Party Cancelled, Callil Attacks Her Protestors

By Ron Hogan on October 11, 2006 10:59 AM

Like many in New York’s media corps, I was supposed to meet Carmen Callil (right) at the French Embassy last night for the party celebrating the American publication of Bad Faith, her history of one Vichy government official’s collaboration with the Nazis in deporting the nation’s Jewish population to concentration camps. But the embassy cancelled the party after protests about a passage in Callil’s final paragraphs regarding the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians.*

I’ve been told that it only took a handful of emails for the French to lose their resolve. One of those letters came from Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz, who returned her invitation to the party with the following note attached: “You may advise Ms. Callil, and her publisher, that any work that equates the murderous designs of the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators with the Israelis—as she so idiotically does—is scarcely worth any such attention.” Contacted by phone Tuesday afternoon, Rabinowitz was surprised at the turn of events: “Who knew they would cancel it?” Though some have suggested an orchestrated campaign against the embassy, she says she didn’t attempt to persuade anyone else to complain about the party, although she did mention her own decision “in passing” to a friend. (She also mentioned that, as someone who’s read just about everything there is on Vichy, “I should say it’s not a bad book.”)

Meanwhile, I ended up meeting Callil at a hastily-arranged interview at the Knopf offices—ironically enough in a conference room devoted to the Schocken imprint, which specializes in books about Jewish history and culture. She was politely furious about the turn of events—after all, this party was one of the main reasons she’d come to the U.S.—and full of scorn for the “fundamentalist Jews” whose protests had led to the cancellation, convinced none of them could possibly have had a chance to read the book. “They see the word ‘Israel’ and they ignite,” she argued. “This sort of thing isn’t good for democracy, and it’s not good for America. Isn’t this a violation of that amendment you have?” Nothing like this had occurred when Bad Faith was published in England recently and frankly, she said, she would’ve thought that if anyone would be upset about the book it would’ve been the Catholic Church, since she writes about the ways in which high-ranking French clergy tacitly endorsed what was happening. She observed that the line about Palestine was just one of several historical examples of persecution—and that it was “slanderous” to suggest that she was flatly equating the situation in Israel to the Holocaust. “I should have added other countries,” she reflected. “I should have added every other country in the world.”

Callil is speaking tonight at Strand Books; at this point, it would appear to be an open question just what attendees can expect to happen, depending on who else turns up. Confrontation is certainly within the realm of possibility: As Ed Pilkington of The Guardian reports, New York’s anti-anti-Israeli contingent follows its targets’ every public move, leading to the cancellation of two events by Tony Judt.

*Here’s the “offending” passage:

“The French forget Vichy, Australians forget the Aborigines, the English forget the Irish, Unionists forget the Catholics of Northern Ireland, the United States forgot Chile and forgets Guantanamo. Everyone forget East Timor and Rwanda. As I wrote this book, people constantly asked me how I could bear to write about such a villain and about such terrible things. In fact, horrors from the past did not deter me. What caused me anguish… was to live so closely to the helpless terror of the Jews of France, and to see what the Jews of Israel were passing on to the Palestinian people. Like the rest of humanity, the Jews of Israel ‘forget’ the Palestinians. Everyone forgets; every nation forgets.”

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