In America, J Street's call for more pluralism is understandable, whether one agrees or not with the group's aims — because the United States, and not just its Jewish minority, is almost monolithically pro-Israel. But in France, JCall's pressure on Israel to concede more at the bargaining table is an absurdity — there is no major force in French institutional life arguing for anything else.

JCall's first international meeting — held in June in the town hall of the 13th arrondissement, near Place d'Italie — did not convey that it had much of a raison d'être. The  participants described a world in which  fostering a more critical attitude towards Israel had a pressing need. One man was shouted down when he said he was a Belgian Jew who was boycotting Israel. The British sociologist Robert Fine laid out with dismay the progress boycott-Israel movements were making in Britain. Editor Meïr Waintrater expressed relief that Badiou and Hazan's book had not become a bestseller, but there was much despair that Hessel's book had made Palestine "la cause des causes". Bashir al-Assad's human rights record was compared — unfavourably — to that of Israel. None of this discussion argued for JCall's relevance. When the sociologist and documentary filmmaker Jacques Tarnero stood up to explain why he had not signed the JCall petition, you could feel a ripple of envy pass through the room.

Learned, independent, abrasive, the sociologist Shmuel Trigano holds those who support JCall in contempt — alterjuifs, he calls them. The French call anti-globalisation activists altermondialistes because of their belief that "another world is possible" — for Trigano, the alterjuifs are trying to wish their way out of their really existing Judaism. They believe that embracing "ideologies of Western self-destruction" will lead the world to treat them more kindly, but it won't, because the world tends to be implacable about such things. "This is not a Jewish problem. It is a problem of the whole of  society," Trigano says, sitting in a café in Place de la République. He adds that even Israel has become a "fiefdom of post-modernism". 

At his think-tank the Observatoire du Monde Juif, in his quarterly Controverses and in his many books, Trigano has theorised that Jews became a useful symbol to the political Left in the 1980s and 1990s — but useful only as victims, not as independent political actors. Against JCall's "appel à la raison" he and the political scientist Raphaël Draï set up an opposition movement called "raison garder", which translates roughly into a suggestion that one keep a level head. "We have 12,000 signatures," he says. "More than J-Call. We have won — but it's they who get invited on all the radio shows."

Trigano fled his native Algeria — "with two suitcases in two days", as he puts it — in 1961. France's Jewish community is vastly larger than it was at the end of World War II, largely because of this influx of North African Jews. That has changed the composition — and culture — of Jewish France. Once overwhelming Ashkenazi (i.e., stemming from the Yiddish-speaking lands of eastern Europe), it is now majority Sephardic (i.e., stemming from the Spanish-descended Jews of the Mediterranean and the Arab world). The common stereotype, among Jews and non-Jews alike, is that the long-established Ashkenazim tend to be urbane intellectuals, while the Sephardim are blunt-spoken small businessmen. (This stereotype was at the heart of the hit 1996 comedy Would I Lie to You?, in which an upwardly mobile North African Jew tries to pass himself off as Ashkenazi.) Perhaps because a similar rise of Sephardic influence in Israel in the 1960s helped bring Menachem Begin's Likud party to power, many people see a shift to the political Right among French Jews. 

There may be something to that, believes Claude Barouch, a charismatic and savvy Tunisian-born accountant who heads the Union of Jewish Professionals (UPJF). "We didn't live through the catastrophe," he says, referring to the Holocaust. "We were mostly spared." The UPJF (which is by no means limited to Sephardim) is a fighting organisation of the French Jewish middle class. In June, Barouch and other leaders organised a demonstration near Place de la Nation to oppose the participation of a French boat in the second Gaza flotilla. It left a mixed picture. What was inspiring was the passion of people unwilling to be ousted from the political conversation in  France. What was uninspiring was the turnout, which was low, and the average age of the demonstrators, which was around 60. Barouch blamed the indifference, and even the hostility, of more establishmentarian Jewish organisations — and he singled out the CRIF. That is noteworthy, since many who distrust the Jewish community have an almost conspiratorial view of the CRIF as a sectarian organisation. Barouch notes mournfully that similar things are said about the Jewish community in general: "They take us for some kind of Masonic lodge," he says.