NEWS STORY: France Battles Anti-Semitism With School Documentary

c. 2004 Religion News Service PARIS _ In an effort to stem a rising tide of anti-Semitism, France’s government is distributing excerpts of a haunting documentary on the Holocaust to high school classes, hoping the gripping accounts will breed a new spirit of tolerance in public schools. DVDs extracting the documentary “Shoah,” or Holocaust, will […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

PARIS _ In an effort to stem a rising tide of anti-Semitism, France’s government is distributing excerpts of a haunting documentary on the Holocaust to high school classes, hoping the gripping accounts will breed a new spirit of tolerance in public schools.

DVDs extracting the documentary “Shoah,” or Holocaust, will arrive in the coming weeks to some 4,400 French public high schools _ alongside a primer on how to teach the French Republic’s creed of “liberty, equality and fraternity” to ever-growing numbers of ethnic immigrant students.


Mirroring renewed Palestinian-Israeli violence, the numbers of anti-Semitic incidents have soared in recent years in France, home to Europe’s largest communities of Jews and Muslims.

The French government counted some 135 acts of violence against Jews in the first half of 2004 alone, compared to 195 attacks against North African Muslims and other minorities. Those numbers don’t reflect epithets or other, less violent acts.

The incidents _ perpetrated in large part, according to French officials, by young, ethnic Arab youths _ have sparked an outcry among Jewish leaders in France and abroad, and sharp criticism by Israeli officials that has ruffled bilateral relations.

The previous Socialist government also distributed the documentary, but in many cases it was shelved in teachers’ desks. Produced by Claude Lanzmann, the film compiles powerful testimony of the World War II catastrophe by Holocaust survivors.

What difference the film will make this time around is anybody’s guess.

“The major problem we have with anti-Semitism in France is that it’s very difficult to teach about those matters,” said Emmanuel Weintraub, a senior member of the Representative Council of Jews in France.

“There is very often a very high percentage of students of North African descent, and they are very influenced by propaganda. Many are Holocaust deniers.”

Michel Wieviorka, a prominent French sociologist who has authored books on violence and racism in France, also believes the French school system hasn’t fully grappled with the complexity of intolerance in schools.


Teachers and administrators don’t always address small incidents of racism before they blow up into big ones, he says. Nor do they always treat racial slurs equally.

“As soon as something is said against a Jew, there will be a great scandal. But there will be no scandal if something is said against an Arab,” Wieviorka said. “So there is a feeling of injustice and of unequal treatment on the part of Arab students.”

But at Lycee Sophie-Germain, a high school in Paris’ old Jewish quarter, which hosted a preview of the Holocaust movie this week, teachers said they’ve tackled matters of anti-Semitism and racism with their students for years.

“We’ve had questions, tensions, but there’s never been any really serious incident” among the school’s ethnically diverse student body, said history teacher Samuel Coulon.

Teachers regularly host after-school debates with students on issues ranging from Islam and modernity, to violence in the Middle East, in an effort to diffuse violence and breed understanding among pupils.

“We often hear `dirty Jew’ or `dirty Arab’ _ not in school, but outside,” said Simon Vacheron, 18, a senior at the high school. “But it’s usually among friends, in a joking way. But it could reveal what people really think.”


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