Whom Did DeLillo Name Benno Levin After?

Benny Levy

Paul Giamatti: Benno Levin Is Benny Levy?

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Mean in name of the character  - do it intentionally

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Name Benno Levin is the pen name of a character in the book. This character I used the name of a revolutionary of the early 20^th century  (vague) - DeLillo says,"and that's all I'm going to say on it"

DeLillo Interview with Krasny for Cosmopolis Publication

DeLillo said:

... details, ideas, themes: the idea of a kind of confluence of technology and money... cybercapital, which seemed to be dominant in a very recent period in our history. Essentially the 1990's. ...

My idea was to end this era not over a period of weeks and months as happened, but in one day.

This Interview is in 7 Parts

Bernard-Henri Levy in a letter to Michel Houellebecq in their back and forth letter book entitled Public Enemies:

I am as fascinated now as I was when I was twenty by those great, inflexible figures who provided a sort of background music through the history of my generation and who as a joke I call our "hidden Imams"! Benny Levy, after his political season and his ascent to Jerusalem; Robert Linhart, who preceded him as the head of the Gauche proletarienne, and whose daughter has just described in a novel how one fine day he simply decided to stop talking;...

From wiki on Benny Levy whose pen name was Pierre Victor - nice inversion here of real and pen names.

Benny Lévy (aka Pierre Victor) was a philosopher, political activist and author. A political figure ofMay 1968 in France, he was the disciple and last personal secretary of Jean-Paul Sartre from 1974 to 1980. Along with him, he helped founding the French newspaper Libération in 1972.

Benny Lévy is known for his unusual itinerary from Maoism to Judaism, or "from Mao to Moses", which was also followed by a few other philosophers of his generation.

Lévy worked with Sartre, and the two men produced four books until Sartre's death. While working with Sartre, Lévy began to discover Judaism, initially through his research into the Kabbalah, which he conducted with his mentor. Their work together created a stir among the circle that surrounded Sartre, because Sartre had begun introducing new ideas and terms that evoked religious and, more specifically, Jewish concepts, such as Redemption and Messianism. ...

 Two months before his death, Sartre responded to these critics, claiming that he had indeed abandoned some of his earlier ideas.^{[citation needed]} In 1978, Lévy encountered Levinas, and started learning Hebrew and beginning Talmudic studies....

Born in Egypt, Benny Lévy grew up without experiencing Judaism as a faith. He left Egypt after the 1956 war and immigrated to Belgium then France with his family. His elder half-brother, Eddy Lévy, stayed in Egypt, converted to Islam in 1956 and changed his name to Adil Rifaat.^[1]...

Benny Lévy soon proved to be a brilliant student and completed his studies at the École Normale Supérieure, learning under such key intellectual figures as Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction. He entered the Union des étudiants communistes(UEC), a student communist group, and then at his foundation in 1966 the Maoist Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes (UJC - ml). He became one of the main leader of this latter organization after Robert Linhart. Benny Lévy was an important figure during the May 68 Student Revolt. After these events, the direction of the UJC-ml was put in minority, and founded the Maoist Gauche prolétarienne (GP, Proletarian Left). Taking the pseudonym of Pierre Victor, Benny Lévy was one of its main leaders, along with Alain Geismar.

Richard Sheets (Rich Shits) aka Benno Levin: I am working on a journal while a man lies dead ten feet away. I wonder about this. 

I thought I would spend whatever number of years it takes to write ten thousand pages and then you would have the record, the literature of a life awake and asleep, because dreams too, and little stabs of memory, and all the pitiful habits and concealments, and all the things around me would be included, noises in the street, but I understand for the first time, now, this minute, that all the thinking and writing in the world will not describe what I felt in the awful moment when I fired the gun and saw him fall. So what is left that's worth the telling.

Benny Levy versus Emmanuel Levinas on “Being Jewish”

mj.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/1/15.full

by A Herzog - 2006 - Cited by 2 - Related articles
The late Benny Levy's last book, Etre juif, is a study of Emmanuel Levinas's ..... be correct one should say: from Moses to Mao, and from Mao to Moses, namely, ...

And now here is the Mao reference, DeLillo's Mao II novel.

“They called me Benno after Benito Juarez,” said Archimboldi, “I suppose you know who Benito Juarez was.” - Bolano 2666