Customer Reviews

The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age

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Those looking to Hannah Arendt for a Zionist or Feminist philosophy will be disappointed. She is one of the great philosophic minds of the twentieth century, and to assign labels to her and use the lens concordant to such labels in reading her is to miss much of what she has to say. She is certainly not trying to provide clever arguments to win debates with. Her relevance to the world today is up to the reader to determine, but I would encourage you to make the attempt.

I am very pleased to obtain a copy of this much loved book. Many of Hannah ARendt's observations have turned out to be prescient in the long term. I had been reading a copy from The University of Queensland and I was determined to get my own copy - this was not easy as out of print and usually very expensive. However, I was lucky enough to get this one for a reasonable price and in fact its in better condition than the Lbrary one that I had read (despite comments written in margins - I actually found these quite interesting!!)

This is a collection of essays from Arendt, a feminist and Zionist from the middle of the century. I am sure most political theorists love this kind of book, but for normal people the text is far too "scholarly". I could find nothing of a feminist nature in this book and little convicing of a Zionist nature. There are far more convincing books on both sets of thought than this.