La France dans l’imaginaire des Juifs séfarades aux États-Unis, de 1945 à nos jours

Abstract

In contrast with the general American Ashkenazi Jewish population, France occupied a central place in the cultural imagination of francophone Eastern Sephardic immigrants to the post-War United States, many of whom had been students in the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle or other francophone institutions in their countries of origin. In the 1950s and 1960s, francophonie opened up an attractive path towards integration for many of these individuals, who came from Arab and Muslim majority countries that had a generally negative set of associations in the United States as “primitive” and “uncivilized.” Whereas being culturally French was a plus for Eastern Sephardim in the 1950s and 1960s, this was less the case in the 1970s and after, when an overall positive reputation of France in the American imagination largely ceded to an image of France as an antisemitic country.