Antisemitism and the Left: On the Return of the Jewish Question by Robert Fine & Philip Spencer

Author:Robert Fine & Philip Spencer [Fine, Robert & Spencer, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sociology, History & Theory, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, General
ISBN: 9781526104984
Google: Zm65DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2017-02-27T06:24:59+00:00

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Political life in an antisemitic world: Hannah Arendt's Jewish writings

All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together. (Franz Fanon, The Fact of Blackness)1

We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English or representatives of any country for that matter. We will always remain Jews, but we want to, too. (Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl)2

At the time that Horkheimer and Adorno were rethinking their approach to modern antisemitism, Hannah Arendt was also embarking on her own sustained efforts to understand the phenomenon. Initially, she had shown little interest in the question of antisemitism, which she professed had previously ‘bored’ her, but with the rise of Hitler, antisemitism unsurprisingly became a key concern of hers both politically and intellectually.3 Arendt was active in Zionist movements, initially in Germany and then in France after she took refuge there in 1933. In the nation state that had proclaimed the Rights of Man and Citizen and accorded citizenship rights to Jews, she found herself extremely vulnerable as a stateless person. After the Nazis swept through France, Arendt was interned, escaped and made her way to the United States where, like Horkheimer and Adorno, she sought to come to terms with something which, in her mind, fundamentally altered the conditions not only of Jewish life but also of human existence.

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