Alain Finkielkraut is a French essayist and public intellectual. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, many on the ideas of tradition and identitary violence, including Jewish identity and antisemitism, French colonialism, the mission of the French education system in immigrant assimilation, and the Yugoslav Wars. He joined the Department of French Literature in the University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1976 at the age of 27, and from 1989 to 2014, he was professor of History of Ideas in the �cole Polytechnique department of humanities and social sciences. He was elected member of the Acad�mie fran�aise on 10 April 2014. He often appears in France on talk shows. As a thinker, Finkielkraut defines himself as being "at the same time classical and romantic". In a similar vein to some American scholarly views such as the criticism of the School of Resentment by Harold Bloom, and of the The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, Finkielkraut deplores what he sees as the deterioration of Western tradition through multiculturalism and relativism. 

June 30th, 1949 in Paris (Age 75)