He is the son of Dina (Siboni) and André Lévy, the founder and manager of a timber company, Becob, and became a multimillionaire from his business.

[15] He visited Bangladesh again in 2014[16] to speak at the launch of the first Bengali translation of this book and to open a memorial garden for Malraux at Dhaka University.

Liam Hoare wrote in Moment that the book examines "the humanism, ethics and politics of Judaism, as well as address[es] the issues of Israel and anti-Semitism in France today".

The movie itself is, as stated in its official Cannes presentation: "The third part of a trilogy, opus three of a documentary made and lived in real-time, the missing piece of the puzzle of a lifetime, the desperate search for enlightened Islam.

Kurdistan is Sunnis and Shiites, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Syrians living freely with Muslims, the memory of the Jews of Aqrah, secularism, freedom of conscience and belief.

It is where one can run into a Jewish Barzani on the forward line of a front held, 50 kilometers from Erbil, by his distant cousin, a Muslim, Sirwan Barazi...

[32] In January 2010, Lévy publicly defended Popes Pius XII and Benedict XVI against political attacks directed against them from within the Jewish community.

[33] At the opening of the "Democracy and its Challenges" conference in Tel Aviv (May 2010), Lévy gave a very high estimation of the Israel Defense Forces, saying "I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions.

"[34] In March 2011, he engaged in talks with Libyan rebels in Benghazi, and publicly promoted the international acknowledgement of the recently formed National Transitional Council.

[35][36] Later that month, worried about the 2011 Libyan civil war, he prompted and then supported Nicolas Sarkozy's seeking to persuade Washington, and ultimately the United Nations, to intervene in Libya, ostensibly to prevent a massacre in Benghazi.

[37] In May 2011, Lévy defended IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn when Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a chambermaid in New York City.

Lévy questioned the credibility of the charges against Strauss-Kahn, asking The Daily Beast, "how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York's grand hotels of sending a 'cleaning brigade' of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.

"[38][39] In May 2011, Lévy argued for military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad after violence against civilians in response to the 2011 Syrian uprising.

[48] In February 2015, he performed his play Hotel Europa at the National Opera of Ukraine on the first anniversary of the Euromaidan's toppling of the pro-Russian oligarchy of Viktor Yanukovych.

[50] In December 2019, Lévy visited the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, where he met Kurdish fighters led by General Mazloum Abdi.

Bernard-Henri Lévy is also accused of having propagated "Masonic" ideology through charitable organizations and Tunisian personalities indicted in the case, in addition to working towards the normalization of relations between Tunisia and Israel and of being a "member of Mossad", the Israeli intelligence service, the investigating judge considering that he had sufficient evidence to initiate proceedings.

[54] Early essays, such as Le Testament de Dieu or L'Idéologie française faced strong rebuttals from noted intellectuals on all sides of the ideological spectrum, such as historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis, Raymond Aron, and Gilles Deleuze, who called Lévy's methods "vile".

[55] More recently, Lévy was publicly embarrassed when his essay De la guerre en philosophie (2010) cited the writings of French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul.

Responding in an opinion piece, Lévy wrote: "It was a truly brilliant and very believable hoax from the mind of a Canard Enchaîné journalist who remains a good philosopher all the same.

[59][60] In 2003, Lévy wrote an account of his efforts to track the murderer of Daniel Pearl, The Wall Street Journal reporter who was taken captive and beheaded by Islamic extremists the previous year.

[59][62] The book was condemned by William Dalrymple, a British historian of India and travel writer, and others, for its lack of rigour and its caricatured depictions of Pakistani society.

[67] In Asterix and the White Iris, Julius Caesar's personal advisor Libellus Blockbustus has been officially described as a caricature modelled on Lévy, among other contemporary French figures.