Although Hannah Arendt is known primarily as a political theorist rather than as a Jewish thinker, she probably wrote more about Jewish issues than any other topic. "Arendt's experience as a Jew was sometimes that of an eyewitness and sometimes that of an actor and sufferer of events, all of which run the risk of partiality," notes Jerome Kohn in his introduction, "but it was also always that of a judge, which means that she looked at those events and, insofar as she was in them, at herself from the outside. Her Jewish writings from [the 1930s through the 60s] are less exemplifications of Arendt's political ideas at work than the experiential ground from which those ideas grew and developed.

It is in this sense that her experience as a Jew is literally the foundation of her thought: it supports her thinking even when she is not thinking about Jews or Jewish questions." Here are her writings from pre-Nazi Germany about the history of German Jews as a people living in a land that was not their own; writings from her exile in France, where Arendt focused on the transformation of antisemitism from a social prejudice to a political policy that would culminate in the Nazi "final solution"; and from her first years in New York, calling for a Jewish army to fight the Nazis, and for a new approach to Jewish political thinking. Here too are her writings on the creation of a Jewish homeland in a binational (Arab-Jewish) state of Israel, and her controversial coverage of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel in 1961.