The Jewish Writings

by Hannah Arendt

Although Hannah Arendt is not primarily known as a Jewish thinker, she probably wrote more about Jewish issues than any other topic. When she was in her mid-twenties and still living in Germany, Arendt wrote about the history of German Jews as a people living in a land that was not their own. In 1933, at the age of twenty-six, she fled to France, where she helped to arrange for German and eastern European Jewish youth to quit Europe and become pioneers in Palestine.

During her years in Paris, Arendt's principal concern was with the transformation of antisemitism from a social prejudice to a political policy, which would culminate in the Nazi "final solution" to the Jewish question - the physical destruction of European Jewry. After France fell at the beginning of World War II, Arendt escaped from an internment camp in Gurs and made her way to the United States. Almost immediately upon her arrival in New York she wrote one article after another calling for a Jewish army to fight the Nazis, and for a new approach to Jewish political thinking. After the war, her attention was focused on the creation of a Jewish homeland in a binational (Arab-Jewish) state of Israel.

Although Arendt's thoughts eventually turned more to the meaning of human freedom and its inseparability from political life, her original conception of political freedom cannot be fully grasped apart from her experience as a Jew. In 1961 she attended Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. Her report on that trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, provoked an immense controversy, which culminated in her virtual excommunication from the worldwide Jewish community. Today that controversy is the subject of serious re-evaluation, especially among younger people in America, Europe, and Israel.

The publication of The Jewish Writings, much of which has never appeared before, traces Arendt's life and thought as a Jew. It will put an end to any doubts about the centrality, from beginning to end, of Arendt's Jewish experience.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Politics, Nonfiction, Jewish, Ebooks, Judaism

559 pages, Hardcover

First published March 13, 2007

About the author

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).

Reviews

[Denise DeRocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime philosophy....

[Stas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The course reader included also her fable "Heidegger the Fox". I really got the kick out of that one.

[Craig Bolton]

The Jewish Writings by Hannah Arendt (2008)

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this to be a really excellent book. Reading Arendt's evolving positions on Zionism before, during partition and post the formation of the state of Israel. I found it very illuminating on the historical issues concerning Israel and Palestine.

[Harriet Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Jewish Writings

The Jewish Writings, by Hannah Arendt, is a fascinating book. Some of it, is difficult to understand. But, it is worth getting through it. I highly recommend this book.

[Vaiva Paulauskaite · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way she writes is just astonishing