Benny Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, and Michaël Bar-Zvi on Jewish Identity

Two recent books explore the tension between land and text in Jewish identity. Alain Finkielkraut and Benny Lévy's dialogue "Le Livre et les livres, Entretiens sur la laïcité" (Éditions Verdier) presents a friendly yet heated exchange. Finkielkraut, identifying as a "Juif français," emphasizes his debt to French secular education and literature, refusing to privilege the sacred Book over other books or Jerusalem over Paris and Athens. Lévy, who moved from Mao to Moses, argues that the real is the Torah, and that freedom means assuming one's Jewish birth. Michaël Bar-Zvi's "Écrire et Exil, philosophie de la nation juive" (Éditions Les provinciales / Cerf) avoids both Lévy's exclusivism and Finkielkraut's secular fascination, giving equal weight to land and text. Bar-Zvi, who also studied philosophy in France and now teaches in Israel, insists that the land demands cultivation of soil and arts, and that the primacy of the Book ensures the fecundity of other books. He situates himself in the lineage of Herzl, Gordon, and Jabotinsky, as both a man of letters and a man of the soil. The article also discusses contemporary philosemitism that is antisemitic, loving the Jew but hating the Israeli, and references Mark Rothko as the "last rabbi of Western art."