SAINT-JEAN-CAP-FERRAT, France — "If I had been given one dollar for each time someone told me that ‘the antisemitism you experience in France would never happen in America,’ I would be super rich now.”
Delphine Horvilleur stops — “not that Jews care about money...,” she starts to say — and laughs wearily. She resumes her argument: The Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and Israeli war in Gaza have brought out on American campuses and in public debates what she recognizes from France’s recent history.
Horvilleur is a French rabbi who is a fixture in the media and public debates in her home country. She is passionate, learned and, even when conversation turns dark, funny. The weariness is recent. She is politically a woman of the left, a not shy critic of Israel’s government and a feminist. But now she finds herself sounding like her ideological sparring partners when it comes to Israel and the threat of antisemitism. In the past three months, her world was turned “upside down,” and she is struggling to “find stable ground.” Her experience is not uncommon for liberal Jews on either side of the Atlantic.
I first met Horvilleur here on the French Riviera, at a Faith Angle retreat in early November. She was visibly disturbed. By the dangers faced by her children; her teenage son had just refused her request to take off his Star of David necklace for his safety in Paris, a decision that she says she accepted. As well as by anxious calls from congregants of her synagogue in Paris. We have spoken several times since. She was gratified by the large turnout at an anti-antisemitism rally in Paris in mid-November. The other day, Horvilleur sounded more downcast, saying that the war in Gaza “is destroying everyone.”
“She is a star,” the prominent French journalist Christine Ockrent says, “and a different kind of French Jew.”
Horvilleur is the third female rabbi ever ordained in France. She came to embrace her faith and calling relatively late in life. She started off studying medicine and spent time as a student in Lebanon, hiding her Jewish background. She is a liberal in a world of French Jews that’s more traditional and right-leaning than the American Jewish community. She is an author of several books; her French-language bestseller, “Living With Our Dead,” will be published in the U.S. this spring.
Horvilleur speaks in that only-in-France way of public intellectuals: Sprinkling biblical and historical references in remarkably well groomed yet somehow made-for-television sentences. France has produced many such figures. At 49, Horvilleur is part of a new wave that now sees the world as post-10/7.
For years, her different approach........