From Juif-Arabe to JuifsArabes: Jews and Arabs in France in Boudjellal's comic books

This article focuses on the geographic displacement of the Arab-Israeli conflict by analyzing the representation of the impact of events taking place in the Middle East on the social and cultural fabric of contemporary France as depicted in Farid Boudjellal's comic book entitled JuifsArabes (2006). JuifsArabes is the latest edition of a compilation of four comic books that Boudjellal, who is known for bringing the issue of Maghrebian immigraton to the fore in comic books, published in the early 1990s that form the series then entitled Juif-Arabe. France happens to be home to both the largest Muslim and Jewish communities in the Western Europe, and events that take place in the Middle East can have repercussions in the Hexagon. I demonstrate that Boudjellal's work participates in an endeavor to go beyond the ideology of partition and separation that has dominated approaches to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I examine the representation of past and future genealogy between both communities, a recurrent issue in the comic book, and how a visual allusion to the Astérix BD series highlights the diversity of France at the turn of the twenty-first century as well as provides a model of coexistence for the French Jewish and Arab communities.