A Lecture by Alain Finkielkraut
École Polytechnique, Paris
Thursday, November 1, 2007
7:30 p.m.
State Room East, Indiana Memorial Union
Indiana University Bloomington
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Alain Finkielkraut is Professor of the History of Ideas at the École Polytechnique in Paris. One of France’s great essayists and scholars of post-Holocaust Jewish identity in Europe, he is the author of 28 books and collected essays, including The Imaginary Jew (1994), The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide (1998), and In the Name of Humanity: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2000). Over the decades, he has had a major impact on the intellectual discourse on antisemitism through incisive essays like "In the Name of the Other: Reflections on the Coming Anti-semitism" (2004) and "The Religion of Humanity and the Sin of the Jews" (2005), both of which appeared in the journal Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation. As a radio host for the French public radio program France-Culture, he regularly contributes to literary, political, and philosophical discussions on contemporary international issues.
In his lecture, Professor Finkielkraut will retrace the genealogy of the new manifestations of antisemitism in France and Europe and explore the adaptability of antisemitism throughout history.
This lecture finishes a week-long series of talks by Alain Finkielkraut, co-organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Indiana University’s Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, and the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Department of French and Italian, Center for Jewish Studies, and Institute for Advanced Study.
