Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

BERNSTEIN, Richard J. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. xiv + 233 pp. Paper, $17.00-Bernstein's book on Hannah Arendt portrays her as an existential thinker whose political thought responded to experiences and events which stimulated her reflection and exploration. Many of these phenomena, if Bernstein is right, were Jewish, and among them are central determinants of her political understanding. These include the Jewish question, antisemitism, Zionism, and the Nazi concentration and death camps. Bernstein's goal is "to show how [Arendt's] confrontation with the Jewish question (in its complex and varied aspects) shaped many of the fundamental issues that preoccupied her throughout her life (p. 9), and indeed how "the Jewish question was the catalytic agent for crystallizing her thinking" (p. 9). More specifically, Bernstein's central thesis is that "in order to understand the nuances of Arendt's political thinking, we must see how it is grounded in, and arises out of, her multifaceted encounter with the Jewish question" (p. 107). Bernstein is sensitive to both Arendt's episodic, penetrating style and her systematic, rational tendencies. In this book his emphasis is on the former. Bernstein's work, then, is a good complement to that of Margaret Canovan, Seyla Benhabib, and Maurizio d'Entreves, on the one hand, and of Jeff Isaac, on the other.

The book's nine chapters discuss Arendt's published writings and correspondence extensively, but they focus on two major works, The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, and on Arendt's essays on Zionism of the late 1940s. Bernstein's strategy is to situate narratively the writing of a book, essay, or article in the context of Arendt's...