I disagree with parts of “How Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger’s Relationship Can Inform Our Current Crises” (https://lithub.com/how-hannah-arendt-and-martin-heideggers-relationship-can-inform-our-current-crises/), but I thought Joshua Corey’s take on Arendt’s rejection of Zionist “blood and soil” ideology was interesting:

”…the accusation Arendt’s friend Gershom Scholem would hurl at her decades later in the wake of the publication of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, that she lacked ahavath Israel, love for the Jewish people. Arendt’s response to Scholem was telling:

“‘How right you are that I have no such love, and for two reasons: first, I have never in my life “loved” some nation or collective. […] The fact is that I love only my friends and am quite incapable of any other sort of love. Second, this kind love for the Jews would seem suspect to me, since I am Jewish myself. I don’t love myself or anything I know that belongs to the substance of my being.’

“It was “the substance of [her] being” that Arendt must have intuited that she could never reconcile with the demands for “authenticity” made by her lover-teacher, whose virulent anti-Semitism would not become fully known to the world until the publication of his so-called “black notebooks” in 2014. This is the same Arendt who would write that, “if one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.”

“Yet the ferociously anti-ideological Arendt is forever fighting the atavistic, tribal demands made upon her identity—the politics of dogmatic certainty in which you are either with us or against us—with the precisely honed weapon of a political ethics that boils down to this: think for yourself. Not in any preening or reflexively contrarian way, but critically, seriously, and yet retaining the capacity for mischief, even for play. Arendt may or may not have been a philosopher—a label she rejected—but she was certainly a writer…”