Judith Butler writes:

‘You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no easier to settle. In these editorials, essays and unfinished pieces, she seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?

(LRB 10 May 2007)

Though Arendt had a long, often sympathetic involvement in Zionist politics, she was wary of the project almost from the start. 'I find this territorial experiment increasingly problematic,' she wrote in a 1940 letter, just one of the fascinating documents gathered by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman in their splendid collection of Arendt’s Jewish writings, many of which have been translated for the first time. In 1948, she confessed to her complete 'opposition to present Zionist politics'. Her opposition was rooted in three concerns: the correspondence she saw between Zionism and Fascism, the Zionists' dependence on imperialism, and her growing awareness of what she called 'the Arab question'.

Schocken | hardback 559 pp. |ISBN: 9780805242386