Yesterday I saw a woman in my Toronto neighbourhood wearing a Jews Against Genocide t-shirt. Normally I’d see this and start thinking about the politics implied, about whether I bought that the wearer was in fact Jewish (in this case, ‘dar pinged affirmative; yes I know Jews can look all ways), things of that nature. Instead, all I could think was, no Parisian lady would dress like that. Not because no woman in Paris would share that intersection of identity and politics but because no one’s wearing shirts to that effect, of any politics.
Allow me a how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation digression: I was in Europe for two weeks, first in Belgium, visiting my in-laws, and then in Paris, visiting the few pastry places that deign to stay open in August. I had figured this would be a very-offline sort of trip, given that I hadn’t brought my laptop, and more to the point, that my husband and I were there with our 3- and 5-year-olds, under circumstances that made online-ness at the level of checking that day’s weather report a challenge.
What I hadn’t anticipated was just how offline everything would feel.
What I mean by this is not that they don’t have internet in Europe. They do! (Small-town Belgium now has ramen and Mexican food and—much to my delight during the heat wave—iced lattes.) But they don’t have the aesthetic trappings of the North American culture wars. I mean maybe somewhere in Europe does, maybe Britain if that still counts (continentally at least), but neither small-town Flanders nor big-city Belgium or France is going in for masks/purple hair/keffiyeh, nor for whichever Vance-ian, MAGA-ish counterpoint.
People are still dressed properly in that European way of not wearing pyjamas outside. Menswear and womenswear are distinct and tailored-looking. The only visual cues that one is not in 2010 or 1980 are the occasional rainbow crosswalks and vape shops, not that vaping appears to have made tremendous inroads in smoking-in-cafés culture. (Outdoors apparently doesn’t count.)
Presumably the same medical impetus to mask exists everywhere, so here and there, in Brussels (but not in smaller towns) I saw a Covid mask, but masking as political signifier, among the young and (largely) healthy, is evidently not a thing. Nor is the overall thrifted-androgynous-mullet aesthetic that is ubiquitous in (what were once called) hipster subcultures in Toronto.
You know what you don’t see at the entrance to a Parisian café? Posters affirming support of every subset of the omnicause. The centre of Paris—we arrived just after the Olympics had ended—is positively bursting with heavily armed police officers. (In order of physical presence, it seemed to go: tourists, police, Parisians.) The vibe is very much nothing-goes. You can see that people have tried to put up Free Palestine stickers here and there, and that they’ve been scraped off, along with anything aesthetically extraneous. There is a sign up in the Marais-area Hotel de Ville about the hostages, seemingly a more official gesture. Maybe Paris, which did once round up and murder its Jews—and which currently has a larger Jewish population than Toronto—has its reasons.
I’m not reporting any of this to say one way is better than the other. You can forget about world events in Paris or Belgium, without the lamppost reminders every few steps of the horrors of war. That’s not great, right? You should know about the world around you, and not everyone picks up a newspaper, digital or otherwise.
But do the flyers and white-person-keffiyehs of downtown Toronto constitute information or advocacy or antisemitism or some impossible-to-disentangle mix thereof? The imperative not to stick your fingers in your ears and ignore difficult issues can make it seem like the noble alternative is to inundate yourself with the visual political messaging your surroundings happen to have landed on.
Is what I’m describing, then, a stifling of political expression? Or is it an aesthetic commitment to not everything being about politics? Because my hunch is that the typical Parisian wearing a French-person scarf rather than a keffiyeh isn’t doing so out of Zionism but rather out of a desire to wear the scarf that goes just so with their outfit.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
