The kind of friendship Hannah Arendt celebrated in politics—rooted in persuasion and the effort to build a shared world—was the lifeblood of her personal life. Her genius for friendship was forged in years of exile. Nowhere is this clearer than in her friendship with the German Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld.
After the burning of the Reichstag in February 1933, Blumenfeld recruited Arendt to work secretly for the German Zionist organization. She was arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated for eight days, and then released before fleeing Germany. She would live the next eighteen years as a stateless person, first in Paris and then in New York City. After the war, Arendt reconnected with friends who were scattered around the world. She wrote to Blumenfeld about the fragility of friendship for refugees and exiles like themselves. “For bohemians like us,” she wrote, there is always an “anxiety in seeing old friends again.” Will they be alive? Would they still be the friends that they were? Would they accept her changed opinions? For Arendt, this “general human and natural angst” haunted all friendships, but it was heightened in exile.
Displaced persons must master new languages, adapt to foreign customs, and learn how to survive in a strange country. Cut off from the world in which they grew up, the exile finds in friends “the only milieu in which one can find private satisfaction.” We exiles, Arendt wrote to Blumenfeld, “always put exaggerated demands on our friends.”
Arendt and Blumenfeld filled their correspondence with arguments about Zionism and politics as they sought to make sense of a broken world. Arendt had come to believe that Zionism was a flawed response to the Jewish question. In 1946, she sent Blumenfeld her essay “Zionism Reconsidered,” in which she announced her break with mainstream Zionism; she knew that Blumenfeld, a committed Zionist who now lived in Palestine, would disagree. She begged him not to be angry: “Remember,” she wrote, channeling her role as the woman twenty years his junior, “that I am always a bit stupid.”
Blumenfeld was angry in spite of Arendt’s protestations. Arendt and Blumenfeld had met when he was the president of the Zionist Federation of Germany. It was a reunion of sorts, as he had been a friend of her grandfather and had played with the young Arendt when she was an infant. Two decades later, at the urging of their mutual friend Hans Jonas, Arendt attended a lecture Blumenfeld gave in Heidelberg. Blumenfeld, Jonas, and Arendt went out after the lecture and kindled their lifelong friendships.
That evening, Blumenfeld and Arendt wandered through the streets of Heidelberg “arm in arm,” singing songs and reciting poetry. He came to be both a mentor and dear friend, someone who inspired Arendt to live less as a detached academic philosopher and more as a politically engaged, worldly thinker. When Blumenfeld gave Arendt a box of Havana cigars, she rejoiced in smoking them, to the frustration of her then-husband Günther Stern, who thought it unwomanly. Arendt, however, described Blumenfeld as masculini generis, someone who was “so self-confidently and ardently a lover of women that he had no need of stereotypical conceptions of how women should behave.” It was Blumenfeld who freed Arendt from her more bourgeois constraints. More than that, he “awakened and fostered [her] sense of her Jewish identity and introduced her to the renewal of Jewish consciousness the Zionists had undertaken.”
Blumenfeld “opened a kind of world” for Arendt concerning the “situation of the Jews.” Above all, he persuaded her that assimilation was an impossible ideal. She came to believe that Jewish political culture developed only two responses to the real dangers of modern antisemitism: assimilation and Zionism. The first strategy, assimilation, required Jews to lose their Jewishness, to present themselves as merely Germans of the Jewish faith. But what assimilationist Jews forget, Arendt saw, is the reality of antisemitism. Assimilationist Jews do not want to admit, except in times of crisis, that Jews are always seen as the Other; when the chips are down, they are hated as outsiders. In Arendt’s words, “As antisemitism proves, we are totally foreign to and despised by that other people on the basis of its inalterable substance.”
Zionism succeeds only by insisting so fully on antisemitism as an eternal and ineradicable fact, that Jews can only be safe if they leave and become a people with their own land, their own army, and their own nation-state. Zionism succeeds as a political response to antisemitism by insisting that Jews see themselves as a racially and politically distinct people, thus entwining Zionism with ideological tribalism. It is the turn to tribalism within Zionism that led Arendt in the 1940s finally to “reconsider” and reject statist versions of Zionism.
In the 1930s in Germany, Blumenfeld’s Zionism offered Arendt the only political way to resist Nazism. It was while working for Blumenfeld and the German Zionists, doing research on antisemitism in Berlin’s Prussian State Library, that Arendt was arrested in 1933. Luckily, as she told it in an interview, Arendt “made friends with the official who arrested me. He was a charming fellow!” The young Gestapo officer had just been promoted from the criminal to the political police. It was a liminal moment in German history, when Nazis had not been fully indoctrinated by Joseph Goebbels’ brutal antisemitic propaganda and friendship with Nazi officers was still possible. She befriended this young Gestapo officer and he let her go. Shortly thereafter, she and her mother fled Berlin for Paris.
While Arendt had never fully embraced Zionism, she did engage actively in Zionist and Jewish politics. In Paris, she found work with Baroness Germaine de Rothschild, overseeing her donations to Jewish charities. Arendt worked for Zionist organizations helping young European Jews to emigrate to Palestine, including as general secretary of the Paris office of Youth Aliyah, where she led a group of young German–Jewish children to Palestine. She also attended the First World Jewish Congress in 1936 in Geneva. It was during the 1930s in France that Arendt began to study antisemitism. Her experiences and her inquiry into the Dreyfus Affair from the late nineteenth century taught Arendt that Zionism was “the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism.” She developed in this period her basic mantra, that “if one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.” As a result, she once recalled while in Paris, “I wanted to go into practical work, exclusively and only Jewish work.”
Arendt continued to write widely about Zionist issues after her arrival in the U.S., primarily as a columnist for the German–Jewish newspaper Aufbau. She served first as a researcher and then as executive secretary of the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction throughout the 1940s until 1952, during which time she developed a close friendship with the eminent Jewish scholar Salo Baron. In collaboration with Baron, Arendt developed a belief in a vibrant and glorious, albeit suppressed, tradition of Jewish political activity, a view that contrasted with the mainstream Jewish tradition of victimhood and withdrawal.
By 1945, however, Arendt had become convinced that mainstream Zionism had lost its way. The essay that she sent to Blumenfeld argued that Zionism’s embrace of a racially Jewish state and its complete rejection of compromise with Palestinian Arabs had led her and others “to reconsider its whole obsolete set of doctrines.”
Arendt feared that a Jewish state in an overwhelmingly Arab region ignored the rights of the Palestinians. She saw fault on both the Arab and Jewish sides. She criticized “Palestinian Arab leaders for insisting on a unitary Arab state as betraying an illusion that the Jewish settlers could be made to leave.” She never became an anti-Zionist. But as a Jew, Arendt warned her fellow Jews “that Arabs were human beings like themselves and that it might be dangerous not to expect them to act and react in much the same way as Jews.”
Arendt sent “Zionism Reconsidered” to Blumenfeld knowing it would provoke him; for the sake of their friendship, however, she needed to know that he could hear and respect her opinions. She asked for his honest criticisms. When no response came, Arendt wrote again five months later. “Was the article so bad?” she asked. She reminded Blumenfeld that the world was daily becoming more inhumane, and that we are lost without friends. “Friendship,” she added, “is rare enough, and it is not to be except on the knife’s edge.”
The edge was sharp indeed. For Blumenfeld, the idea that such a proven Zionist friend as Arendt was stabbing the Zionists’ political aspirations in the back was a tough test, one he would never fully overcome. Blumenfeld would wait another six months before he answered: “Since life passes quickly and it is unlikely that we will see each other soon, I do not want it to be that our differences of opinion imperil our friendship.” To which Arendt responded, “Nothing in the world counts as do friends.”
Friendship, as Arendt practiced it, means seeing friends for who they are, fully, even the parts of them that upset or repel you. Friendship is not simply a matter of comfort and does not exist without the knife’s edge of conflict. Caution might have told Arendt to let her friend remain silent or gracefully ignore her writings critical of Zionism. She could not do so. Her idea of friendship would not allow her to proceed with caution. Amid their discord, she refused to retreat. Instead, she sought a deeper harmony. “There is,” she wrote to Blumenfeld, “a nearness that grows always nearer, even when one is alone.”
The lifelong friendship between Arendt and Blumenfeld faced its final test in the wake of Arendt’s coverage of Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann had been an out-of-work salesman when he joined what would become the Gestapo in 1932. Eichmann and his staff initially helped Jews to emigrate under pressure and later forced many to do so. By the late 1930s, he was responsible for concentrating Jews in ghettos. And after 1942, he oversaw the transport of Jews from across Europe to the extermination camps in the East. Having left Germany in 1933, Arendt had never seen an architect of the Holocaust “in the flesh”—the Eichmann trial was her only chance. She asked the New Yorker to send her to Jerusalem to cover the trial. “To attend this trial,” she wrote, “is somehow, I feel, an obligation I owe my past.”
The book Arendt published about the trial—Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil—became one of the most influential accounts of the Holocaust, told through the lens of Eichmann’s trial and his hanging for crimes against humanity. Arendt never doubted either his guilt or his evil, but she was startled by the man himself. She saw in Eichmann a superficial bureaucrat, someone who spoke in clichés that shielded him from the force of reality. He was simple, thoughtless, not at all the ideological monster she expected. He was, instead, “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” In the final line of her book, Arendt concluded that the entire “course in human wickedness” offered by the trial taught one lesson above all: “the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
While in Jerusalem to cover the trial, Arendt spent meaningful time together with Blumenfeld. Her letters home to her husband, Heinrich Blücher, are filled with stories of her time with Blumenfeld and with worries about his health. And Blumenfeld wrote to Blücher that, in spite of the distance and the disagreements, “in my talks with Hannah I felt that the bond that unites us does not break, no matter how long it may be.” Blumenfeld, who was ill, added that “in my life there have been many changes. I am no longer allowed to eat or drink with merriment. Thus was Hannah’s appearance so much more important. We understand each other better and better.” Such mutual understanding, however, was short-lived.
As Arendt’s reports on Eichmann’s trial of began to appear in the New Yorker in 1963, Blumenfeld lay dying in a hospital in Tel Aviv. Unable to read Arendt’s essays himself, he relied on friends to read them aloud to him and to describe the raging controversy they had unleashed. Many misread her book as a defense of Eichmann—so badly, Arendt said, that it was clear they had not read it at all. On the front page of the New York Times Book Review, she was falsely accused of writing that “Eichmann was not really a Nazi at heart.” Enraged reviews cursed Arendt as a self-hating Jew and Nazi lover; in the Jewish Forward she was accused of “polemical vulgarity.” The Anti-Defamation League sent out a ten-page rebuttal, accusing her of portraying Eichmann as “a victim of the system, and somewhat to be pitied.” The league further called the book both “banal” and “evil.” In the Partisan Review Lionel Abel offered a malicious review, opining that Eichmann “comes off so much better in her book than do his victims.” The criticism of Eichmann in Jerusalem came to resemble a wild feeding frenzy that took on a life of its own and had little to do with the book Arendt had written.
Arendt feared that Blumenfeld, sick and at the mercy of his Zionist friends, would be turned against her by her enemies. Her fears were not unfounded. Pinchas Rosen—a mutual acquaintance and Israel’s first Minister of Justice—later reported that Blumenfeld, who was dependent on his Zionist friends for what he could learn, had come to believe Arendt was in the wrong and even considered attacking her publicly. When Arendt learned that Blumenfeld was dying, she flew from Greece to see her old friend. They spoke and discussed the controversy. He dismissed one critic as a “nauseating pest” (Kotzproppen) and another as a “chunk of vomit” (Kotzbrocken).
Whether Blumenfeld and Arendt reconciled, we will likely never know. Ingeborg Nordmann, who edited their correspondence, writes that their reconciliation remains “uncertain”; the “few excerpts of a private conversation” that we have reported to us “don’t settle the question of whether the old friendship possibly was broken.” What we do know is that the friendship between Arendt and Blumenfeld ended, much as it always existed, on the knife’s edge.
That friendship teeters between understanding and anger teaches us what a friend is, as opposed to a casual acquaintance. If your friend does something that annoys you, writes Deborah Eisenberg, “or if you and ‘your friend’ decide that you hate each other, or if ‘your friend’ moves away and you lose each other’s address, you still have a friendship.” That may sound like a cliché, but it captures something essential: that friendship endures through annoyance, anger, and even estrangement. As Montaigne wrote when asked what he would do if La Boétie were to betray him, no arguments could convince him that his friend was untrue—which is why you must choose your friends carefully.
In a world of Facebook friends where we learn that a friend is getting married or that their spouse has died through an internet post, the friendship between Arendt and Blumenfeld reminds us that real connection demands risk. To remain friends while staying true to oneself is to balance dangerously and yet confidently on the knife’s edge. True friendship may require telling a friend when you think they are wrong. What is even more difficult is that it may also require allowing them to have their opinions.
There is a demanding honesty in all real friendship, as uncomfortable as that may be. In its seemingly infinite demand for understanding and recognition, friendship cuts deeply into our own self-certainty. But it is on that edge—precarious, painful, and profoundly human—where the richest forms of solidarity are forged.
Adapted from A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, by Roger Berkowitz. Published by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2026 by Roger Berkowitz. All rights reserved.