The Jewish Writings

“Arendt posits a political way of life that disperses sovereignty, nationalism, and individualism into new forms of social and political coexistence.”–Judith Butler, London Review of Books“Arendt’s experience as a Jew was sometimes that of an eyewitness and sometimes that of an actor and sufferer of events, all of which run the risk of partiality; but it was also always that of a judge, which means that she looked at those events and, insofar as she was in them, at herself from the outside. Her Jewish writings from more than thirty years are less exemplifications of Arendt’s political ideas at work than the experiential ground from which those ideas grew and developed. It is in this sense that her experience as a Jew is literally the foundation of her thought: it supports her thinking even when she is not thinking about Jews or Jewish questions.”–From the preface by Jerome Kohn

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, fled to Paris in 1933, and came to the United States after the outbreak of World War II. She was the editorial director of Schocken Books from 1946 to 1948, and taught at Berkeley, Cornell, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and The New School for Social Research. Arendt died in 1975.