The boys hide their skullcaps under baseball caps. The girls tuck their Star of David necklaces under their sweaters. Their school in this middle-class suburb east of Paris has been scorched by fire and fear, and those are the off-campus rules. Early one Saturday in November, unidentified vandals set fire to the new two-story wing of the Merkaz Hatorah School for Orthodox Jews that was set to open as an elementary school in January. The fire prompted President Jacques Chirac to call an emergency cabinet meeting and declare that “an attack on a Jew is an attack against France.” It also intensified an agonizing debate over the definition and extent of anti-Semitism today in France, and indeed all of Europe, and forced the French government to redouble its efforts to combat it. Full Story
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