Stephane Trano is a French journalist and author based in New York City, New York. His most recent contribution as a guest columnist began in October 2018 in the French weekly newsmagazine Le Point.
Biographies
Trano has authored three biographical essays:
In 2000, on François Mitterrand, Mitterrand, Les Amis D’abord Trano explored in-depth the former French president’s personal networks. The preface was written by Jean Lacouture, the French biographer of General Charles de Gaulle. Lacouture writes: "François Mitterrand, whose public life is arranged traditionally around three or four parties, including one he roughly forged, confided in me that "in politics, everything is a matter of banding together", which could also have been said, of religion, by a general of the Jesuits in their heyday. And when he defined a friend as he in whom nothing, neither Bousquet, nor failure, nor insult, could alter public or private loyalty, he seemed to speak less as a politician or secular moralist than as an adherent of a religious order.Stéphane Trano suggests, line by line, that the reason for the State has reasons other than the reason of the heart. And that loyalty, noble virtue that it is, can be, in the public order, incompatible with the general interest." In this first book on Mitterrand, Trano published a conversation with his long-hidden daughter Mazarine Pingeot. Pingeot-Mitterrand had never before witnessed publicly about her relationship with her father in a book.
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In 2006, with Une Affaire d’Amitie, Trano extended its work to Mitterrand's families. Mazarine Pingeot wrote the preface, and the former French Minister of Culture from 1981 to 1997 under Mitterrand, Jack Lang, signed the postface.
An essay about John Fitzgerald Kennedy, "a character built by his entourage Appointed by his father to fulfill his own presidential destiny, the first politician invented by the new dominant post-war mass media and shaped by marketing." According to the author, the legend of Kennedy was "carefully maintained by censorship and powerfully organized by his family, and then conveyed by historians. However, his diseases, his obsession with women, his dangerous relationships, the wandering of his political thought... represent everything America usually hates : concealment, perjury, betrayal, corruption. Fifty years after his death, the best-hidden mystery of the icon of American lies not in his murder, but in a life totally concealed by myth."
Journalism
At the age of 18, Trano's first news articles appeared in the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, founded in 1950 by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in conjunction with former members of the French Resistance. He first began as a celebrity lifestyles reporter but soon became a political journalist. From 1991 to 1996, Trano served as Chief Political Editor of the weekly :fr:Tribune juive |Tribune Juive. Recognized by the French intellectual community, he reported on controversial issues of public interest for several major publications. In 1996, Trano became the first Jewish journalist to work under dual Middle East leadership—Palestinian National Authority and Israeli supervision—after being appointed as Co-Chief Editor of the short-lived Palestinian Economic Newsletter, a monthly publication to promote economic development in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in accordance with the Oslo Accords of 1993. With a circulation of 15,000, it was published in English, French and Arabic. Yasser Arafat wrote its first editorial when it was published in June, 1996. It was published for seven months.
Political advisory
Trano has served in prominent political advisory roles, including:
Special Advisor to Patrick Gaubert, then Head of the French governmental mission against racism and anti-Semitism
Special Advisor to Jean Kahn, President of the Conseil Representatif des Institutions juives de France,, and President of the European Jewish Congress
In 2005-2006, Trano was Director of Online Communications and author for Jack Lang, President of the Arab World Institute, former NATO-based French anti-piracy expert, and French Minister of Culture and Communications from 1981-1995. Trano has received attention for his contributions to public debate by questioning, in many articles:
During a session of the Senate in Belgium, December 14, 2000, in a debate with Prime Minister Michiel Martens about a proposal for a resolution on the right of return for Palestinian Refugees:
Regarding Holocaust monuments and national memorial cultures in France and Germany since 1989: the origins and political function of the Vel d'Hiv in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin
