User:Rickyricardio/sandbox

The Imaginary Jew is a book by French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut published first in French in 1983, and then translated into in English in 1997. In his book, Finkielkraut wrote about his views on Jewish identity in a post World War II era.

Biography
Alain Finkielkraut was born in Paris France to two Auschwitz survivors Janka and Daniel Finkielkraut. During his childhood, Finkielkraut remembers his parents neglecting their Jewish culture and religion. He confessed in The Imaginary Jew he did not know what Jewishness was as a child.

Finkielkraut attended university at École normale supérieure de lettres et sciences humaines. In 1968 he joined the movements occurring in France against capitalism and American imperialism.

During the late 1970's, Finkielkraut spoke out against using certain metaphors for the events of the Holocaust. These metaphors used the suffering of Jesus, a christian motif, to describe a Jewish ordeal. He believed that this took the significance away from the suffering of the Jews and placed emphasis on glorifying the suffering itself.

Finkielkraut believed that each culture's identity is always shifting. He believed that each person has the power to reinterpret their racial identity.

Alain Finkielkraut formerly a philosophy professor at École Polytechnique, now hosts a weekly radio show called Répliques.

In an interview with National Public Radio in 2003, he discussed his belief that racism is no longer the only way Jews are being attacked. He claims Jews are now being labeled as racists for attempting to claim the country of Israel.

Finkielkraut often talks about the current state of France and the treatment of the Jews. He took part in the manifesto published in May of 2018 in the French Newspaper LeParisien that was signed by over 250 people. The manifesto outlined its signatories' belief that there is a new wave of antisemitism sponsored by the radical Islamic presence in France.

Summary
As a child, Finkielkraut recalls terms like “dirty Jew” being used as insults. Finkielkraut decided that he would wear discrimination as a badge of honor. He remembered how other children made up stories for themselves to make them seem more interesting. Finkielkraut felt that he had his story already written for him simply by being born Jewish.

At some point in his life, he realized that claiming to be Jewish at a young age was foolish. He originally believed he was Jewish because his mother was Jewish and he had bits of Jewish culture taught to him. However, Finkielkraut saw that he had no Jewish beliefs and did not know what it meant to be Jewish. Finkielkraut labeled himself as an "imaginary Jew."

As he grew into young adulthood, he saw many protests and movements being formed, one of which was the Zionist movement. He believed the protestors wanted any cause to be outraged by and did not actually care about the foundation of the nation of Israel or the Jews. He disliked protestors who did not go through the Holocaust but used it in their arguments for Zionism.

Many post World War II Jews grew more angry at Sephardic Jews than at Ashkenazic Jews because they believed the Sephardic assimilated too much before World War II. In order to assimilate, Finkielkraut believed Jews had to discard pieces of their heritage and religion. With the loss of Jewish culture by assimilation, Finkielkraut believed his generation had to discover what it meant to be a Jew without that original culture.

In an attempt to reclaim their Jewishness, many post-war Jews joined the Zionist movement. Finkielkraut believed Zionists did not desire an established nation. He believed Zionists were using Zionism to hide their feelings of confusion about their Jewish identity. Finkielkraut believed there was no strong community between Jews after World War II, and because of this, the Zionist community became a way for the confused Jews to come together. Finkielkraut viewed the Zionist community as insufficient and misguided. Instead, he desired that Jews stop using the nation of Israel as the way out of their confusion and construct a new way to experience Judaism.

The book ends with Finkielkraut acknowledging he was unable to answer what it meant to be fully Jewish. He instead highlighted his hope to be able to learn as much as he could from his ancestors who survived the Holocaust. He hoped to recreate a sufficient image of what Judaism could look like going forward.

Guilt
In chapter 2 of The Imaginary Jew, Finkielkraut writes about Pierre Goldman. Pierre Goldman was a Frenchman of Jewish descent who was convicted of robbery and murder. Goldman was innocent of the accused murders and was acquitted when the case was retried years later. Finkielkraut claimed that because of Goldman's guilt for not being a victim of the Holocaust, nor a radical Jewish leftist, Goldman accepted imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. This, to Finkielkraut, was a reflection of the post World War II generation of Jews who share the feeling of guilt of not being persecuted enough like their ancestors and have a need to be marginalized because of that guilt.

Destroyed Culture
According to Finkielkraut, before the Holocaust, much of Jewish culture was lost due to assimilation of Jews in various countries in order to avoid persecution and pogroms. Finkielkraut believed that with the death of 6 million Jews in World War II, the Jewish identity and culture the pre-war Jews held was lost with them. This led post-war Jews to search for a new meaning of Jewishness, which at the time of writing The Imaginary Jew, Finkielkraut does not believe they had yet discovered.

Zionism
Finkielkraut saw a rise in Zionism after the Holocaust, partially due to many Jews believing they had earned a Jewish nation after having gone through the genocide of the Holocaust. To Finkielkraut, these Zionists gave antisemites the ability to mask their antisemitism with anti-Zionism. He believed this allowed antisemites to claim that they were against Zionism's ideologies and not outright say they were against Jews.

Reception
The Imaginary Jew has been met with mixed reception. Some like Alan Berger of the Journal of Religion, tout Finkielkraut's book as an accurate depiction of the Jewish identity crisis post World War II in a generation that did not live through concentration camps but had to live with the camps' aftermath. Berger claims the book was still relevant at the time of his review in 1996. Other reviewers like Lucien Lazare of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, view The Imaginary Jew as out of date due to more current events like the fall of the Soviet Union and the changing climate in the middle east. Lazare believed these changes made the claims in this book void, and while the book might have had some validity during its original release, it no longer did at the time of Lazare's review.