Jewish Politics in All the Languages of the World

• In Event: Reading Arendt: Language, Law, Politics

Abstract

This paper reconsiders the much-discussed question of Arendt’s attitude toward Zionism. Rather than focusing on Arendt’s one famous visit in Jerusalem as a reporter on the Eichmann trial, as much of this discussion has, I track a whole series of visits, starting with her trips to Palestine on the behest of the Youth Aliya in the 1930s and ending with her visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories shortly after the war of June 1967. Far from severing her ties to the State of Israel in the wake of her scathing Eichmann report and the ostracizing that famously ensued, it would seem that Arendt continued to some degree to identify with the state and rushed to take part in the wave of victory tourism that followed the war. What are we to learn, then, from thinking of “Arendt in Jerusalem” as a serial event, rather than a one-time occurrence? My list of Arendt’s multiple visits to Jerusalem includes also virtual ones, such as her commentary on events that took place in the city in 1942, which was written for the New-York Yiddish daily Morgen Zshurnal. Which brings up the second form of multiplicity that I look to in order to complicate our understanding of Arendt’s relationship to Zionism: her multilingualism. Arendt’s Yiddish op-ed piece is written from the point of view of an expert on the politics of the Yishuv and it deals in particular with the issue of language politics, criticizing those Zionists who put the cause of Hebrew revival above Jewish solidarity in the face of Nazi aggression. Instead of defending Hebrew, she proposes, the activists of the Yishuv should turn to populism and pursue “Jewish politics in all the languages of the world.” As I show in the paper, the op-ed prefigures the Eichmann book and the controversies that followed it in fascinating ways, making it the ideal lynchpin for a rethinking of the place of that famous affair in our larger account of Arendt’s relation to Zionism and the State of Israel.

Author

• Naama Rokem, University of Chicago