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December 21, 2017

Paul Valéry Didn’t Think Much about the Jewish Question, but Couldn’t Escape It

He managed to move from the craven to the courageous.

In the midst of a long essay on the French poet Paul Valéry and his 1917 masterpiece La Jeune Parque (“Young Fate”), Paul Berman addresses his subject’s politics and attitude toward the Jews. Valéry, living through the Dreyfus Affair, the growth of French anti-Semitism after World War I, and then the Holocaust, couldn’t be ambivalent about the Jew’s fate:

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