Limmud Michigan 2019

Hannah Arendt demands our attention but defies categorization:
• The political philosopher who coined the term totalitarianism, she rejected the label of philosopher, never referring to herself as one
• A Jewish victim of Nazi persecution, fellow Jews labeled her an anti-Semite for depicting Eichmann not as a monster but as “terrifyingly normal”
• A woman in a strongly sexist age (she earned her doctorate in 1929 and published her two masterworks in the 1950’s), she never considered her gender a barrier
• An ardent Zionist who well before Israel’s founding brought to Palestine shiploads of Jews escaping the Nazis, she advocated an Arab-Jewish joint state
Arendt was ahead of her time. Does her life speak to our own era’s contradictions?