Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem

Rating:
Summary: A prophecy of the Israel/Palestine conflict
Review: Hannah Arendt's reputation in Israel (according to this book) has suffered the consequences of her controversial views, but these are now becoming more openly discussed, witness the conference on her thought at the source of this book. This set of essays is a highly useful (and balanced) treatment of the 'banality of evil' controversy, and much else, including Arendt's prophetic cassandra warnings about what was to come in the hopeless muddle of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Rating:
Summary: The case against Arendt was not made strongly enough
Review: I was present at the Jerusalem Conference and heard a number of the papers included in the present volume. From what I heard no one really addressed Hannah Arendt's moral failing in showing such insensitivity and coldness to victims of the Shoah in her book 'The Banality of Evil'. They too did not see two other areas in which she despite being one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century failed her own conception of the ' dignity of man' One was in her reluctant and apologetic attitude toward her own Jewishness, and the second in her deference to the Nazi - sympathizing Heidegger. I would also say the whole celebratory tone of the conference as if the world had changed and now everyone understood that Arendt was after all right about the ' Banality of Evil' conference seemed to be wrongheaded and in itself slightly immoral.