Welcome to this new series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?

This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.

Flora Goldenberg is a Paris-based tour guide and lecturer specializing in Le Marais, the city’s historic Jewish quarter. Check out her Instagram account here.

She grew up here. Her grandfather ran a restaurant on one of its streets. The restaurant is gone. But his name is still painted on the building.

That image is the starting point for this conversation, and for a question worth sitting with: what happens to identity when the container changes but the label stays? Le Marais is still called the Jewish Quarter. Fewer people speak Yiddish. The neighborhood is gentrified, expensive, and transformed — but Flora argues: it’s still alive.

A generation ago, protesters filled the streets against globalization. The charge was Americanization: one culture flattening all the others. It didn’t happen that way. What happened instead was something harder to name: an acceleration of exchange that preserved more than it erased, but changed the texture of everything it touched.

Flora sees that every day. So does her grandfather’s name, still waiting on the wall.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe