Alain Elkann

Alain Elkann (born 23 March 1950) is an Italian journalist, novelist, and interviewer specializing in cultural and intellectual discourse. Born in New York to Jean-Paul Elkann, a French-Jewish banker and industrialist, and Carla Ovazza, from the prominent Italian-Jewish Ovazza banking family of Turin, Elkann has pursued a career centered on literature, journalism, and broadcasting. Since 1989, he has contributed a weekly interview column to the Italian newspaper La Stampa, engaging with prominent figures in arts, politics, and society. Elkann has authored over twenty books, frequently addressing the history of Jews in Italy and their cultural contributions, with works translated into multiple languages. He founded the Alain Elkann Interviews platform, hosting discussions with international personalities, and has served as president of the Foundation for Italian Art & Culture in New York. Among his honors are the Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur awarded by France in 2009 and the Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2020.

Alain Elkann was born on March 23, 1950, in New York City to Jean-Paul Elkann, a French-Jewish banker and industrialist born in Paris in 1921, and Carla Ovazza, an Italian-Jewish woman from the prominent Ovazza banking family of Turin. Jean-Paul Elkann, who later served as president of the Paris Jewish Consistory and acting president of the Representative Council of Major French Jewish Organizations (CRIF) in 1982, had studied at Columbia Business School and held directorships including at Christian Dior SA, reflecting his integration into post-war European financial networks despite the family's wartime displacements. The Ovazza family, established bankers in Piedmont, had faced fascist persecution, prompting Carla's relatives to flee Italy amid rising antisemitism in the late 1930s.

The Elkanns had relocated to the United States in the early 1940s to escape Nazi and Fascist threats in Europe, with Jean-Paul and Carla meeting and marrying in New York before returning to Europe shortly after Alain's birth, eventually settling in Milan and Turin. This transatlantic move instilled a bilingual and bicultural foundation, blending French, Italian, and American influences in Elkann's early environment, shaped by his parents' Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and experiences of exile. The family's affluence, rooted in banking and industry, provided immediate access to elite intellectual and economic circles, including connections to Parisian Jewish communal leadership and Turin's financial establishment.

Carla Ovazza's Piedmontese origins further embedded Elkann in a milieu of Jewish assimilation and resilience, as her family had been prominent in Italian finance since the 19th century, though marked by tragedies like the 1943 execution of relatives Ettore Ovazza and his children by SS forces near the Swiss border. Jean-Paul's non-practicing yet supportive stance toward Orthodox Judaism influenced the household's cultural dynamics, fostering an environment where secular intellectual pursuits coexisted with awareness of historical Jewish vulnerabilities. These origins positioned Elkann amid a network of post-war Jewish elites navigating reconstruction in France and Italy.