[2] Finkielkraut is the son of a Polish Jewish manufacturer of fine leather goods who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp.

In 2010, he was involved in founding JCall, a left-wing advocacy group based in Europe to lobby the European Parliament on foreign policy issues concerning the Middle East and Israel in particular.

[7] Finkielkraut first came to public attention when he and Pascal Bruckner co-authored a number of short but controversial essays intended to question the idea that a new emancipation was underway;[citation needed] these included The New Love Disorder (Le Nouveau Désordre amoureux, 1977) and At the Corner of the Street (Au Coin de la rue, 1978), as well as The Adventure (L'aventure, 1979).

This reflection led Finkielkraut to address post-Holocaust Jewish identity in Europe, such as in The Imaginary Jew (Le Juif imaginaire, 1983).

[8] Seeking to promote what he calls a duty of memory [fr], Finkielkraut also published The Future of a Negation: Reflexion on the Genocide Issue (Avenir d'une négation : réflexion sur la question du génocide, 1982) and later his comments on the Klaus Barbie trial, Remembering in Vain (La Mémoire vaine, 1989).

In The Wisdom of Love (La Sagesse de l'amour), Finkielkraut discusses this debt in terms of modernity and its mirages.

[15][16][17] Emmanuel Todd wrote in 2008 that "never in France would rioters have been characterized by the color of their skin, if this anti-republican blasphemy had not been the work of an intellectual of Jewish origin, to whom the sacralization of the Shoah guarantees a surer protection than the colonial past to the young people of the suburbs".

[23] He was criticized for his close friendship with Croatian president Franjo Tuđman, and was accused by David Bruce MacDonald of supporting "a nation whose leader was a Holocaust revisionist, at the helm of an authoritarian government".

[25] On 16 February 2019, Finkielkraut was accosted on the street by a group of yellow vest protesters in Paris when they chanced on him in Boulevard du Montparnasse.