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 (1951) and elsewhere that the racism that fueled European imperialism’s 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.
There is a puzzle, though. Arendt’s straightforward enlightenment universalism may seem hard to reconcile with her reflections on the deceptiveness, or even the impossibility, of disavowing one’s ethnic or religious origins. However, when Eichmann in Jerusalem proposes that the Holocaust, a crime against humanity, was also a crime “perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people,” it offers a hint of Arendt’s approach to that enduring puzzle.
In her biting wartime essay “We Refugees” (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 “social parvenus” 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 Benjamin Disraeli is the exemplary parvenu). Instead, she praises “conscious pariah[s],” defined a year later in “The Jew as Pariah” as “those bold spirits who tried to make of the emancipation of the Jews that which it really should have been—an admission of the Jews as Jews to the ranks of humanity.” 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’t join them.
In much later essays such as “Lying in Politics“ (1971) and “Truth and Politics” (1967), Arendt consistently argued that each of us has an ethical duty to understand others by making our “mind go visiting.” 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.
The “natality” 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 (1958), “plurality 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.”
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.
Arendt’s refusal of “love for the Jewish people” is a startlingly radical and highly potent response to the ethnonationalism that in 2025 comes in both antisemitic and philosemitic flavors—which sometimes blend together with surprising ease.
“We Refugees” 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.
“We Refugees” appeared (in English, in the tiny journal Menorah) 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’s also another salient context: as Elizabeth Young-Bruehl shows in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 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 “We Refugees”) to formulate a vision of a future Palestine that repudiated not only the concept of a “Jewish commonwealth” but also the sectarian division implied by any notion of minority and majority rights within the unitary state. Both contexts are crucial—she 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.
Both frames illuminate the ways that “We Refugees” unpacks the logic of Arendt’s frequently cited response to Nazi antisemitism: “When one is attacked as a Jew, one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew.” In that spirit, “We Refugees” is surprisingly caustic about German Jews who pretend that all along they’ve spoken and indeed preferred English. The parvenu pretends that history and all its messy concomitants do not exist. “Lacking 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.”
“We Refugees” depicts the would-be assimilator in almost Maurice Sendak terms: “A nice little fairy-tale has been invented to describe our behavior; a forlorn émigré dachshund, in his grief, begins to speak: ‘Once, when I was a St. Bernard …’.” 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 “good immigrant” rhetoric that has proved such a noxious force in building Trump’s surprising appeal to newly minted Americans.
The logic of “We Refugees” helps us understand an open letter (Judith Butler parsed it eloquently in 2007) Arendt wrote to Gershom Scholem after his attack on her 1961 Eichmann in Jerusalem: “I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them: I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.” Arendt grants (as Sartre seemingly declines to do in his influential 1946 Antisemite and Jew) 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 me for it. Arendt’s refusal of “love for the Jewish people” is a startlingly radical and highly potent response to the ethnonationalism that in 2025 comes in both antisemitic and philosemitic flavors—which sometimes blend together with surprising ease.
Arendt’s 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’t go telling people you’ve always been a St. Bernard, or you may come to believe it). Her caution to the German Jews offended by 1930s Nazi race laws—“Is 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?”—is 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.
We need not imagine what Arendt would have had to say about Israeli’s crimes against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Gazan people—because 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’s most surprising insights is that professing love for the X people may be a way to foreclose on freedom and on humanity just as effectively as professing hatred for the Y people.
What has happened to that opening puzzle about squaring Arendt’s universalism with her warnings about chameleonic assimilation? On the one hand, Arendt’s 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 “parvenus” 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—as if “love for the Jewish people” could be corrected by turning it into “love for the American people” instead.
Jews who arrived in America were understandably eager to establish their credentials simply as nouveau Americans. After all, as Arendt puts it, “nobody likes to listen to all that.” To what, exactly? To the fact, hard to hear in 1943, that the Nazi regime is demonstrating that “hell is no longer a religious belief or a fantasy, but something as real as houses and stones and trees. … History has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.” 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 émigrés or aliens but as refugees. Switching sides does not remove the crime against humanity implied by the original decision to draw that line—and to barbed wire it.
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 “Reflections on Exile”: “How, then, does one surmount the loneliness of exile without falling into the encompassing and thumping language of national pride, collective sentiments, group passions?” That so many writers on refugees and their rights (cf. Naimou) 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.
Discussing Arendt’s enthusiasm for the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Lyndsey Stonebridge’s recent We Are Free to Change the World argues that Arendt was surprisingly fond of the ancient Greek concept of isonomia. This politics of respect for others’ autonomy coupled with insistence on one’s own freedom of thought and deed has gone by many names: Kropotkin called it mutual aid, Bakunin anarchism; in Public Books I argued Ursula Le Guin thought of it as solitary solidarity.
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.
Throughout her career, Arendt wondered what gives certain people the courage to reject any time-tested creed and choose instead to “think without a banister” (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?
Those who keep their heads even in extremity cannot be relying on what’s 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.
In “We Refugees” Arendt says sympathetically that “Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely confused.” 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.
In Trump’s 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—as Arendt put it in The Human Condition—not from what we are but from who we are. 