In 1988, in what was probably one of the last trials of a Nazi war criminal and the first of such trials to take place in France, Klaus Barbie, the notorious "Butcher of Lyon," was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. Yet despite the memories stirred, despite the verdict, to Alain Finkielkraut the trial was a moral failure. In Remembering in Vain, Finkielkraut maintains that the Barbie trial attests to the failure of international society to take responsibility for criminals of state. Trying Barbie not only for actions against Jews but also for...

A passionate critique of Enlightenment--both in its contemporary invocation and its historical and cultural use--and a call to arms to rethink human equality and liberty without the sacrifice of individual rights and ethnicities.

The notion that all the world's peoples constitute a "brotherhood of man" is not a given among all human beings--it is rather the product of history. So suggests acclaimed philosopher Alain Finkielkraut in In the Name of Humanity, an unsettling reflection on the twentieth century in its twilight hours in which he asks us to rethink our assumptions about universalism and humanism. While many people look to humanist ideals as a deterrent to nationalist chauvinism, Finkielkraut challenges the abstract idea of universalism by describing the terrible crimes "civilized" Europe has committed...

The Future of a Negation is a crucial statement on the Holocaust--and on Holocaust denial--from Alain Finkielkraut, one of the most acclaimed and influential intellectuals in contemporary Europe.

The book examines the Holocaust, its origins in modern European thought and politics, and recent "revisionist" attempts to deny its full dimensions and, in some cases, its very existence as historical fact. Finkielkraut's central topic is the impulse toward "negation" of the Nazi horrors: the arguments made by many people, of varying political orientations, that "the gas chambers...

Dispatches from the Balkan War and Other Writings is a collection of essays on the Balkan crisis and on European reaction to it. In opposition to many powerful figures in France, Alain Finkielkraut has largely supported the Croatian struggles for sovereignty. He argues against an array of outmoded views of the Balkan region and its political and cultural conditions conceptions that date back to earlier in the century and that have long bedeviled the region and the European powers relation to it. The book takes up larger issues about European political and intellectual history issues...

The Holocaust changed what it means to be a Jew, for Jew and non-Jew alike. Much of the discussion about this new meaning is a storm of contradictions. In The Imaginary Jew, Alain Finkielkraut describes with passion and acuity his own passage through that storm. Finkielkraut decodes the shifts in anti-Semitism at the end of the Cold War, chronicles the impact of Israel's policies on European Jews, opposes arguments both for and against cultural assimilation, reopens questions about Marx and Judaism, and marks the loss of European Jewish culture through catastrophe, ignorance, and cliche. He...