July 2013
Hannah Arendt’s work has come under some critical fire lately, what with the release of the Margarethe Von Trotta-directed biopic, starring German actress Barbara Sukowa as the controversial political theorist. At issue in the film and the surrounding commentary are Arendt’s (allegedly misleading) characterizations of the subject of her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, as well as her ambivalent—some have said callous, even “victim-blaming”—treatment of other Jews. None of these controversies are new, however. As Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz notes in a recentNew York Times editorial, at the time of her book’s publication, “Nearly every major literary and philosophical figure in New York chose sides in what the writer Irving Howe called a ‘civil war’ among New York intellectuals.”
Source: Open Culture
