Suchergebnisse

For many years Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) has been the object of intense debate. After her bitter critiques of Zionism, which seemed to nullify her early involvement with that movement, and her extremely controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt became virtually a taboo figure in Israeli and Jewish circles. Challenging the "curse" of her own title, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem carries the scholarly investigation of this much-discussed writer to the very place where her ideas have been most conspicuously ignored. Sometimes sympathetically, sometimes critically, these distinguished contributors reexamine crucial aspects of Arendt's life and thought: her complex identity as a German Jew; her commitment to and critique of Zionism and the state of Israel; her works on "totalitarianism," Nazism, and the Eichmann trial; her relationship to key twentieth-century intellectuals; her intimate and tense connections to German culture; and her reworkings of political thought and philosophy in the light of the experience of the twentieth century

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. BILDUNG IN PALESTINE -- Zionism, Binationalism, and the Strains of German-Jewish Humanism -- 2. THE TENSIONS OF HISTORICAL WISSENSCHAFT -- The Émigré Historians and the Making of German Cultural History -- 3. ICONS BEYOND THE BORDER -- Why Do We Love (Hate) Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss? -- Notes -- Index

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Part I: The Crisis of Culture-Then and Now -- 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, and Degeneration -- 2. Thinking the Nietzsche Legacy Today: A Historian's Perspective -- 3. Against Social Science: Jewish Intellectuals, the Critique of Liberal-Bourgeois Modernity, and the (Ambiguous) Legacy of Radical Weimar Theory -- 4. Nazism and the Holocaust in Contemporary Culture -- Part II: (Con)Fusions of Identity-Germans and Jews -- 5. Excursus: Growing Up German Jewish in South Africa -- 6. Assimilation and Its Impossible Discontents: The Case of Moritz Goldstein -- 7. Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem -- 8. German History and German Jewry: Junctions, Boundaries, and Interdependencies -- 9. Archetypes and the German Jewish Dialogue: Reflections Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair -- Part III: Understanding Nazism and the Holocaust: Competing Models and Radical Paradigms -- 10. Nazism, Normalcy, and the German Sonderweg -- 11. Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil -- 12. Post-Holocaust Jewish Mirrorings of Germany: Hannah Arendt and Daniel Goldhagen -- Part IV: Historians, History, and the Holocaust -- 13. Reconceiving the Holocaust? Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners -- 14. George Mosse at 80: A Critical Laudatio -- 15. On Saul Friedlander -- Notes -- Index.

This book consists of a range of essays covering the complex crises, tensions and dilemmas but also the positive potential in the meeting of Jews with Western culture. In numerous contexts and through the work of fascinating individuals and thinkers, the work examines some of the consequences of political, cultural and personal rupture, as well as the manifold ways in which various Jewish intellectuals, politicians (and occasionally spies!) sought to respond to these ruptures and carve out new, sometimes profound, sometimes fanciful, options of thought and action. It also delves critically into the attacks on liberal and Enlightenment humanism. In almost all the essays the fragility of things is palpably present and the book touches on some of the ironies, problematics and functions of responses to that condition. The work mirrors the author's ongoing fascination with the always fraught, fragile and creatively fecund confrontation of Jews (and others) with European modernity, its history, politics, culture and self-definition. In a time of increasing anxiety and feelings of fragility, this work may be helpful in understanding how people at an earlier (and sometimes contemporary) period sought to come to terms with a similar predicament.