Hannah Arendt, white supremacist - The Jerusalem Post

Hannah Arendt, white supremacist - The Jerusalem Post: racism (photo credit: REUTERS) 

racism

(photo credit: REUTERS)

‘The right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality,” wrote Hannah Arendt in 1957, in support of segregation in the US South.

On a recent list of the top 144 “Jewish heroes” published by Israel’s Beit Hatfutsot, Arendt was listed as one of 10 heroic “thinkers,” alongside Albert Einstein and Martin Buber. The German-born Arendt has always loomed large in Jewish circles. She is often portrayed as the consummate Jewish intellectual and is almost always heralded and lauded in liberal and progressive Jewish circles. But it is time to tell the truth about Arendt. She was no hero. She was a white supremacist, an intellectual of the early 20th century European variety who combined noxious notions of white European superiority with a toxic view of the world. She derided vast continents as being full of “savages.” It’s time to close the book on Arendt: she was a product of a brutal and racist 20th century, not a Jewish hero, but a villain.

She is a representation of all that went wrong when Jews in Europe embraced European concepts of racial supremacy in an attempt to ape European nationalism.

Arendt was born in Linden, Germany in 1906. In the 1920s she studied at the University of Freiburg and began an affair with the philosopher Martin Heidegger. She completed her dissertation in 1929 at Heidelberg and fled Germany in 1933 with the rise of Nazism. She eventually made her way to New York in 1941. In the postwar period she briefly managed Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc, an organization that helped collect abandoned Jewish cultural assets in post-war Germany. Soon afterwards she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, one of many publications that cemented her as a thinker.Since then she has joined a pantheon of Jewish thinkers that one is supposed to “know” and respect. The adoration Arendt is given seems to be based on received wisdom.People think she is important, so she is important.Few people seem to have read what she actually wrote.