Every Box but One

Barbara Butch survived a year of far-right death threats. Then she signed a letter against antisemitism, and a different crowd showed up.

On Saturday night in Grenoble, France, at a city festival that has run for twenty-five years, the DJ Barbara Butch got twenty minutes. She went on around 10:20. In front of the stage stood a crowd of hundreds of protesters, waving Palestinian flags, whistling, and shouting insults. The city of Grenoble says glass bottles and other projectiles were thrown, deliberately aimed at her, and that electrical installations were sabotaged. Citing threats against the artist and the safety of the crowd, the city suspended the concert. Butch left the stage while John Lennon’s “Imagine” played over the speakers.

If you know Barbara Butch, it might be from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in 2024. She was the DJ at the center of the “Festivity” tableau, the woman in the silver halo whom half the internet decided had blasphemed against a Renaissance painting. What followed was one of the ugliest harassment campaigns in recent French memory: tens of thousands of messages, including threats to kill her and to rape her. The abuse was antisemitic before it was anything else, with plenty left over for her body and her sexuality. She filed complaints. French prosecutors opened investigations, and some of the people who threatened her were charged and convicted. A month after the ceremony she carried the Paralympic torch through a Paris suburb and told an interviewer she had chosen not to be afraid to exist in public.

In March, Butch signed a letter in Le Point, alongside the philosopher Elisabeth Badinter and former prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, supporting the proposition de loi Yadan, a bill whose stated purpose was to fight what its drafters called new forms of antisemitism. The case against that bill was real. Its critics, La France Insoumise loudest among them, argued that the drafting was vague and that it risked criminalizing legitimate criticism of Israel. The government withdrew the text in April. If the story ended there, it would be ordinary democratic politics: a contested bill and a government retreat. Protesting a law and supporting it are both speech. Both are legitimate.

The campaign against Butch began in May, a month after the bill died. There was no law left to oppose. What remained was the person. Allan Brunon, an LFI city councilor in Grenoble, posted a call to cancel her booking at the Cabaret Frappé festival, accusing her of supporting a colonial and genocidal regime. His evidence was the tribune, plus the claim that she had played Tel Aviv Pride in 2025, during the war. Tel Aviv Pride was canceled in 2025. What she actually played was a private event for the French Embassy in Israel. The full case against her, stripped of its phrasing, comes to this: she signed a letter against antisemitism, and she took a booking from her own country’s diplomats.

Grenoble’s mayor, Laurence Ruffin, refused to cancel the show, on the reasonable ground that city governments should not run ideological background checks on musicians. So the protesters came to the show instead. Afterward, Brunon, who attended, described the evening as a peaceful demonstration and said he was proud to have taken part. He denies that any projectiles were thrown, which puts his account in direct conflict with the city’s. He also offered a line worth quoting in full: “It is not Madame Butch who is being censored. It is everyone fighting the genocide in Gaza who is censored in our country today.” At the national level, LFI’s Manuel Bompard said he could understand a political position drawing protest, provided the protest stays peaceful. Given the city’s description of glass bottles aimed at her, that condition had already failed by the time he offered it.

The institutions, at least, were not confused. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez condemned the violence in the strongest terms, writing that antisemitism and intimidation have no place in the Republic and that preventing an artist from performing is an unacceptable attack on free expression. The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra), a French nonprofit, demanded an investigation and named what it saw: an antisemitic conflation that assigns Jewish people collective responsibility for the policies of the Israeli state. The mayor called the acts unacceptable and announced that the city will file a complaint.

Here is what makes Grenoble more than a local story. Barbara Butch is not a borderline case. She is a lesbian activist decorated by the Republic for services to culture, and the public face of the fight against fatphobia in France. In 2024 she absorbed a year of far-right hatred for representing inclusion at the most-watched event her country has staged this century. By every standard the progressive left claims to hold, she should be among its most protected people. None of it transferred. What disqualified her was the Jewish part, and one public statement: antisemitism in France is real, and it is present in the anti-Israel movement.

She never said anything about Israeli policy and has never defended the Israeli government. Her stated politics amount to fighting the hatreds she has personally received and warning against the conflation of Jews with a foreign state. That is the same conflation Licra denounced on Sunday. The crowd in Grenoble enforced it. To them, a French Jew who once played a party for French diplomats and French Jews, is an agent of Israel, answerable for its wars. The far right spent 2024 telling Butch she did not belong to France’s story. On Saturday, the left joined in.

In the video she posted afterward, she repeated what she has said for two years and warned once more against hating Jews because of the actions of a foreign government. The new note was darker. She said a society this divided is heading toward defeat. The city's complaint is expected within days. It will sit in a legal file. Files like hers are how this period of European Jewish life is going to be read later. Through all of it, her position has not moved: she stands for love.