Hannah Arendt, the Holocaust, and Zionism: A Story of a Failure

Abstract

For some time, Hannah Arendt has been considered a major thinker, regarded by some as perhaps the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. She is now becoming a major figure in Israel as well, in light of which, this article reexamines Arendt's attitude towards the "Jewish question", notably Zionism and the State of Israel. The article shows, through looking at Arendt's work as a whole, that she has never succeeded in overcoming her own Jewish problem. Fundamental tension between a typical universalism and a deep feeling of Jewishness marks all of her work, but explodes in her report on Eichmann's trial. Attending this was, for her, in her own words, a "late cure"—perhaps from this unresolved tension between Jewish identity and particularism and universalistic aspirations. The result was the book on the Eichmann trial which was, as the article tries to show, a moral failure in the strict sense of the word.