Acting

Henri Alleg

Harry Salem, known as Henri Alleg, born July 20, 1921 in London and died July 17, 2013 in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, was a French journalist, member of the French Communist Party (PCF), and former director of Alger Républicain. He is notably the author of "La Question," a book denouncing torture during the Algerian War. Born in London to Russo-Polish Jewish parents, Henri Alleg never fully embraced his Jewish identity due to his views on Israel as an agent of racist colonialism. Alleg spent part of his childhood in Paris where, during the Spanish Civil War, he encountered an increasingly politicized school environment with Italian refugees who opposed Mussolini's arrival in France along with German Jews. Alleg left for Algeria in 1939 and, at the age of 18, became closely associated with the Algerian Communist Party. In 1946, he married Gilberte Serfaty, who, like him, would become an ardent communist activist. In 1951, he became editor of the daily newspaper Alger Républicain. He went underground in 1955, when the newspaper Alger Républicain was banned. Boualem Khalfa, the first Muslim to head a major daily newspaper, had left the previous year to join the Algerian Communist Party press.