Although Hannah Arendt is not primarily known as a Jewish thinker, she probably wrote more on Jewish issues than on any other topic. As a young adult in Germany, she wrote about German Jewish history. After moving to France in 1933, she helped Jewish youth immigrate to Palestine. During her years in Paris, her principle concern was the transformation of antisemitism from prejudice to policy, which would culminate in the Nazi "final solution." After France fell, Arendt escaped from an internment camp and made her way to America. There she wrote articles calling for a Jewish army to fight the Nazis. After the war, she supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in a binational (Arab-Jewish) state of Israel .Arendt's original conception of political freedom cannot be fully grasped apart from her experience as a Jew. In 1961 she attended Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. Her report, Eichmann in Jerusalem, provoked an immense controversy, which culminated in her virtual excommunication from the worldwide Jewish community. Today that controversy is the subject of serious re-evaluation, especially among younger people in the United States, Europe, and Israel. The publication of The Jewish Writings–much of which has never appeared before–traces Arendt’s life and thought as a Jew. It will put an end to any doubts about the centrality, from beginning to end, of Arendt’s Jewish experience.

The introduction by Feldman (pp. 15-52), "The Jew as Pariah: The Case of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)", discusses her life and writings, including her views regarding antisemitism in the 19th-20th centuries. Pp. 240-279 contain material on the controversy over Arendt's book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" - exchanges between her and the scholars Gershom Scholem and Walter Laqueur stating their objections to her views, along with her responses.

"Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt's first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though it would not be published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cutural life in the nineteenth century, as well as someone who confronted and bore the burden of being both a woman in a man's world and an assimilated Jew in Germany with unusual determination. Rahel Levin Varnhagen, was, Hannah Arendt writes, "neither beautiful nor attractive... and possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality." Arendt sets out to tell the story of Rahel's life as Rahel might have told it and, in doing so, to reveal the way in which intellectual and social assimilation works out in one person's destiny. On her deathbed Rahel is reported to have said, "The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life--having been born a Jewess--this I should on no account now wish to have missed." Only because she had remained both a Jew and a pariah, Hannah Arendt observes, "did she find a place in the history of European humanity.""--