Jean Daniel (1) (1920–2020)

Jean Daniel was the pen name of Jean Daniel Bensaïd, born to a Jewish family in Blida, Algeria, the youngest of 11 children of a miller. He attended the University of Algiers before World War II, when he was part of a resistance group that aided the liberation of Algiers. He also participated in the Allied landings at Normandy and fighting in Alsace as part of the Free French forces led by Philippe Leclerc. After the war, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and worked for socialist politician Félix Gouin as a speechwriter. A self-described Jewish humanist and non-Communist leftist, he was a friend of Albert Camus and a confidant of Pierre Mendès-France, the French premier. In 1947, he co-founded and edited the literary review Caliban, when he adopted the pen name Jean Daniel. Caliban folded in 1951, after which Daniel worked as a teacher until being hired as a correspondent by the left-wing weekly news magazine L’Express. Daniel reported on the Algerian War for the magazine in 1956.
In 1964, he co-founded the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur as a weekly, covering political, business, literary, and economic news in France and internationally. He directed the magazine for nearly 50 years. He also wrote for The New York Times and other publications for decades. He was the author of many books on nationalism, communism, religion, the press, and other subjects, including the 2005 book La prison juive: Humeurs et méditations d'un témoin (English translation: The Jewish Prison:

A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism) as well as novels. In 1973, he published his memoir, Le Temps Qui Reste (The Time That Remains). He was married to Michèle Bancilhon, with whom he had a daughter, Sara Daniel, a reporter at L’Obs.