The Correspondence Of Hannah Arendt And Gershom Scholem

The essence of the correspondence between Arendt and Scholem can be said to lie in three things. Above all it provides an intimate account of how two great intellectuals try to come to terms with being both German and Jewish, and how to think about Germany before, during, and after the Holocaust. They also debate the issue of what it means to be Jewish in the post-Holocaust world whether in New York or in Jerusalem. Finally, the specter of Benjamin haunts the work and in a sense the letters are as much about Benjamin as the other two questions since his life and tragic death epitomize them both. Arendt and Scholem's letters on these weighty questions are lightened by more routine exchanges: on travel itineraries, lunch or dinner parties where important people were present, and so forth. These daily details are woven throughout the correspondence and provide vivid biographical information about Arendt and Scholem that is unavailable in any other source.

The legendary correspondence between the critic Walter Benjamin and the historian Gershom Scholem bears indispensable witness to the inner lives of two remarkable and enigmatic personalities. Benjamin, acknowledged today as one of the leading literary and social critics of his day, was known during his lifetime by only a small circle of his friends and intellectual confreres. Scholem recognized the genius of his friend and mentor during their student days in Berlin, and the two began to correspond after Scholem's emigration to Palestine. Their impassioned exchange draws the reader into the very heart of their complex relationship during the anguished years from 1932 until Benjamin's death in 1940.

At first glance, Theodor W. Adorno’s critical social theory and Gershom Scholem’s scholarship of Jewish mysticism could not seem farther removed from one another. To begin with, they also harbored a mutual hostility. But their first conversations in 1938 New York were the impetus for a profound intellectual friendship that lasted thirty years and produced more than 220 letters. These letters discuss the broadest range of topics in philosophy, religion, history, politics, literature, and the arts – as well as the life and the work of Adorno and Scholem’s mutual friend Walter Benjamin. Unfolding with the dramatic tension of a historic novel, the correspondence tells the story of these two intellectuals who faced tragedy, destruction, and loss, but also participated in the efforts to reestablish a just and dignified society after World War II. Scholem immigrated to Palestine before the war and developed his pioneering scholarship of Jewish mysticism before and during the problematic establishment of a Jewish state. Adorno escaped Germany to England, and then to America, returning to Germany in 1949 to participate in the efforts to rebuild and democratize German society. Despite the differences in the lifepaths and worldviews of Adorno and Scholem, their letters are evidence of mutual concern for intellectual truth and hope for a more just society in the wake of historical disaster. The letters reveal for the first time the close philosophical proximity between Adorno’s critical theory and Scholem’s scholarship of mysticism and messianism. Their correspondence touches on questions of reason and myth, progress and regression, heresy and authority, and the social dimensions of redemption. Above all, their dialogue sheds light on the power of critical, materialistic analysis of history to bring about social change and prevent repetition of the disasters of the past.

Called “the most important critic of his time” by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has only become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A “natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature,” writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword to this volume; and Benjamin's correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas, while also offering an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived. Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Max Brod, and Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin elaborates on his ideas about metaphor and language. He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, and expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as Marxism and French national character. Providing an indispensable tool for any scholar wrestling with Benjamin’s work, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 is a revelatory look at the man behind much of the twentieth century’s most significant criticism.

Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times Steven E. Aschheim The way three prominent German-Jewish intellectuals confronted Nazism, as revealed by their intimate writings. Through an examination of the remarkable diaries and letters of three extraordinary and distinctive German-Jewish thinkers -- Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Victor Klemperer -- Steven E. Aschheim illuminates what these intimate writings reveal about their evolving identities and world views as they wrestled with the meaning of being both German and Jewish in Hitler's Third Reich. In recounting how their personal and private selves responded to the public experiences these writers faced, their letters and diaries provide a striking composite portrait. Scholem, a scholar of Jewish mysticism and the spiritual traditions of Judaism; Arendt, a political and social philosopher; and Klemperer, a professor of literature and philology, were all highly articulate German-Jewish intellectuals, shrewd observers, and acute analysts of the pathologies and special contours of their times. From their intimate writings Aschheim constructs a revealing "history from within" that sheds new light on the complexity and drama of the 20th-century European and Jewish experience. Steven E. Aschheim holds the Vigevani Chair of European Studies and teaches in the Department of History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is author of Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800--1923; The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890--1990; and Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises. Published in association with Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati May 2001 120 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, index cloth 0-253-33891-3 $19.95 s / £15.50

This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present.

"It is impressive to see an edited collection in which such a high intellectual standard is maintained throughout... I learned things from almost every one of these chapters."—Craig Calhoun, author of Critical Social Theory

Hannah Arendt is increasingly recognised as one of the most original social and political thinkers of the twentieth century. In this important book, Richard Bernstein sets out to show that many of the most significant themes in Arendt's thinking have their origins in their confrontation with the Jewish Question. By approaching her mature work from this perspective, we can gain a richer and more subtle grasp of her main ideas. Bernstein discusses some of the key experiences and events in Arendt's life story in order to show how they shaped her thinking. He examines her distinction between the Jewish parvenu and the pariah, and shows how the conscious pariah becomes a basis for understanding the independent thinker. Arendt's deepest insights about politics emerged from her reflections on statelessness, which were based on her own experiences as a stateless person. By confronting the horrors of totalitarianism and the concentration camps, Arendt developed her own distinctive understanding of authentic politics - the politics required to express our humanity and which totalitarianism sought to destroy. Finally, Bernstein takes up Arendt's concern with the phenomenon of the banality of evil. He follows her use of Eichmann in order to explore how the failure to think and to judge is the key for grasping this new phenomenon. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question offers a new interpretation of Arendt and her work - one which situates her in her historical context as an engaged Jewish intellectual.