Debate With Hannah Arendt
Scholem was opposed to the death sentence against Adolf Eichmann. In the aftermath of the trial in Jerusalem, Scholem sharply criticised Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and decried her lack of "ahavath Yisrael" (solidarity with the Jewish people). He also opposed Arendt's interpretation (in letters and the introduction to Illuminations) of Walter Benjamin as a Marxist thinker who predated the New Left. For Scholem, Benjamin had been an essentially religious thinker, whose turn to Marxism had been merely an unfortunate, but inessential and superficial, expedient.
Read more about this topic: Gershom Scholem
Famous quotes containing the words hannah arendt, debate, hannah and/or arendt:
“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Like man and wife who nightly keep
Inconsequent debate in sleep
As they dream side by side.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“We are all dead men on leave.”
—Eugene Leviné, Russian Jew, friend of Rosa Luxemburg’s lover, Jogiches. quoted in Men in Dark Times, “Rosa Luxemburg: 1871-1919,” sct. 3, Hannah Arendt (1968)
“What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)