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:
“The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.”
—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)
“According to the historian, they escaped as by a miracle all roving bands of Indians, and reached their homes in safety, with their trophies, for which the General Court paid them fifty pounds. The family of Hannah Dustan all assembled alive once more, except the infant whose brains were dashed out against the apple tree, and there have been many who in later time have lived to say that they have eaten of the fruit of that apple tree.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... the word “education” has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education,
when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)