A 'Paradise of Parasites': Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Legacies of Empire

ISGAP

Speaker: Dr. Dorian F. Bell Affiliation: Literature Department, University of California, Santa Cruz Title: "A 'Paradise of Parasites': Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Legacies of Empire" Convener: Dr. Charles Asher Small, Founder and Executive Director, Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) Location: Yale University, New Haven, CT Date: April 7, 2011 Description: Professor Dorian F. Bell maintains that scholars of antisemitism have sometimes been loath to analogize between modern antisemitism and colonial racism, usually out of concern for maintaining the specificity of the Holocaust. Other critics, most famously Hannah Arendt, have identified a crucial step along the path to the Final Solution in nineteenth-century imperialism. Whatever the relative merits of these approaches, Dr. Dorian Bell maintains that even the latter has overlooked (or at least misapprehended) the extent to which antisemitism and empire were evolving in tandem even in the nineteenth century.