{"id":61054,"date":"2025-11-05T08:53:29","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T14:53:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=61054"},"modified":"2026-03-23T11:38:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T16:38:19","slug":"arendts-refugee-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/arendts-refugee-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Arendt\u2019s Refugee Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In an age of rising authoritarianism, it is no shock that Hannah Arendt should be returning to syllabi and bestseller lists. A ruthless critic of ethnic nationalism and all the evils that follow from it, Arendt argues in The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em> (1951) and elsewhere that the racism that fueled European imperialism\u2019s overseas outrages logically precedes the enormities of the Holocaust. First deploy the pseudocategory of races to divide people; then use that difference as a way of justifying inequality and oppression; then go for the kill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a puzzle, though. Arendt\u2019s straightforward enlightenment universalism may seem hard to reconcile with her reflections on the deceptiveness, or even the impossibility, of disavowing one\u2019s ethnic or religious origins. However, when Eichmann in Jerusalem <\/em>proposes that the Holocaust, a crime against humanity, was also a crime \u201cperpetrated on the body of the Jewish people<\/a>,\u201d it offers a hint of Arendt\u2019s approach to that enduring puzzle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her biting wartime essay \u201cWe Refugees\u201d (1943), Arendt is already putting together some of the key pieces in her vision of a universalism that is nonetheless cautious about assimilation as shape-shifting. Fairly recently arrived in America herself, Arendt warns Jewish refugees against becoming \u201csocial parvenus\u201d willing to sweep their own identity under the rug so as to rise in a society that scorns Jews (in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em> Benjamin Disraeli is the exemplary parvenu). Instead, she praises \u201cconscious pariah[s],\u201d defined a year later in \u201cThe Jew as Pariah\u201d as \u201cthose bold spirits who tried to make of the emancipation of the Jews that which it really should have been\u2014an admission of the Jews as Jews<\/em> to the ranks of humanity.\u201d Faced with an American society that for all its political freedom still rejects social nonconformity, she urges refugees to be conscious pariahs, not Disraeli-like infiltrators: Beat them, don\u2019t join them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Essays<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n \u201cLying in Politics\u201d: Hannah Arendt\u2019s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"John <\/a>\n \n John Plotz <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n\n\n

In much later essays such as \u201cLying in Politics<\/a>\u201c (1971) and \u201cTruth and Politics<\/a>\u201d (1967), Arendt consistently argued that each of us has an ethical duty to understand others by making our \u201cmind go visiting.\u201d Arendt praises such boundary-free  multiperspectivalism as an indispensable intellectual tool in the battle against fixed categories of ethnic or racial or religious identity, which she saw mid-20th-century ruling elites weaponizing to justify oppression, exploitation, and worse. And yet this commitment to shared humanity is accompanied by the recognition of meaningful and often profound differences between individuals. Her early unpacking of the power of the conscious pariah underpins many ideas in Arendt that may initially seem internally contradictory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cnatality\u201d that brings each thinking being into the world with a different outlook from that of any other being is what makes protecting the rights of each so indispensable. (Although Arendt never, as far as I know, extends this account of personhood beyond the human, it is totally consistent with her account to do so, if humans discern in other species a capacity to feel and know and think about the world in ways that differ from ours.) We are connected and require one another not despite but because we differ from one another. As she puts it in The Human Condition<\/em> (1958), \u201cplurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All over the world those in power rush to justify their own acts of oppression by citing past enormities visited against their own group. Arendt, by aligning the body of the Jewish people with other targets of crimes against humanity, urges readers to imagine themselves as potential objects of such oppression and persecution: Whomever they came for first, tomorrow it could easily be you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arendt\u2019s refusal of \u201clove for the Jewish people\u201d is a startlingly radical and highly potent response to the ethnonationalism that in 2025 comes in both antisemitic and philosemitic flavors\u2014which sometimes blend together with surprising ease.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe Refugees\u201d lays out what Arendt thinks follows from the fact that each of us is tossed into the world with certain attributes, which we deny or conceal not only at our own peril but also with the result of making the world unsafe for others. Why should our decision to conceal or ignore aspects of our identity (in her terms, to act the parvenu) endanger others? Because crimes against humanity are always perpetrated on some set of bodies that has been singled out from the rest; we ignore such differences, latent or activated, at our peril.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe Refugees\u201d appeared (in English, in the tiny journal Menorah<\/em>) just as German refugees in America were learning the news of concentration-camp confinements and murders on an unprecedented scale, and before the fact registered or was accepted in America at large. There\u2019s also another salient context: as Elizabeth Young-Bruehl shows in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, <\/em>Arendt was repelled by both moderate and radical Zionist positions laid out in the May 1942 Biltmore Conference. Her objections to the Biltmore declaration inspired her (during the same months she was at work on \u201cWe Refugees\u201d) to formulate a vision of a future Palestine that repudiated not only the concept of a \u201cJewish commonwealth\u201d but also the sectarian division implied by any notion of minority and majority rights within the unitary state. Both contexts are crucial\u2014she was thinking both about Jews as victims of an unfolding genocide and about Zionists who aspired to dominate other residents of their intended future homeland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both frames illuminate the ways that \u201cWe Refugees\u201d unpacks the logic of Arendt\u2019s frequently cited response to Nazi antisemitism: \u201cWhen one is attacked as a Jew,<\/a> one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew.<\/em>\u201d In that spirit, \u201cWe Refugees\u201d is surprisingly caustic about German Jews who pretend that all along they\u2019ve spoken and indeed preferred English. The parvenu pretends that history and all its messy concomitants do not exist. \u201cLacking the courage to fight for a change of our social and legal status, we have decided instead, so many of us, to try a change of identity. And this curious behavior makes matters much worse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe Refugees\u201d depicts the would-be assimilator in almost Maurice Sendak terms: \u201cA nice little fairy-tale has been invented to describe our behavior; a forlorn \u00e9migr\u00e9 dachshund, in his grief, begins to speak: \u2018Once, when I was a St. Bernard \u2026\u2019.\u201d Entering a new nation confronting an unwelcome flow of refugees, Arendt thinks it is a terrible idea (unethical and ultimately unhelpful) simply to try to blend in. In effect, her denunciation of parvenu politics is a warning about the \u201cgood immigrant\u201d rhetoric that has proved such a noxious force in building Trump\u2019s surprising appeal to newly minted Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The logic of \u201cWe Refugees\u201d helps us understand an open letter (Judith Butler<\/a> parsed it eloquently in 2007) Arendt wrote to Gershom Scholem after his attack on her 1961 Eichmann in Jerusalem<\/em>: \u201cI do not \u2018love\u2019 the Jews, nor do I \u2018believe\u2019 in them: I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.\u201d Arendt grants (as Sartre seemingly declines to do in his influential 1946 Antisemite and Jew<\/em>) that there is more to Jewishness than its significance in the eyes of the antisemite. However, individual identity need not translate into complex political points about group belonging. Just as I think people should not hate me (or kill me) for being Jewish, so they should not love<\/em> me for it. Arendt\u2019s refusal of \u201clove for the Jewish people\u201d is a startlingly radical and highly potent response to the ethnonationalism that in 2025 comes in both antisemitic and philosemitic flavors\u2014which sometimes blend together with surprising ease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arendt\u2019s praise of pariah politics and criticism of parvenus and faux assimilation are part of her case against disavowing or attempting to disguise the shameful attributes that may make any one of us a stigmatized object of prejudice. That is a far cry from lending the ethical blessing of past pariah status to a new national identity. Rather, she wants those who come into power to remember what it was like to be outside it (don\u2019t go telling people you\u2019ve always been a St. Bernard, or you may come to believe it). Her caution to the German Jews offended by 1930s Nazi race laws\u2014\u201cIs it conceivable that none of them asked himself how many of his own group would have done the same if only they had been allowed to?\u201d\u2014is of a piece with her indictment of Israeli bars against intermarriage at the time of the Eichmann trial. Pariahs should not become hypocrites a generation later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We need not imagine what Arendt would have had to say about Israel\u2019s crimes against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Gazan people\u2014because we already know that she denounced the ethnic bigotry practiced in 1960s Israel, a milder premonitory version of the current horrors being visited upon Gazans and other Palestinians under Israeli jurisdiction. One of Arendt\u2019s most surprising insights is that professing love for the X people <\/em>may be a way to foreclose on freedom and on humanity just as effectively as professing hatred for the Y people.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

What has happened to that opening puzzle about squaring Arendt\u2019s universalism with her warnings about chameleonic assimilation? On the one hand, Arendt\u2019s vision of humanity that is at its most vulnerable when wedges are driven between different groups, understood as innately distinct. On the other, her criticism of \u201cparvenus\u201d who arrive in America as refugees and seek to deny their Jewish origins. The solution lies in realizing that Arendt is critiquing those who attempt seamless integration into the new group\u2014as if \u201clove for the Jewish people\u201d could be corrected by turning it into \u201clove for the American people\u201d instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jews who arrived in America were understandably eager to establish their credentials simply as nouveau Americans. After all, as Arendt puts it, \u201cnobody likes to listen to all that.\u201d To what, exactly? To the fact, hard to hear in 1943, that the Nazi regime is demonstrating that \u201chell is no longer a religious belief or a fantasy, but something as real as houses and stones and trees. \u2026 History has created a new kind of human beings\u2014the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.\u201d In place of thinking like a parvenu, Arendt argues for rejecting camp logic on all counts: this is what it means to take up pariah politics in the terrible new world in which people can be classed not simply as \u00e9migr\u00e9s or aliens but as refugees. Switching sides does not remove the crime against humanity implied by the original decision to draw that line\u2014and to barbed wire it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since her day, many writers have recognized and struggled to make sense of the category of the refugee, distinct from the migrants and exiles of earlier eras. Like her, they consider the pressure that this new category of potentially permanent displacement puts on the seeming comforts of group identity. As Edward Said puts it in \u201cReflections on Exile<\/a>\u201d: \u201cHow, then, does one surmount the loneliness of exile without falling into the encompassing and thumping language of national pride, collective sentiments, group passions?\u201d That so many writers on refugees and their rights (cf. Naimou<\/a>) have turned to Arendt for inspiration is one reason to excavate her case for a new kind of national belonging constituted neither by long-standing tradition nor by shared love between members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Discussing Arendt\u2019s enthusiasm for the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Lyndsey Stonebridge\u2019s recent We Are Free to Change the World<\/em><\/a> argues that Arendt was surprisingly fond of the ancient Greek concept of isonomia<\/em>. This politics of respect for others\u2019 autonomy coupled with insistence on one\u2019s own freedom of thought and deed has gone by many names: Kropotkin called it mutual aid, Bakunin anarchism; in Public Books <\/em>I argued Ursula Le Guin thought of it as solitary solidarity<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps isonomia is also a helpful way of capturing what Arendt values in pariah politics. The parvenu responds to the new hell on earth found in concentration and internment camps by seeking shelter inside another thicket of rules and orders, no matter how shaped by bias those rules may be. Expelled from one state and its laws, though, pariahs are refugees disinclined to pledge their allegiance to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"Refugees<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n No Peace for Refugees<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Emma <\/a>\n \n Emma Shaw Crane <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n\n\n

Throughout her career, Arendt wondered what gives certain people the courage to reject any time-tested creed and choose instead to \u201cthink without a banister\u201d (a famous Arendtian ideal). Even under a totalitarian regime there always remain a few people capable of evading the pressure to go and get along. How?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those who keep their heads even in extremity cannot be relying on what\u2019s generally accepted and taken as obvious. In dark times (1943, and possibly 2025, with its profoundly tainted public and social media) faulty or spurious claims may seem to circulate with just as much authority as reliable reasoning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cWe Refugees\u201d Arendt says sympathetically that \u201cVery few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely confused.\u201d She might have added, though, that those who do survive the loss of social, political, and legal status, and who furthermore resist the temptation to define themselves anew by some other identity label, have found a way to live in truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Trump\u2019s America, too many have already found themselves refugees, detained or expelled. The rest of us, the not-yet-captive, can learn something from their fate, and also their example. We ought not play the parvenu, which in this context means not bending the knee to the false comforts of conformity to a bigoted political regime that bolsters ethnonationalism and crimes against humanity elsewhere and is grossly indifferent to its weakest citizens and subjects at home. By embracing pariah politics instead, we can draw sustenance\u2014as Arendt put it in The Human Condition<\/em>\u2014not from what <\/em>we are but from who <\/em>we are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of Arendt\u2019s most surprising insights is that professing \u201clove for the X people\u201d may be a way to foreclose on freedom and on humanity just as effectively as professing \u201chatred for the Y people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":61062,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2511,714,975,171,28,209,976],"pbpartner":[],"section":[],"pbseries":[2274],"class_list":["post-61054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-arendt-in-dark-times","tag-authoritarianism","tag-hannah-arendt","tag-nationalism","tag-politics","tag-refugees","tag-the-origins-of-totalitarianism","pbseries-b-sides"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nArendt\u2019s Refugee Politics - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"One of Arendt\u2019s most surprising insights is that professing \u201clove for the X people\u201d may be a way to foreclose on freedom and on humanity just as effectively as professing \u201chatred for the Y people.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/arendts-refugee-politics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Arendt\u2019s Refugee Politics - 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