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 and/or arendt:
“The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of “living well,” which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.”
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“To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities ... than a rigorously enforced divorce from war- oriented research and all connected enterprises.”
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