between young bros. How do you square that?
The President takes it very, very seriously. I know the President very well, and I respect him. I respect his comments about it. The Vice President I don't have a deep relationship with, and I don't really know his comments, honestly and truly.
The Muslim community is growing very dramatically, and the Jewish community is shrinking pretty dramatically. There used to be 600,000 Jews maybe a decade or more ago, now it’s 440,000.
How you know that? There’s no census for that.
ChatGPT, that's like my best source. Look it up yourself.
And your interpretation of that is that it's this is not a welcoming place for them?
Like I said, Jews here live in fear and feel abandoned by the government, and so is that very welcoming to you? I don't think so. I wouldn't feel welcomed here if I was scared to walk around with a yarmulke on my head, or scared to put a mezuzah on my door.
So what's the next step? What actually can you do here practically?
I think there are a small percentage of French Jews that live like the Jews in Germany in 1938, 1939. They say they are successful with the government, that this a great place to be. The government's never going to touch us. You could check on ChatGPT also about how many Jews then felt so secure because they were so high up in government, or were so high up in wealth, in society, in industrial business. So they say, “Don't make noise.”
But I think by having our voices heard, maybe we can make the current government a little bit more aware and a little bit more responsive now. So that's number one. Number two, I think we should be speaking with the Minister of Education, talking about education. I met with the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, and we talked about doing something jointly together between the Muslim community and the Jewish community.
I sit here as a proud Jew and a proud Zionist, but I would tell you Jews and Muslims lived in peace for hundreds of years. And I don’t put all Muslims in one category. You know, there's radicalized Muslims. There's radicalized Jews that I don't like as well, that are violent, that just last week burned down a mosque. I do not favor those people. I feel about them like radicalized Muslims.
So most Muslims are good God-fearing people that have lived with Jews for hundreds and hundreds of years. But the radicalized part of the population is becoming more and more, and this country, with the open borders of Europe, I think that part of the population is growing very fast.
So you see this rise in antisemitism as coming largely from the Muslim population.
I didn't say that. No, I think it comes from the radicalized Muslim population. In America it comes from a lot of places.
For two years in Paris pretty much every week there have been demonstrations against the war in Gaza. In your mind, is this an antisemitic act?
When you say from the river to the sea, or if you say the destruction of Israel, you're saying I hate Jews.