Belgian identity masks an ethnic-linguistic split that multiculturalism cannot resolve

Evidence

The choice of becoming truly Belgian means for him becoming French-speaking rather than Flemish-speaking. At the close of this monologue he defines himself yet again as “not a bad Iranian, not much of an Iranian at all, neither truly Belgian, nor truly a Jew.” This is the fantasy of the Jew as “merely” part of the multicultural mix, a mix defined as Francophone and thus beyond the struggle for linguistic hegemony that is still modern Belgium. It reflects the old joke about a pitched battle between French and Dutch speakers in Belgium during the 1960s in which both sides are separated by the police, who order the Walloons to one side of the street and the Flemish to the other. A Jew walks up to a policeman and asks: “And where do we Belgians go?” The answer, in the discourse of contemporary multiculturalism, is: any place you want but not here. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 785

Categorization

• SEED: The Jew-in-Belgium joke is a ready-made essay hook: the figure excluded from the ethnic binary reveals how multicultural frameworks inherit the boundaries they claim to dissolve.
• XREF: Connects to the immodesty/clothing moral panics piece’s theme of ethnic markers as class and identity signaling, here transposed to language
• CANDY: The punchline ‘And where do we Belgians go?… any place you want but not here’ is a sharp, tweetable joke about the Jew’s position in multicultural Europe.