Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews

In March of 1980, Le Nouvel Observateur published the final interviews between the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, then blind and debilitated, and his young assistant, Benny Lévy. Readers immediately denounced the interviews as distorted and fraudulent for portraying a Sartre who had abandoned his leftist convictions, rejected his most intimate friends, and cast aside his fundamental beliefs in favor of a messianic Judaism. Sartre's supporters argued that it was his orthodox interlocutor, Lév...