Dreyfus, Zionism, and Sartre

Ispent most of the summer in Paris, where sidewalk tables were packed with refugees from lockdown, most of them gabbing, drinking, and vaping. (“Belle Vape,” one store’s sign read.) If you were alone, the unspoken rule seemed to be that one must smoke and stare into space instead of looking at an iPhone. Some people even read print newspapers. Belleville, my neighborhood, had five bookstores within a narrow radius, approximately as many as in the entire borough of Brooklyn, thanks to a French law forbidding booksellers to undercut one another’s prices—a blow to Amazon unimaginable in the monopoly-addicted United States.