The Least and the Last of the Jews
February 21, 2011 by Sarah Hammerschlag
Figuring the Jew in Postwar French Thought
‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands!’We are all German Jews. This is the famous slogan taken up by throngs of students during the May 1968 protests in Paris.The cry was most immediately the response of a crowd to the news that the movement’s leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit had been denied re-entry into France after a brief trip abroad. This spontaneous act of sympathy marked an event in the history of France’s Jews, a moment when the Jew, understood as a figure on the margins of the culture, a rootless wanderer, a foreigner, publically came to represent a political ideal. As such, this event registered the history of the figure of the Jew perhaps more than the history of the Jews themselves: a moment when a shift in value, wrought by the crucible of the Shoah, manifested itself publically and politically.
