Abstract

Alain Finkelkraut has interrogated contemporary Jewish identity in terms of how a Jew reckons with the heavy impact of the Holocaust and in fact with the entire history of the Jewish people. Finkelkraut takes issue with Sartre's 1947 essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, not for its content but the effect that it has had on him. "Let there be no misunderstanding: I am not attacking the book that Sartre wrote on the Jewish problem," asserts the author in a footnote (JI 17, my translation). Instead, he shows how the philosopher aids in the creation of what Finkelkraut terms "the imaginary Jew." He compares this process of fossilization to Genet's treatment in Saint Genet. Finkelkraut's metaphoric language captures the pernicious effects that the public act of naming and thus essentializing can have on a person or group of people.