Observers of German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt often disagree on her politics, yet many view her as a staunch early critic of Zionism. Whereas her criticism of Israel rendered her unpopular in the American-Jewish and Israeli communities for many decades after 1948, commentators more recently have come to see her perspective as a prescient assessment of the ills of Jewish nationalism. This interpretation, however, fails to grasp the complexity of Arendt‘s political views of Zionism in particular and of Jewish nationhood (...) in general, which evolved over time and remained ambivalent from her early to her late works. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt claims the concept of brotherhood presents false notions of political community that elide historic hatreds of others and threaten modern political life. This paper explores Arendt’s critical assessment of the concept of brotherhood in order to reflect on one specific example: the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring of 2011. While some observers reject Arendt’s assessment of brotherhood as too narrow, her criticisms raise useful questions about democracy and plurality, which (...) confront any community that exhorts its members to act as ‘brethren’ rather than as ‘citizens.’ The Muslim concept of brotherhood suggests many different possibilities for belonging: a classic universalism of the Abrahamic natural law tradition; a progressive counter-public sphere; and as well the authoritarian private community of believers as represented in the early writings of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. Therefore, the politically controversial Muslim Brotherhood has no monopoly over the understanding of the Muslim concept of brotherhood. However, it is the most powerful, most well-organized brotherhood movement. The paper opens and ends with reflections on the Arab Spring of 2011, its one-year anniversary in January 2012, and considers other possibilities for the concept of brotherhood against the backdrop of Arendt’s analysis. (shrink)