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Hubert Abraham Haddad, a noted poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright, as well as an art historian and painter, was born in Tunis on March 10, 1947 and accompanied his parents into exile in France at the age of five. One of his novels, Le Camp du bandit mauresque (The Camp of the Moorish Bandit, 2005), describes their drab existence in the poor neighborhoods of Paris and its suburbs and his search for identity. Years later, speaking in an interview of his Judeo-Berber heritage and his Tunisian-French identity, he said: “There can only be h…

The film director Marcel Hanoun was born in Tunisia on October 26, 1929, moved to France just after World War II, and died in Créteil, France, on September 22, 2012. In the 1950s in Paris, he was fascinated by photography, cinema, and theater, and studied aeronautical engineering. Working as a photographer and journalist, he was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Eurovision in Cannes in 1959 for his first feature-length movie, Une Simple Histoire. Jean-Luc Godard, who admired Hanoun’s revolutionary aesthetic choices, often sponsored his low-budget productions. After completing Le Huitième…

Benny Lévy was a French intellectual, essayist, philosopher, and professor at the Sorbonne (Paris VII), best known in France as one of the founders of a Maoist movement in 1968 and for having been secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre from 1973 until the latter’s death in 1980. His trajectory took him from radical politics to Western philosophy to Orthodox Judaism, and ultimately aliya to Israel, where he taught philosophy and in 2000, together with two other French Jewish philosophers, Bernard-Henri Lé…