Mini biography

Bernard-Henri Lévy _{(November 5th. 1948, Béni Saf, Oran, French Algeria)}

Bernard-Henri Lévy (born 5 November 1948) is a French public intellectual.

Often referred to in France simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" (New Philosophers) movement in 1976.

His opinions, political activism and publications have also been the subject of several controversies over the years.

Early life and career

Lévy was born in 1948 in Béni Saf, French Algeria, to an affluent Sephardic Jewish (Algerian-Jewish) family. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. He is the son of Dina (Siboni) and André Lévy, the founder and manager of a timber company, Becob, and became a multimillionaire from his business.His father participated in the battle of Monte Cassino during World War II. He is the brother of Philippe Levy and Véronique Lévy [fr].

After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Lévy entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1968 and graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1971. His professors there included French intellectuals and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser.

Inspired by a call for an International Brigade to aid Bangladeshi separatists made by André Malraux, he became a war correspondent for Combat in 1971, covering the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan. The next year he worked as a civil servant for the newly established Bangladesh Ministry of Economy and Planning.

His experience in Bangladesh was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution ("Bangladesh, Nationalism in the Revolution", 1973). He visited Bangladesh again in 2014 to speak at the launch of the first Bengali translation of this book and to open a memorial garden for Malraux at Dhaka University.

New Philosophers

After his return to France, Lévy became a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg where he taught a course on epistemology. He also taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. He was a founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of young intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, and who developed an uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas.

In 1977, the television show Apostrophes featured Lévy together with André Glucksmann as a nouveau philosophe. In that year, he published Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain, 1977), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt.

Notable books

In the Footsteps of Tocqueville

Although Lévy's books have been translated into the English language since La Barbarie à visage humain, his breakthrough in gaining a wider US audience was the publication of a series of essays between May and November 2005 for The Atlantic Monthly, later collected as a book. In preparation for the series, In the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Lévy criss-crossed the United States, interviewing Americans, and recording his observations, with direct reference to his claimed predecessor, Alexis de Tocqueville. His work was published in serial form in the magazine and collected as a book by the same title. The book was widely criticized in the United States, with Garrison Keillor publishing a damning review on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

The Spirit of Judaism

In February 2016, Lévy published a new book entitled L'Esprit du Judaisme. An English version, The Genius of Judaism, was published by Random House in January 2017. In his foreword he describes this work as "a sequel, 40 years later" to Testament de Dieu, his earlier, widely considered seminal, opus. The book explores the reasons why the State of Israel is considered to be a litmus test for Jews and non-Jews alike; as well as the roots and causes of anti-Semitism where it existed, still exists, or is newly nascent. But, most of all, the book is devoted to Levy's ″defense of a certain idea of man and God, of history and time, of power, voice, light, sovereignty, revolt, memory, and nature—an idea that contains what I call, in homage to one of the few really great French writers to have understood some of its mystery, the genius of Judaism.

Notable movies

The Tobruk oath

Documentary released in 2012. It tells the diplomatic events of the Libyan Civil War seen from the inside by Lévy.

Peshmerga

Lévy's involvement with the Kurdish cause goes back to the early 1990s. On 16 May 2016, Bernard-Henri Lévy's new documentary film, Peshmerga, was chosen by the Cannes film festival as a special screening to its official selection. Lévy developed his vision of the Iraqi Civil War, through the Peshmerga fighters (Kurdish fighters armed by Westerners and fighting in particular against Daesh). It consists of images shot on the spot by a small team, especially with the help of drones. It portraits notably the female regiments of the Peshmerga army.

The movie itself is, as stated in its official Cannes presentation:

"The third part of a trilogy, opus three of a documentary made and lived in real time, the missing piece of the puzzle of a lifetime, the desperate search for enlightened Islam. Where is that other Islam strong enough to defeat the Islam of the fundamentalists? Who embodies it? Who sustains it? Where are the men and women who in word and deed strive for that enlightened Islam, the Islam of law and human rights, an Islam that stands for women and their rights, that is faithful to the lofty thinking of Averroes, Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Ibn Tufail, and Rumi?...

"Here, with this third film, this hymn to Kurdistan and the exception that it embodies, I have the feeling of possibly reaching my goal. Kurdistan is Sunnis and Shiites, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Syrians living freely with Muslims, the memory of the Jews of Aqrah, secularism, freedom of conscience and belief. It is where one can run into a Jewish Barzani on the forward line of a front held, 50 kilometers from Erbil, by his distant cousin, a Muslim, Sirwan Barazi… Better than the Arab Spring. The Bosnian dream achieved. My dream. There is no longer really any doubt. Enlightened Islam exists: I found it in Erbil."

A year later, Lévy said that "Jews have a special obligation to support the Kurds," and that he hopes "they will come say to the Peshmerga: 'For years now you have spilled your blood to defend the values of our shared civilization. Now it is our turn to defend your right to live freely and independently.'"

The Mosul battle

Documentary released in 2017. Alongside Kurdish fighters and Iraqi soldiers, Lévy chronicles, street after street, the liberation of the self-proclaimed capital of the organization Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Mosul.

Director - Selected filmography

1. Peshmerga (2016)