Hannah Arendt and Leni Yahil: a friendship that failed the test

Discusses correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Israeli historian Leni Yahil from May 1961 to April 1963, with one letter sent by Yahil to Arendt in 1971. Their relationship was rather cordial at first, but after Yahil read four of Arendt's five articles, which later lay the ground for her "Eichmann in Jerusalem", the women's friendship became irreparably damaged. Many subjects cropped up in the correspondence, and they basically involved three areas: "the banality of evil"; antisemitism, Germanness, and the Holocaust; Jews, the Jewish people, Judaism, and God. The controversy influenced Yahil's historical writing, which can be seen in her "The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945". In contrast to Arendt's writing, Yahil's was characterized by a Jewish perspective; she stressed the complex development of the Nazi anti-Jewish policies from 1933-45 and dealt extensively with the policies and role of the Jewish Councils during the war, using eyewitness accounts. Pp. 40-65 contain translations of the correspondence between Arendt and Yahil, most of which was written in German; only two were in English.