Three years after the terror attacks against Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, we checked in with the Paris-based Director of AJC Europe, Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, to get an update on the state of the French Jewish community.
After German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s latest visit to the Jewish state, AJC Jerusalem Director Avital Leibovich and AJC Berlin Ramer Institute Director Deidre Berger, answered key questions about the relationship between the German leader and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and what’s next for Germany-Israel ties.
Why is Israel returning to Africa? For Netanyahu, one reason dominates all others. “The automatic majority against Israel at the UN is composed—first and foremost—of African countries,” he told a gathering of Israel’s ambassadors to Africa in February of last year. “Whether in the end or at the outset, our goal is to change their voting patterns.”
In the wake of the unprecedented tragedy of the Holocaust, it was anything but obvious that a Jewish group would seek to engage postwar Germany. But that’s exactly what American Jewish Committee (AJC), alone among global Jewish organizations, did.