Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

Abstract

Hannah Arendt (1906­ 1975) was one of most original and interesting political thinkers of twentieth century. In this new interpretation of her career, philosopher Richard Bernstein situates Arendt historically as an engaged Jewish intellectual and explores range of her thinking from perspective of her continuing confrontation with the Jewish question. Bernstein argues that many themes that emerged in course of Arendt's attempts to understand specifically Jewish issues shaped her thinking about politics in general and life of mind. By exploring pivotal events of her life story ­ her arrest and subsequent emigration from Germany in 1933, her precarious existence in Paris as a stateless Jew working for Zionist organizations, her internment at Gurs and her subsequent escape, and finally her flight from Europe in 1941 ­ he shows how personal experiences and her responses to them oriented her thinking.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 163 citations exist upstream.