Finkielkraut studied modern literature at the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud. Broadly speaking, his ideas may be described as being in the same vein as those of Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, a filiation he has repeatedly pointed out. Finkielkraut first came to public attention when he and Pascal Bruckner co-authored a number of short but controversial essays intended to question the idea that a new emancipation was underway; these included The New Love Disorder and At the Corner of the Street , as well as The Adventure . Finkielkraut then began publishing singly authored works on the public's betrayal of memory and our intransigence in the presence of events that, he argued, should move the public. This reflection led Finkielkraut to address post-Holocaust Jewish identity in Europe . Seeking to promote what he calls a duty of memory, Finkielkraut also published The Future of a Negation: Reflexion on the Genocide Issue and later his comments on the Klaus Barbie trial, Remembering in Vain. Finkielkraut feels particularly indebted to Emmanuel Levinas. In The Wisdom of Love, Finkielkraut discusses this debt in terms of modernity and its mirages. Finkielkraut continues his reflection on the matter in The Defeat of the Mind and The Ingratitude: Talks About Our Times . At the end of the 1990s, he founded with Benny Lévy and Bernard-Henri Lévy an at Jerusalem.
Essayist on society
In recent years, Alain Finkielkraut has given his opinion on a variety of topics in society, such as the Internet in The Internet, The Troubling Ecstasy . In the book Present Imperfect , akin to a personal diary, he expresses his thoughts about various events in the world. During the wars resulting from the breakup of Yugoslavia, he was one of the first to strongly condemn Serbian ethnic cleansing. However, he has been criticized for his close friendship with Croatian presidentFranjo Tuđman and was accused by David Bruce MacDonald of supporting "a nation whose leader was a Holocaust revisionist, at the helm of an authoritarian government." In August 2018, Finkielkraut expressed in an interview with The Times of Israel his worries for French Jews and the future of France: "The anti-Semitism we're now experiencing in France is the worst I've ever seen in my lifetime, and I'm convinced it's going to get worse".
Controversies
His interview published in the Haaretz magazine in November 2005 in which he gave his opinion about the 2005 French riots stirred up much controversy. Finkielkraut's remarks that the France national football team was "Black, Black, Black" were seen as "racially insensitive". Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan took legal action against Finkielkraut after the Frenchman said Sivan "is, if you will, one of the actors in this particularly painful, particularly alarming reality, the Jewish anti-Semitism that rages today." 60 researchers and professors at the École Polytechnique signed a petition in 2006 to protest his alleged colonial views. In 2009, he was criticized for his strong defence of Roman Polanski, arrested in Switzerland for an alleged sexual offence in which a 13-year-old girl was involved. Finkielkraut claimed that she was a "teenager", "not a child". On 16 February 2019, Finkielkraut was verbally assaulted on the street by a group of yellow vest protesters in Paris when they chanced on him in Boulevard du Montparnasse. A 36-year-old French convert to Islam was indicted after saying that Finkelkraut was "going to die". Finkelkraut had previously expressed his sympathy for the yellow vest movement. In April, Finkelkraut stated that he had been repeatedly accosted by street protestors and told reporters, "I can no longer show my face on the street". In April 2019, IEP announced the cancellation of a forum where Finkielkraut was to be a speaker, due to threats by «antifas». Eugénie Bastié of Le Figaro denounced the cancellation as a "gangrenous" symptom of the Americanisation of French university life. The announcement was intended to mislead far-left protestors, and the lecture went on in a different location.
