In April, after the deaths in recent years of such venerable French Jewish members as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and biologist François Jacob, the Académie française increased its quotient of Yiddishkeit. That day, the author Alain Finkielkraut, born in Paris in 1949 to a family of Polish Jewish origin, was elected to join the group of…
Having survived a bout with lymphoma last fall, the French Jewish philosopher and essayist Alain Finkielkraut has come back fighting, with an ambitious and thoughtful new book on literature, “Un coeur intelligent” (An Intelligent Heart; Stock Flammarion, Paris ), an examination of nine novels, including Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain” (2000) and Ukrainian Jewish writer…
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