Alain Finkielkraut

Alain Luc Finkielkraut (born 30 June 1949) is a French philosopher and public intellectual. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, many on the ideas of tradition and identitary nonviolence, including Jewish identity and antisemitism, French colonialism, the mission of the French education system in immigrant assimilation, and the Yugoslav Wars. He often appears on French television.

He joined the Department of French Literature in the University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1976, and from 1989 to 2014 he was professor of History of Ideas in the École Polytechnique department of humanities and social sciences. He was elected member of the Académie française (Seat 21) on 10 April 2014.

As a thinker, Finkielkraut defines himself as being "at the same time classical and romantic". Finkielkraut deplores what he sees as the deterioration of Western tradition through multiculturalism and relativism.

In 2010, he was involved in founding JCall, a left-wing advocacy group based in Europe to lobby the European Parliament on foreign policy issues concerning the Middle East and Israel in particular.

Finkielkraut is the son of a Polish Jewish manufacturer of fine leather goods who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp.