Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (PDF)

Hannah Arendt is increasingly recognised as one of the most
original social and political thinkers of the twentieth century. In
this important book, Richard Bernstein sets out to show that many
of the most significant themes in Arendt's thinking have their
origins in their confrontation with the Jewish Question. By
approaching her mature work from this perspective, we can gain a
richer and more subtle grasp of her main ideas.

Bernstein discusses some of the key experiences and events in
Arendt's life story in order to show how they shaped her thinking.
He examines her distinction between the Jewish parvenu and the
pariah, and shows how the conscious pariah becomes a basis for
understanding the independent thinker. Arendt's deepest insights
about politics emerged from her reflections on statelessness, which
were based on her own experiences as a stateless person. By
confronting the horrors of totalitarianism and the concentration
camps, Arendt developed her own distinctive understanding of
authentic politics - the politics required to express our humanity
and which totalitarianism sought to destroy.

Finally, Bernstein takes up Arendt's concern with the phenomenon
of the banality of evil. He follows her use of Eichmann in order to
explore how the failure to think and to judge is the key for
grasping this new phenomenon.

Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question offers a new
interpretation of Arendt and her work - one which situates her in
her historical context as an engaged Jewish intellectual.