Held Captive by Sartre

...he bases his insights squarely on his own experience...

...Both show to good effect Finkielkraut's salient traits as a thinker—his independence of intellectual fashion, detestation of moral relativism, and abiding interest in the larger meaning of the particular...

...Finkielkraut is sympathetic to the political aspirations of Israel...

...Looking back on this period, Finkielkraut is filled with shame and remorse, referring to himself contemptuously as "genocide's huckster," the "swashbuckler of the concentration camps," a "deportee for the fun of it...

...The allotment was inescapable: for them, utter abandonment and anonymous death, and for their spokesperson, sympathy and honor...

...I did not set out like a cynical and sordid swindler to embezzle what they possessed...

...Since Yiddishkeit was completely decimated by the Nazis, and survivors are rapidly fading from the scene, his vision of the future is bleak indeed...

...These discussions are uniformly interesting and often insightful, but the bottom line in each and every case is the same...

...The bulk of The Imaginary Jew is devoted to a consideration of possible options for Jewish identity today...

...Finkielkraut is a man who has painted himself into a corner: What he values in Jewish life no longer exists, and what exists he does not value...

...It is as a disciple of Sartre that he brings himself to write: "Judaism, for me, is no longer a kind of identity as much as a kind of transcendence...

...In Finkiel-kraut's case this is especially striking, for as one of France's leading anti-Marxist, anti-totalitarian nouveaux philosophes, he has broken completely with Sartre's political legacy...

...His central thesis is that the Shoah constitutes the great divide for Jewish identity, separating forever the world of authenticity from the inauthentic versions of latter days...

...The game of 'Who am I?'" he states bluntly, "will be a short one, for the Jewish content of our lives isn't enough to rub two sticks together...

...Like others, Finkielkraut grew up in a household with the destruction of European Jewry permanently in the background—his parents were themselves Polish survivors of the Holocaust?but without any sense of a substantive Jewishness, religious or secular...

...The remedy is obvious...

...Once he had gone beyond the early identification with his survivor parents and with the Yid-dishkeit that was their cultural lot, his Jewishness seemed an empty shell...

...He writes with withering irony: "Others had suffered and I, because I was their descendant, harvested all the moral advantage...

...that it finds an increasingly important place in his writing has added significant cachet to public displays of Jewishness in the French domain...

...Among his recent publications, two other volumes also focus on Jewish subjects: The Future of a Negation, concerning the Left's flirtation with Holocaust denial, and Remembering in Vain, on the trial of Klaus Barbie...

...On the subject of Jewish life, though, he accords Sartre's views authoritative weight...

...In this situation, there are only two possibilities for the Jew...

...He needs to break out of the intellectual prison Sartre has constructed for him in the Jewish realm, just as he broke free in the political sphere...

...The book "intoxicated" him because he saw in it an "inscription of my life...

...Hence his insistence on the absolute dichotomy between "authentic" and "in-authentic" Jewishness...

...Finkielkraut aims to make something positive of his Jewishness, yet ends up treating it as a form of masochism...

...Indeed, Finkielkraut owes his very conception of the "imaginary Jew" to his predecessor's line of analysis...

...His powerful hold on these issues is confirmed by the fact that even a fiercely independent thinker like Alain Finkiel-kraut feels compelled to take them up from the Sartrean perspective...

...His Jewishness has been reduced to a perpetual Yahrzeit, a mournful remembrance of what was destroyed...

...About Israeli culture per se, Finkielkraut is silent...

...Finkielkraut's problem is that he is held in thrall by Sartre's interpretation of the Jewish condition...

...Thus, he dismisses the organized Jewish community in France, with its elaborate web of institutions, as a "collectivity without any collective existence," a "fiction that exists only in the rhetoric of its promoters...

...One would have expected that a careful thinker intent on forging a meaningful Jewish identity for himself would adopt an incrementalist approach, carefully sifting through the various possibilities and keeping all his options open...

...He invents the term "imaginary Jew" to describe his own condition, how as a young man he sought to live vicariously off the Holocaust...

...Arguing that anti-Semitism plays the determinative role in creating a sense of Jewishness, and distinguishing between what he labeled the "authentic" and the "inauthentic" Jew, Sartre set the terms of the discourse that would follow...

...For him there is only one Jewish culture, the secular Yiddishkeit of pre-War Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust survivor is the only authentic Jew...

...The effect produced wasn't intentional...

...Even as his identity shifted from "authentic" to "imaginary," Sartre's view continued to serve as a beacon...

...His vehicle was the slim volume Reflections on the Jewish Question, published in 1946...

...The personal aspect of the author's observations is made explicit in an opening chapter on his youth...

...Now a repentant New Philosopher, he champions the liberal political order as newspaper columnist for the Nouvel Observateur and as editor of a prominent journal, the Messager Eu-ropeen...

...In short: Because I do not suffer from anti-Semitism, I am not a real Jew...

...I owed to the bond of blood this intoxicating power to confuse myself with the martyrs...

...His central assumption was that Jewish-ness has no inherent basis: The Jew's reaction to Gentile hostility is the sum total of his essence...

...Reflections on the Jewish Question gave theoretical expression to the pro-as-similationist stance that its author adopted during the dark days of World War II...

...Finkielkraut's relationship to his Jewishness has always been fully honorable...

...The book stands out from his other work as well in being strongly autobiographical...

...Not something that defines me...

...He attended the city's leading educational institutions with students of all faiths, and went on to become a professor of literature at the elite Ecole Polytechnique...

...Those engaged in the enterprise of creating a serious secular-Jewish culture there have nothing more to work with, he says, than the "vaguest reminiscences, a moribund symbolic system, and a language that lies in shreds...

...Reviewed by David Singer Editor, "American Jewish Year Book" IT IS A COMMONPLACE in writing about French intellectual life to dwell on the long shadow cast by Jean-Paul Sartre in the areas of politics and philosophy...

...The Imaginary Jew centers on the Holocaust too, but here Finkielkraut's concern is with its implications for modern Jewry...

...Although he takes note of a "neo-archaic return to tradition" by newly Orthodox Jews in France, he makes it clear that their "anachronistic rules" and "worn procedures" are not to be taken seriously...

...But it isn't only intention that matters...

...In his student days, he was a Maoist who actively participated in the political upheavals of 1968...

...Hence, too, his strong association of Jewishness with suffering, specifically suffering at the hands of the Nazis...

...Finkielkraut's gradual awakening to his playing at victimization was an important step forward in self-awareness...

...He may live either "authentically," embracing the condition of Jewishness that anti-Semitism imposes, or "inauthentically," seeking by various stratagems to flee from his condition...

...but a culture that can't be embraced, a grace I cannot claim as my own...

...Until he does so, the author of The Imaginary Jew will not be able to turn his Jewish identity into a thing of value...

...The existentialist, while detesting anti-Semitism and wishing for its end, could not help but applaud the former—the "authentic" Jew who "makes himself a Jew in the face of all and against all-Sartre's theory was directly pertinent to French Jews of Finkielkraut's generation who came of age in the Paris of the '50s and '60s...

...The radical either/or stance he assumes instead quickly narrows the range of acceptable Jewish experience to virtual zero...

...Finkielkraut rejects the option for lack of substance and authenticity...

...Less well known, however, is Sartre's far-reaching influence on discussions of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity...

...And, sad to report, so it remains down to the present, with Finkielkraut unable to locate any authentic expression of his heritage in contemporary life...

...at the same time it robbed his Jewishness of all substantive meaning...

...He has no patience, however, for French Zionists who, while declining to go on aliyah, build their Jewishness around Israel's achievements?a Diaspora of dreams...

...It is no coincidence that he reports reading Reflections on the Jewish Question with "gluttonous pleasure" as a young man...