Taking a Look at the Dreyfus Affair

In fact, there are good mice and bad mice, good cats, and bad cats, and so on. The book reveals a relatively real society at that time to its readers, and it also considers how racial stereotypes still exists today, questioning that if we as a society learned something from the Holocaust.

Anti-Semitism changed the French perspective of Jews before and after the Vel d’Hiv Roundup in July 1942, because this Roundup was the first time the French government explicitly targeted foreign and French Jews alike without pressure from German occupiers. The French government explicitly designed and carried out the Vel d’Hiv Roundup where they collected all of the Jews in Paris, France on their own accord and sent them to concentration camps to be exterminated. While holding in scope two years prior, 1940-1, and one year, 1943, following the Roundup, the changing perspective in Paris, France, of mutual obliviousness to sympathy, is evident by the analysis of anti-Semitic legislature, the influence of German occupation, and the leading operations of the French government. The changing perspectives in Paris show that a majority of society will follow their government (without rebelling) until this influence affects society as a whole, and alters the way of life. The government and societal viewpoint of Jews transformed together, but arrived at opposing conclusions – anti-Semitism and pro-Semitism respectively. This transformation became definitive after the Vel d’Hiv Roundup in Paris on July 16-17, 1942. This claim holds relevance to current knowledge and culture by providing an example of profound importance on the influence of governmental actions and its own societal standpoint in connection with world issues. In respect to this claim direct governmental actions

The late seventeenth century, when the enlightenment began, was a period of great turmoil, which persisted at intervals throughout the succeeding century. Reason had led many thinkers to the conclusions that kings and queens were ordinary mortals, and that conclusion implied new kinds of uncertainty. Society in this period worked by the means of well-defined codes of behavior. Religion during this period was still very important to many people. Moliere’s “Tartuffe” is a great illustration on how religion affected people at that time. Moliere was very brave to write this story based on how the Catholic Church was influencing and blinding people. Women also played a huge part of the enlightenment period and society during this time. Women of the upper classes occupied an important place in the Enlightenment society, presiding over “Salons,” gatherings whose participants engaged in intellectual as well as frivolous conversation (Puchner 7). In the literature that we have read, society overlook women capabilities and their logic thinking. The story that was a great example of this is “Tartuffe “and “The Love Suicides At Amijima”. Throughout these two text you can easily point out the difference between a man and a woman role in society. In this essay, I will dive into how society played a factor in “Tartuffe” and “The Love Suicides at Amijima”.

    There are two important literary devices used in this section. First the author puts the word "pettiness" on a line by itself. This is used as a declaration of what the author feels anti-Semitism is based on. It is because of pettiness that Dreyfus was accused and further because of pettiness that he was not pardoned when it was proven that he had not committed any crime. The next important device is the description of ladies with their umbrellas. This is an image to the wealthy

“The experience of the Jewish families in the United States over the last century has been one of acculturation and accommodation to the norms and the values of the American society.” (“Jewish American Family” 2). At the same time, Anti-Semitism in America reached its peak during the interwar period between the 1940s and 1960s. The self-hating Jew appeared as a phenomenon of the Depression and the 1940s. At that time, almost all of the Jewish American writers simply presented realistic portrayals of their fellow immigrants or their parents’ generation. Later, some other Americans, partial to Anti-Semitism, found confirmation of negative stereotypes in the new Jewish American Literature. Indeed, some parent-hating or self-hating Jewish American writers of the second or the third generation consciously reinforced negative stereotypes with satire and a selective realism. Philip Roth, whose portrayal of the tensions between these figures borders on self-hatred and an almost Anti-Semitic view of the Jewish family in America, is a great example of this phenomenon. In his book, Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth touched on the assimilation experiences of American Jews, their relationship to Israeli Jews, and his experience as inherent in being the son of a Jewish family which led him to be self-hating Jew to escape from the harsh reality.

The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal that divided France for many years, during the late nineteenth century. It cantered on the condemnation by high treason of Alfred Dreyfus in 1894, an artillery officer of the French army, of Jewish origin. The accused was subjected to a fraudulent process conducted behind closed doors. He was accused of having written a list of secret military documents of the French government that he intended to send to the German embassy in Paris. A military court found him guilty in 1894; He was demoted and transferred to Devil's Island, where he was to remain a prisoner for the rest of his life. His conviction provoked a national conflict that led the progressive Republican sector to a dominant position in French politics and that culminated in the separation of the Church and the State.

In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the aloof foreigner Moishe the Beadle gets deported from the town Sighet with other foreign Jews. After escaping, Moishe recalls the horrific scene where the Jews were taken into the forest and, “Without passion or haste, [the Gestapo] shot their prisoners… Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns” (Wiesel 6). During the Holocaust, the Nazi belief that Jews were of an inferior and evil race brought forth little discrepancy on their liquidation and abuse. Anne Marie Hacht puts this notion into a broader context in “Oppression and Genocide” from Literary Themes for Students: War and Peace, pointing out that, “Analysis of literary works… reveals a common denominator of cause: governmental abuse of power that results in the manipulation or attempted extermination of a political or racial minority.” Hacht’s analysis especially applies to the case of Moishe, who witnessed first-hand the massacre of the Jewish minority. The way in which the Gestapo conducted these executions shows just how “normal” acts of genocide and dehumanization were. Ultimately, the elimination and degradation of certain racial, religious, or social subdivisions of society was a common method of

You always hear about the events that occurred during WWII in Germany, but you never really hear about the terrible things that happened in France. The essay is based off of the book “Sarah's Key”, this story told about the events that occurred in France during WWII. This essay will first provide historical context about France during WWII. This essay will then provide a brief summary of “Sarah’s Key” by Tatiana de Rosany. Finally, this essay I'll analyze the themes in the book: loss of innocence and human suffering.

She does this by using such elevated, disgusted terminology- one can imagine her reading these terms with an intense voice of contempt- as “affair” (1), “the Brinvilliers woman”(5), and “Believing”(10) to convey a spirit of detachedness and divergence- marking the woman as a member of a distinctly separate social class than herself and her audience. Her incredulous, scornful tone toward the Brinvilliers woman indicates her treatment of the criminal as someone far below her and her audience.

Since this presentation should be related to the specific part of the journalism, the newspaper journalism, I decided that it would be suitable to present a story, showing how the journalism can change, manipulate and have serious impact on the society as well as on the stability of the country itself. A story, how a single article can save people from life time of imprisonment and prove a government guilty.

Throughout history, Jews have often been subjected to the inferior status of “scapegoat”, wrongfully being found guilty of crimes that they did not commit. An extremely telling example of this subjection was with the Dreyfus Affair. In order to understand the complexity and the injustice that was brought to the Jews of Europe, specifically surrounding France throughout the duration of the Affair, one must begin by understanding the shift in the French government that took place in the 1880’s. With a new power created by the shift in French government, there was possibility for a brighter future where the French government could work alongside the great Jewish leaders to create an even stronger and more powerful country. Unfortunately, the Dreyfus

In his essay “A Victim,” Bruno Bettelheim claims that a “victim and [his] persecutor are inseparably interlocked” (Bettelheim 11). If a victim’s behavior corresponds to what the oppressor expects, Bettelheim warns, then the victim will activate the prepared anxieties that go with his stereotype. In other words, the oppressor’s “delusional creation […will] become real” (13). Bettelheim, a psychiatrist, defines his ideas of a victim and oppressor from his experience at a clinic in a German concentration camp. In the winter of 1938, the Gestapo used an event to step up anti-Semitic actions.

Bonheur was an important figure in women’s right; she herself reflects the social movement for women. She was a women that didn’t let society’s standards keep her down; she worked hard to build her career. Bonheur was the first woman in France to get a permit to wear pants.1 The police’s reasoning for allowing Rosa this permit was because of health, and her doctor co-signed the permit.1 The slaughterhouses and fairgrounds would dirty her dresses thus it was impractical for her to wear a dress. Bonheur was smart she knew what wearing pants would do to her career.1 She knew buyers would not purchase paintings that came from a woman who wore pants, so Bonheur would wear dresses to social events.

The film Prisoner of Honor (1991) draws attention to Dreyfus affair in 1894. Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish French Army Captain who, accused and convicted of treason for selling military secret to the Germans in 1895, was sentenced to a life of imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Colonel Georges Picquart represents a man with too much honor, who risks his own life to expose the truth behind Dreyfus Affair. Upon further investigation by Picquart, a level of the conspiracy was uncovered that Dreyfus was wrongly accused of a treason. In 1898 Major Hubert Henry confessed that he forged a document against Dreyfus and later Henry committed suicide. The Dreyfus affair was very significant to the French politics of the 20th century because it split France in two. The Dreyfus affair demonstrated that the French of the Republic was very devoted to the France. French Army protected the traitor in order to keep the public trust in them. The primary source J’ Accuse (1898) by Emile Zola, a French novelist wrote a letter to the President of France which was published in the newspaper all over the France. Zola accused the Government of antisemitism and French Army General Staff officer for accusing an innocent man. The second primary source is The Beilis trial (1913) by New York Times; it describes that Mendel Beilis was a Jew, also accused of the murder of the Russian boy for ritual purpose in 1911, Russia. Beilis case is indeed comparable to the Dreyfus Affair because in both cases injustice

The end of World War II and the start of the Algerian War of Independence defined France during the mid 1900s. Many black intellectuals, including poet Léopold Sédar Senghor and writer William Gardner Smith grappled with the war, colonialism and racism that permeated French culture, whether overtly or subtly. Despite the similar imagery within their prose, the authors showcase two distinct points of view. Both authors describe ugly, inhuman visages, but in Senghor’s work, these twisted faces are merely masks, as removable as the humanly-constructed horror of the era, whereas Smith sees the twistedness as fully ingrained in the human countenance.