JEWISH WORLD / Bernard Henri Levy: Jews must spread their resistance to the world

"There is a Jewish experience which has to be more than ever conveyed to the nations," say Bernard Henri Levy, the Jewish French philosopher who founded the New Philosophy (Nouvelle Philosophie) movement.

"We have a message to deliver to those experiencing mass murders, in Africa, Darfur, Chechnya, where people die countless, nameless, meaningless... for them we have an experience of resistance," he says.

For three decades, Levy has simultaneously charmed and infuriated French intellectuals with his outspoken views on both rightist and leftist politics, human rights, and the State of Israel.

In this interview with Leadel.NET, Levy calls on Jews to to "go out of themselves and into the world," and involve themselves in the plight of humanitarian victims.

"We have a duty of involvement in those cases," he says. "Abstract solidarity, abstract charity is not a Jewish value. Concrete, active practical solidarity, this is what our texts demand and teach."

Levy was born to a Jewish family in Algeria in 1948, and was brought to Paris just a few months later.

He studied at the elite Ecole Normale Superieure in the late 1960s, under the guidance of professors such as Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. He joined a group of young intellectual to form the New Philosophy movement in response to the uncompromising Marxist atmosphere sweeping Paris around the student upheavals of the 1960s.

He has spoken out against concentration camps and genocide around the world, comparing them to the experience of the Holocaust.

This is the third edition of Leadel.NET'S 'Living the Vision' series on The Jewish World. Visit Leadel.NETfor more online interviews with Jewish leaders.