In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Annabel Herzog about her article “When Arendt Said ‘We’: Jewish Identity in Hannah Arendt’s Thought,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
When Arendt Said “We”: Jewish Identity in Hannah Arendt’s Thought
Annabel Herzog
The term “identity” has become commonplace in political discourse—so much so that we tend to think people have always sought to define their collective identities as specific and different from others, and as worthy of special consideration in the political sphere. However, even a superficial look at the history of the term “identity” shows that its use in politics and political theory became prevalent only in the 1970s. Moreover, acceptance of the concept was not straightforward. The notion of identity in politics was born to call attention to the fact that categories of people had been, until then, repressed by or excluded from the political discourse. Racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, gender groups, or people of different sexual orientations—all demanded that their voices be heard in a world that had oppressed or neglected them. However, not everyone felt represented by these new voices. Identities born from the pleas of particular groups for their collective experiences of exclusion to be acknowledged as authentic only led to more such pleas based on claims of exclusion from those very identities, and to definitions of “proper ways” to fit into identities. As K. Anthony Appiah puts it, the notion of identity replaced one tyranny with another.[1]
The response to that situation was a critique against the essentialism of identity politics, namely, against the very existence of accepted authenticities and the closure of identities. The concept of identity gave way before notions of hybridity, difference, fluidity, borderlines, etc. This development, however, led to a dead end and, recently, a revival of identity politics. As Amy Allen formulated it twenty years ago in the context of feminist theory, “the current debate among feminists over the uses and abuses of identity politics has led to a critical impasse. . . . [E]ither we embrace identity categories that are fixed, pregiven and perhaps even ‘natural,’ or we reject any and every notion of identity in favor of a theorization of multiple, shifting, open-ended processes of identification.”[2] In the former case, oppression is reenacted through a process of reification and standardization. In the latter case, political action is inconceivable because it necessitates that people agree to be classified in more or less homogeneous groups whose members are pursuing identical goals.[3]
It is in this context that scholars have turned to Hannah Arendt, seeking in her thought elements that could help avert the dead end of identity discourse. Arendt was a woman, a Jew, for some time a refugee, and, later, a proud American citizen. However, her views on these issues were often unusual because they were based on an unexpected distinction between natural and political identities. As such, Arendt’s conceptualization of the passage between these two forms of identity, the natural and the political, may constitute a solution to the reification and essentialization of identity, although Arendt herself seldom used the term and died before she could furnish an explicit opinion on identity politics as such.
What kinds of insights about Jewish identity can we draw from Arendt’s work? It has been convincingly argued that although Arendt “knew very little about the body of Judaism itself, [she] was the great explicator of ‘Jewishness’ and its psychological machinations.”[4] Put differently, she conceptualized modern Jewish identity. Indeed, current scholarship emphasizes Arendt’s Jewishness, as witnessed by the publication in 2007 of a volume entitled The Jewish Writings,[5] which includes almost all the essays and articles Arendt wrote on topics related to the Jews: anti-Semitism, assimilation, the Holocaust, Zionism, the Eichmann trial, etc. However, her criticism of the European nation-states and her admiration for American federalism led her to an original and, we might say, paradoxical attitude toward the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel: she rejected nationalist Zionism even as she supported the creation of a Jewish homeland. Scholars are thus forced to address the tension between Arendt’s conception of Jewish identity and her views on Jewish national identity, a tension that they resolve through such apt locutions as “non-nationalist nationalism”[6] or “cosmopolitan nationalism.”[7]
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1. K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 162–63.
2. Amy Allen, “Solidarity after Identity Politics: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Feminist Theory,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 25, no. 1 (1999): 100.
3. To escape this impasse, Spivak conceptualized a “strategic essentialism.” She explained that social and political action requires behaving as if people were linked by homogeneous identities, even if no such identities in fact exist. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sara Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–16.
4. Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 2001), p. 65. However, Vromen argues that “Arendt never defined the meaning of a Jewish secular identity.” Suzanne Vromen, “Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Identity: Neither Parvenu nor Pariah,” European Journal of Political Theory 3, no. 2 (2004): 183.
5. Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).
6. Raluca Munteanu Eddon, “Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt and the Paradox of ‘Non-Nationalist’ Nationalism,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 12, no. 1 (2003): 55–68.
7. Natan Sznaider, “Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Cosmopolitanism: Between the Universal and the Particular,” European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 1 (2007): 115.
