Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

Born in Hanover, Germany in 1906 to an assimilated Jewish family that concealed its Jewish origins, Hannah Arendt wrestled with the “Jewish Question,” both personally and politically, her entire life. Arendt experienced first-hand the so-called “Golden Age” of German Jewry (1890-1930), as well as the nadir of modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, whose nature she tried to fathom in pathbreaking works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

In recent years, Arendt’s views on Jewish themes have provoked additional controversy and discussion. In 2012, she was the subject of German director Margarethe von Trotta’s critically acclaimed film, “Hannah Arendt,” which revolved around Arendt’s role in the Eichmann trial controversy. Two years ago, the publication of Bettina Stangneth’s book, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, which was based on previously unknown sources (the so-called “Sassen tapes”), compelled scholars and journalists to reopen the Eichmann dossier. 

In our course, we will trace the evolution of Arendt’s views on modern Jewish experience from her early work on the nineteenth-century Berlin Saloniste Rahel Varnhagen to her 1963 study of Adolf Eichmann, who in her eyes was emblematic of the “banality of evil.”

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center. Among his books are Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton University Press) and The Seductions of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press).

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