Published: 2 June 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
WHILE MAJOR FRENCH, German and Hebrew news sources reported on his passing, for the most part, English language news sources have not. Memmi has not received an obituary in The New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal.
A man once considered so important to mid-century French intellectual life that no less than Camus and Sartre wrote introductions to his earliest works is gone, and the English-speaking world has barely taken notice.
How did this happen? How did a man who was once the darling of the French existentialist left, and who was once considered as foundational for early post-colonial theory as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said are today, come to be so thoroughly forgotten in the United States?
Part of it, no doubt, is the unfortunate timing of passing away at a time when all of our attention is a bit preoccupied with other matters. But I suspect a lot of it also has to do with his inconvenient politics.
Memmi’s Jewish politics do not fall squarely on either left or right, so both sides have seen it fit to ignore him – which, of course, is precisely what makes his work so vital and challenging for us today.
FULL STORY The last of his kind: ‘Jewish Arab’ Albert Memmi leaves a vital message about Zionism (Forward)
Photo: Albert Memmi (Wikicommons)
