Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

Hannah Arendt is increasingly recognised as one of the mostoriginal social and political thinkers of the twentieth century. Inthis important book, Richard Bernstein sets out to show that manyof the most significant themes in Arendt's thinking have theirorigins in their confrontation with the Jewish Question. Byapproaching her mature work from this perspective, we can gain aricher and more subtle grasp of her main ideas.Bernstein discusses some of the key experiences and events inArendt's life story in order to show how they shaped her thinking.He examines her distinction between the Jewish parvenu and thepariah, and shows how the conscious pariah becomes a basis forunderstanding the independent thinker. Arendt's deepest insightsabout politics emerged from her reflections on statelessness, whichwere based on her own experiences as a stateless person. Byconfronting the horrors of totalitarianism and the concentrationcamps, Arendt developed her own distinctive understanding ofauthentic politics - the politics required to express our humanityand which totalitarianism sought to destroy.Finally, Bernstein takes up Arendt's concern with the phenomenonof the banality of evil. He follows her use of Eichmann in order toexplore how the failure to think and to judge is the key forgrasping this new phenomenon.Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question offers a newinterpretation of Arendt and her work - one which situates her inher historical context as an engaged Jewish intellectual.