France’s Loi Yadan: The Republic or the Mob |
In France, in 2026, Jewish families are removing the mezuzot from their doorframes. No one ordered them to. That is the point.
I have seen this before. Not in France — in the testimonies I have spent years recording from elderly Iraqi Jews, the last witnesses to communities that once lived alongside mine on the banks of the Tigris. A man in his nineties who had not spoken his mother tongue in sixty years. He was born in Mosul, in a house by the river where his family had lived for generations, centuries, possibly. He spoke Judeo-Arabic, a language that will die with the last of his generation. He told me about the day the mobs came. The neighbor who refused to hide them. The border crossing, the confiscated documents, the life rebuilt from nothing in a country where no one understood what had been taken from him. He was not crying. He was past crying. He was reporting.
I have recorded dozens of these testimonies. They are the voices of people erased from my city within a single generation. I came to the study of antisemitism through these voices — through the gap between the world they described and the silence that replaced it. I came to it from the other side of a shared history, a history that should have made coexistence permanent and instead turned it into a cautionary tale that France, in 2026, refuses to read.
I currently direct the Antisemitism Research Initiative at George Washington University, where my team and I track the production and normalization of antisemitic ideology across continents on a daily basis. I teach at Sciences Po Paris — one of the institutions I will discuss here, and one I know from the inside. I am not writing this as a commentator. I am writing this as a researcher who monitors this hatred professionally and watches the same mechanisms he documented in the Middle East take root in the heart of Europe.
October 7 and what followed
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered approximately 1,200 people in southern Israel — the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Within hours, before Israel had launched any military response, demonstrations erupted in French cities in which the assault was openly endorsed — an assault that La France Insoumise would officially describe as an “armed offensive by Palestinian forces.”
What followed was not a protest movement. In the first quarter of 2024, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced over 360 antisemitic acts — a 300 percent increase year on year. For the full year, the SPCJ and the CRIF recorded 1,570 — a 360 percent increase over 2022. In 2025, 1,320 incidents, with physical violence rising from 106 to 126 cases. Jews make up less than 1 percent of the French population. They are the targets of more than half of all anti-religious hate acts in the country. This week, Tel Aviv University’s annual report confirmed that twenty Jews were killed worldwide in 2025 in targeted antisemitic attacks — the highest toll in thirty years.
When you chant slogans calling for the elimination of a Jewish state in the streets of a country where Jewish children are being beaten, do not tell me you are exercising a freedom. You are providing the soundtrack to a pogrom.
In February 2026, a thirteen-year-old boy was beaten, threatened with a knife, and robbed on his way to synagogue in the 18th arrondissement. He was holding his kippa in his hand — he was not even wearing it. It was not........