Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Response to my critics

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-44
Author(s):  
Seyla Benhabib
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
Albert Hirschman ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Liberal Societies ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Palestinian Population ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

My new book, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration. Playing Chess With History From Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin, considers the intertwined lives and work of Jewish intellectuals as they make their escape from war-torn Europe into new countries. Although the group which I consider, including Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Judith Shklar, Albert Hirschman and Isaiah Berlin, have a unique profile as migrants because of their formidable education and intellectual capital, I argue that their lives are still exemplary for many of the dilemmas and risks faced by all migrants. In the reply to critics, I consider such issues as the intellectual relations between Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer; differences between Arendt’s and Adorno’s views of an interpretive social science; and why international law played such an important role in the imagination of Jewish intellectuals. A further question involves the generalizability of the experience of Jewish otherness in European culture. Liberal societies always designate some others as their constitutive exterior. How continuous is the experience of emigré Jewish intellectuals with the exclusion of ethnic and racial minorities in our societies? Finally, if the founding of the State of Israel has by no means resolved the problems of statelessness but re-created it for the Palestinian population, what kind of political stance should we assume vis-à-vis this reality today?

scholarly journals Heliotropes

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-9
Author(s):  
Robyn Marasco
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
And Migration

A reflection on Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration, with a particular focus on her reconstruction of early critical theory and the ‘Benjaminian moment’ that links Hannah Arendt to Theodor Adorno.

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seyla Benhabib
Keyword(s):  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Albert Hirschman ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
The Face ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Intellectual Movements

This book explores the intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century—in particular, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, and Judith Shklar, as well as Hans Kelsen, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss. Informed by their Jewish identity and experiences of being outsiders, these thinkers produced one of the most brilliant and effervescent intellectual movements of modernity. The book's starting point is that these thinkers faced migration, statelessness, and exile because of their Jewish origins, even if they did not take positions on specifically Jewish issues personally. The sense of belonging and not belonging, of being “eternally half-other,” led them to confront essential questions: What does it mean for the individual to be an equal citizen and to wish to retain one's ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, or perhaps even to rid oneself of these differences altogether in modernity? The book isolates four themes in their works: dilemmas of belonging and difference; exile, political voice, and loyalty; legality and legitimacy; and pluralism and the problem of judgment. Surveying the work of influential intellectuals, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration recovers the valuable plurality of their Jewish voices and develops their universal insights in the face of the crises of this new century.

Intertwined Lives and Themes among Jewish Exiles

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Seyla Benhabib
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Judith Shklar ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

This introductory chapter outlines the entanglement of Jewish intellectuals and others as they confronted exile, migration, and, in some cases, statelessness. These intellectuals include Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Albert Hirschmann, Varian Fry, Judith Shklar, Carl J. Friedrich, and Isaiah Berlin. They faced these challenges because of their Jewish origins, regardless of whether they themselves identified as Jewish, whether they were believers, or whether they were practicing Jews or not. Meanwhile, the chapter considers that for German Jews, the experience of belonging and not belonging, of being rendered migrants and internal exiles in their own country, began in the mid-nineteenth century, with the granting of certain civil rights to Jews residing in German territories. Lastly, the chapter presents a brief layout of the succeeding chapters' content.

Populating Israel's Mountains while Preserving Their Environmental Quality

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnon Soffer
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
The United States ◽  
Swiss Alps ◽  
Western World ◽  
Rural Settlements ◽  
Agricultural Terraces ◽  
Unusual Phenomenon ◽  
And Migration ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Mountain Population

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Galilee Mountains were still practically a ‘closed system’, as a result of which the balance of land-use was more or less preserved. Rural settlements had then hardly developed, and stagnation of the few remaining mountain towns was observed. In general, the roads were unpaved routes, the economy served for subsistence only (based mainly on agricultural terraces), while most of the area was of forest or rocky ground serving as pasture.During the British Mandatory period, the Galilee Mountains area opened up slowly, and this process has increased ever since the establishment of the State of Israel. The Mountains are facing a tremendous increase in population as a result of natural local increase (mostly Arabs) and migration (mostly Jews). This excessive mountain population in Israel is an unusual phenomenon in comparison with other mountain regions in the western world, which have generally decreased in population though there, too, the equilibrium of land-use has been shaken—for instance in the Swiss Alps (Bugmann, 1980; Gallusser, 1980; Messerli et al., 1980), and in the Rocky Mountains of the United States (Kelly, 1980).

scholarly journals A DEMOCRATIC CONSENSUS? ISAIAH BERLIN, HANNAH ARENDT, AND THE ANTI-TOTALITARIAN FAMILY QUARREL

Think ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (48) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Kei Hiruta
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
Post War ◽  
Political Turmoil

Amid the ongoing political turmoil, symbolized by the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, books and articles abound today to encourage us to re-read anti-totalitarian classics ‘for our times’. But what do we find in this body of work originally written in response to Nazism and Stalinism? Do we find a democratic consensus forged by a shared anti-totalitarian commitment? I doubt it. Considering the cases of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, this article highlights discord beneath what may today appear like a post-war democratic consensus. I argue that the anti-totalitarian literature of the last century encompassed multiple political philosophies, which sometimes differed irreconcilably from each other.

At the edge of Soviet state control

AJS Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-188
Author(s):  
Gennady Estraikh
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
State Control ◽  
Soviet Leader ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

In August 1956, Nikita Khrushchev took part in a meeting with a delegation of Canadian communists. Discussing the wave of repression against Jewish intellectuals during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Soviet leader mentioned that he had supported Stalin's decision not to give the Crimea to Jews because it would have created a springboard for attacks on the Soviet Union. Apart from being paranoid about the Soviet Jews' loyalty to the young state of Israel and its imperialist backers, Khrushchev had, as his remark revealed, another paranoia that was characteristic of the Kremlin decision-makers: distrust of the peripheries. Khrushchev and his advisors knew that their totalitarian regime was not such a monolith as it might appear in the eyes of foreign observers, especially because visitors were seldom allowed to travel to the outskirts of the Soviet empire and did not know that some areas had features of fiefdoms. The post-Soviet disintegration of the communist empire confirmed the Kremlin denizens' misgivings.

scholarly journals Crise da Educação

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-118
Author(s):  
Flávia Regina Schimanski dos Santos ◽  
Marta Regina Furlan de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Theodor Adorno

Este estudo objetiva tecer reflexões a respeito do campo da Educação e da Formação de Professores, tendo como embasamento teórico as contribuições da Teoria Crítica da Sociedade com Theodor Adorno e a pensadora Hannah Arendt. Tais autores, apontam a crise da autoridade no mundo moderno como a origem da crise da educação, a qual culminou na redução da educação aos seus aspectos instrumentais e semiformativos. Embora as análises tenham partido de um contexto diferente, os problemas da educação brasileira denotam um cenário semelhante. Especificamente, o estudo analisa as inconsistências desencadeadores da crise formativa. O percurso metodológico consiste em uma pesquisa bibliográfica de cunho qualitativo. É oportuno considerar a possibilidade de um caminho para as tensões educativas que sigam a estrada da tomada de consciência rumo a autonomia docente e a constituição de uma autoridade sólida. Para tanto, assim como demonstrou a pesquisa, os professores precisam assumir, eminentemente, o compromisso de educar para a emancipação, para o pensamento autocrítico e, sobretudo, autorreflexivo. Recebido em: 29/10/2020.Aprovado em: 04/12/2020.

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