The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (review)

Book Reviews lSI The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt, by Jennifer Ring. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1997. 358 pp. $34.50. This is an interesting and learned book about the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. But it is also a difficult book to review, because it attempts to do many things at onceto contextualize Arendt's thought, to argue with her critics, to discuss numerous aspects ofJewish culture and intellectual life, and implicitly to vindicate a certain distinctively "Jewish" approach to political theory. These are all important tasks, and Ring has insightful things to say about each ofthem. But these perceptions and comments don't add up to a clear line of argument. Perhaps they are best considered as Arendtian "thought trains," efforts to pursue certain fruitful lines of inquiry unconstrained by academic or political conventions. The book is structured around two related concerns, which Ring asserts have been insufficiently explored by Arendt scholars-gender and Judaism and their intersection. Ring insists that if we want to understand Arendt we have to see her as a Jewish woman, grappling with distinctively Jewish concerns from a position of double marginality to which Jewish women have been relegated by an already marginalized Jewish male culture. The book actually consists oftwo parts only loosely tied together. The first deals with the hostile reception accorded to Arendt's famous Eichmann in Jerusalem, which Ring explains in terms of Arendt's position as a Jewish women working in a male intellectual culture; the second deals with parallels between certain "Jewish" themes related to Torah, Talmud, rabbinic literature, and historical consciousness , and Arendt's writings on politics and philosophy. Ring sometimes writes as though her approach to Arendt is thoroughly against the .grain of recent scholarship. But the argument ofthis book would be clearer if it came explicitly to terms with a number ofrecentwriters-Dagmar Barnouw, Seyla Benhabib, Richard Bernstein, Hannah Pitkin, and others-who have also sought to underscore the generally "Jewish" context of Arendt's work. Yet there is much in this book that is genuinely novel. The discussion of the reception of Arendt's Eichmann by New York Jewish intellectuals is in many ways superb. Ring asks why Arendt's book provoked such vicious attack, while Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, which makes many of the same claims, was generally lauded. The difference, she argues, is that Arendt was a Jewish woman whose bold thesis regarding Eichmann's banality, combined with her critique ofthe Judenrat, undermined the hawkish, anticommunist liberalist (often called "hard liberalism, something Ring doesn't note) of the New York Jews, men dealing with a long history of antisemitic charges ofeffeminacy and with the guilt derived from their own distraction from and impotence during the Holocaust. For a woman, an outsider, especially such an intellectually aggressive one as Arendt, to disturb their conventional 152 SHOFAR Winter 2000 Vol. 18, No.2 wisdom about Nazism, Ring claims, was simply too much for many ofthese writers to handle. This is a clever and at times a genuinely powerful analysis, and in developing it Ring ranges widely, from psychoanalytic theory to postwar American intellectual history to feminism to revisionist Israeli historiography (Segev, Porath) about the response of the Yishuv to the destruction of European Jewry. Ring's most effective accomplishment in these chapters, and in the book as a whole, is to do for the general subject ofJewish womanhood what writers like bell hooks have done for the subject of African-American womanhood-to underscore the powerful and complex interplay of racial and gendermarginalization. Ring offers a self-consciously"multicultural" reading ofArendt, insisting that while she was a "white woman," as a'Jew and as a woman she suffered a double exclusion. As she puts it, while an "identity" approach to scholarship is "completely legitimate," both its partisans and its critics "have overlooked Judaism as a part of identity politics and the multicultural dialogue." By insisting on the role of Judaism, and Jewish feminism in particular, within this dialogue, the book makes a genuine contribution. Yet there is also something a bit anachronistic about this argument, which treats as "completely...