About Catherine Chalier, the author of Le dsir de Conversion Catherine Chalier teaches philosophy at the University of Paris-X-Nanterre.

She has published copiously on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and many aspects of Judaism. She obtained the Agrgation de philosophie in 1971, and her State Doctorate in Philosophy in 1981. Her personal page, which lists 27 books authored by her published between the dates of 1982 and 2009, and 47 articles from 1976 to 2007, furnishes a complete bibliography of her work, and is available at: http://www.u-paris10.fr/96708336/0/fiche___pagelibre/ . She may be contacted by email at chalc@club-internet.fr. She is a member of the Adath Shalom Temple, in the 15th Arrondissment. Last year, Dr. Chalier received the prestigious French Judaism Foundation Award. I translate an excerpt from her remarks on that occasion below, as they may offer some insight into the personal thread that binds her life and work together. (The original French text of the reception of the award may be accessed at http://www.massorti.com/Le-prix-de-la-Fondationdu). My discovery of philosophy, full of enthusiasm in my senior year of study, took place thanks to Elisabeth de Fontenay. To this day I am deeply grateful to her for the love of philosophy and the knowledge she transmitted to me. During the same time in my life, when I was quite young, I began to read the Jewish Bible, and I also discovered, little by little, through Hebrew, the tradition and its commentaries, and the happiness that lay in studying them. They bring the texts to life in an extraordinary way and awaken the desire to live with them. Those two encountersphilosophy and Judaismwere of decisive importance in determining my personal life and my work, these two last being inseparable. It seems to me that I have wished to live in harmony with what I studied because for me it was the only way to catch a glimpse of a certain light, a hope, and to find my way through winding pathways . . . such as we all have in our lives. In any event, the philosophic word was thereby reoriented by the Jewish one, so forgotten at the University, so suspect, even, of affinities with the ineffability of a faith or the authority of a theology. Now, what comes to us from the Jewish wellspring continues to irrigate thought, provided we go to the trouble of studying, questioning, reflecting and transmitting what we discoverin the form of writing or teaching. Philosophy, in turn, prompts us to put questions to the text that allow us to discover new meaningsmeanings that sometimes make all the difference to ourselves or others.