Hannah Arendt and Modern Jewish Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In her reply to Gershom Scholem’s scathing letter implying that Eichmann in Jerusalem constituted a betrayal of the Jewish people, Hannah Arendt insists that Jewishness is constitutive of her very being. “To be a Jew belongs to the indisputable facts of my life, and I have never had the wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. There is such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given and not made; for what is physei and not nomo.” Arendt proceeds to explain that, in the Jewish case, gratitude for the given constituents of identity entails the adoption of an emphatically political stance, for it rules out the very forms of behavior (e.g., disloyalty, denial, self-delusion) of which Scholem accused her. Here, the ostensible “fact” of Jewishness occasions a meditation which is simultaneously existential and political. In others words, the predicaments confronting modern Jews as individuals and as a collective generate immense theoretical creativity.
On this panel, we will use Arendt’s penetrating but occasionally idiosyncratic analysis of modern Jewish politics as a springboard for an examination of her central theoretical claims regarding action, non-sovereign agency, and the nation-state. Taking Jewish facticity as a point of departure, the papers will investigate the extent to which Jewish experiences and concerns lie at the heart of Arendt’s theorizing, shaping her perspective even in texts, such as The Human Condition, which make no explicit reference to things Jewish. Moreover, we will examine how Arendt’s ongoing engagement (both as an activist and as a theorist) with pressing crises of the Jewish twentieth century spawned a more general critique of the nation-state and the limitations of rights discourse. In recent years, political theorists aligned with the Jewish left (e.g., Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib) have increasingly claimed Arendt as an ideological forebear. This panel takes a somewhat different approach. We look to Arendt not to claim an authentic Jewish pedigree for, say, contemporary opposition to Israeli policy, but to better understand the political-theoretical questions posed by modern Jewish history. The conviction animating all of the panel’s papers is that Arendt is an incisive analyst of modern Jewish history – and that these analyses afforded her unique critical insights into the broader dynamics of modern politics.
The panel features presenters at different career stages, hailing from universities located in four continents (Australia, America, England, and Israel). Judah Isseroff, a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, will uncover the Jewish underpinnings of Arendt’s most superficially Greek text, The Human Condition. Julie E. Cooper, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, will revisit Arendt’s exchanges with Salo Baron, the renowned Jewish historian, in an effort to parse the marked political determinism that suffuses their respective analyses of Jewish Emancipation. John Ackerman, Assistant Professor of Politics at Northeastern University London, will study Arendt’s attempt to overcome diasporic Jews’ supposed avoidance of politics by crafting a modern Jewish politics adequate to the challenges of the twentieth century. Miguel Vatter of Deakin University will serve as chair and discussant. The panelists all work at the fertile intersection between political theory and Jewish studies, adding an interdisciplinary perspective that is critical for making sense of Jewish political predicaments and their broader theoretical implications.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Between Survival and Sovereignty: Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Political Theory - Judah Isseroff

• Hannah Arendt and the Modern Jewish Avoidance of Politics - John Wolfe Ackerman, Northeastern University London

• Salo Baron, Hannah Arendt, and the Politics of Jewish Emancipation - Julie E. Cooper, Tel Aviv University

• Actions, Nations and Time: Arendt’s Wartime Writings and the Politics of History - Isaac Stethem, Columbia University

Chair

• Miguel Vatter Deakin University

Discussants

• Miguel Vatter Deakin University

• Noga Rotem University of Washington