Ros Schwartz’s translation of The Need for Roots makes Weil’s masterpiece feel as urgent today as it was in 1943.

Simone Weil was born to a fairly well-off Jewish family in Paris in 1909. After a charmed childhood in which she and her younger brother were considered something like prodigies, Weil graduated ...

His observation brought to mind the words of Simone Pétrement, biographer and friend of Simone Weil, the 20th-century French philosopher. Weil had been a Marxist in the early years of her ...