Born in 1920 in Blida (Algeria) of Sephardic origin, Jean Daniel graduated in Philosophy at the Sorbonne. He founded the review Caliban, in 1947 and was its editor until 1951. As editor-in-chief of L'Express between 1954 and 1964, he became known as an international reporter, covering the war in Algeria and travelling to Cuba. He went on to become the Paris correspondent of Washington's The New Republic between 1957 and 1962, and a contributor to the daily paper Le Monde (1964). Late in 1964 he founded the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, which he is now editor and manager of. He contributes regularly across the international mass media.

Jean Daniel is considered one of France's most influential intellectuals not only in the fields of politics and culture but also in the twentieth century's great issues for debate: the Sartre-Camus controversy and the end of the Marxist utopia, the war in Algeria, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the decolonization of Africa, European and Latin American dictatorships and, more recently, terrorism and recent wars. He has been a member of the board of France-Presse (1971-1975), the Supreme Council of the French Language (1989-1994), the Board of Directors of the Gran Louvre (1992-1997) and the National Consultative Committee for Ethics (1998-2002) as well as other organisations, and he is the president of the Committee of Wise Men (Brussels, 2003).

He is the author of a number of books, including L'erreur (1953), Le temps qui reste (1973), Le Refuge et la Source (1977), L'ère des ruptures (1979), De Gaulle et l'Algerie (1986), Les religions d'un président (1988), La Blessure (1992) and L'ami anglais (1994). He won the International Press Award in 1973 for Le temps qui reste.