French Jews on my mind

How did it come to pass that I'm studying and am mildly obsessed with French Jews? I've taken French since third grade and have been Jewish since--and here the phrase "since God knows when" would be appropriate. It occurred to me that I'm taking three classes, one of which is a French class, one Hebrew class, and one BA "class" which involves everything French and Jewish all rolled up into one, like a Marais falafel sandwich followed by a crepe (and I wonder why a gained a few pounds in Paris). For some reason, I feel more of a connection to the late-19th-century French Jews than to most American Jews or, certainly, than to most modern-day French people. I could go into why this is the case, or better yet...

This first chapter of a biography of Marcel Proust and this one of Woody Allen make for a good back-to-back read. The Allen first chapter mentions Proust ("'...the twenty-nine pictures that, all together, form a cumulative portrait of Woody Allen's life — documents comparable in obsession if not in depth to the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.'"), which I find worth noting because in a paper I wrote for a Proust class a while back, I argued that Proust's Freudian, Jewish sense of humor is not unlike Allen's, with the omnipresent mother and so forth. But beyond that, there's this sense that neighborhoods like the Faubourg Saint-Germain or the Upper East Side have a certain hold over Jews, who swallow whole the mystique in ways that non-Jews tend not to. Then again, I'm sure that if Nan Kempner were to swallow anything whole, it would be the mystique of the Upper East Side, so, as I do with most of my blog-debuted theories, I may have to abandon this one along with the rest.