Kirsch, Adam. "Beware of Pity: Arendt and the Power of the Impersonal." THE NEW YORKER January 12, 2009.

It is an ambiguous tribute to Arendt, then, that her scholarly and popular profile is higher today than at any time since she died, in 1975, at the age of sixty-nine. In the past few years, a number of Arendt’s works have been published by Schocken Books, where she worked as an editor in the nineteen-forties. The Origins of Totalitarianism has been accompanied by several collections of essays—most notably The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman, which includes Arendt’s wartime journalism. Scholars around the world have kept pace with a torrent of studies—on Arendt and international relations, Arendt and human rights, Arendt and the Jewish question. It is hard to name another thinker of the twentieth century more sought after as a guide to the dilemmas of the twenty-first. Yet it is not just political theorists who find Arendt a source of fascination. The most intense curiosity about Arendt in the past few years has had less to do with her work than with her life. Above all, the publication in English, in 2004, of Arendt’s correspondence with Martin Heidegger, after decades of speculation about their relationship, brought renewed scrutiny to her intimate life. To a thinker who believed that the personal was emphatically not political, this kind of attention would have been very unwelcome. She derided the “pseudoscientific apparatuses of depth-psychology, psychoanalysis, graphology, etc.” as nothing more than “curiosity-seeking.” Yet Arendt’s deeply ambivalent relationship with Heidegger—her lover, teacher, and friend—has a more than personal significance, since it casts light on the most vexed issue in her work: her tangled relationship with Jewishness and Germanness. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/01/12/090112crat_atlarge_kirsch?printable=true.