Kurt Blumenfeld
German journalistWikipedia
15
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6
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Search complete. 15 mentions across 6 episodes found for "Kurt Blumenfeld".
Oct 28, 2026
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
And her friends got very upset.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
And two of them in particular, Kurt Blumenfeld and Gershom Scholem, wrote very upset letters back.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
And when she responds, she says to Scholem, you know, look, we can disagree about all this.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
But in the end, the only real question for us is, can we still be friends? And at the end of that, she says, you know, you're a man.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
It's an amazing thing.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
You know, she has two good friends, two of her best, well, one of her best friends is Kurt Blumenfeld, who is the leader of the German Zionists and then moves to Israel.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Another of her good friends, I wouldn't call everyone his best friends, but good friends is Gershom Scholem, who also was a strong Zionist who moved to Israel.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
And in the 1940s, when she writes an essay, Zionism Reconsidered, Arendt had been Zionist adjacents from 1933 until 1944.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Love can happen like a thunderbolt, you know, love at first sight.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
And in love, two people sort of join together and sort of almost become, you know, outside the world.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
The world is, you know, where we live in our own little cocoon.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
And she says friendship is different, right? Friendship is worldly.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Friendship takes time.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
It builds trust.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
She says there's no such thing as a two-week-old friendship.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
And so I do a fair bit in the book distinguishing love from friendship.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
That was life.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
That said, friendship is not warm and fuzzy, as you put it, right? I think in chapter two or three, I talk about her friendship with Kurt Blumenfeld.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
And he was one of her probably two or three closest friends in her life.
Donovan HohnHOST
Yeah, and remind listeners, Kurt Blumenfeld.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Yeah, Kurt Blumenfeld was the head of the German Jewish Zionist organization in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Arendt met him through her friend Hans Jonas.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
She had actually... potentially met him when she was a baby, but that's neither here nor there.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Um, but, you know, these were all older men, right? Um, Blücher was also older.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Uh, and, and by the way, Kurt Blumenfeld, who was also about 20 years older than her, was another one of her close friend.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
She had a lot of as, you know, you might call father replacement figures, uh, people who were older men who she was-
Andrew KeenHOST
Hmm
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
There's a chapter in the book called The Knife's Edge.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
in which one of her best friends, Kurt Blumenfeld, who was the head of the German Zionists in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, recruits her to work for the Zionists.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
She gets arrested.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
She gets out.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
And she breaks for a whole lot of reasons.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
We don't have to go into it right now.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
But she sends this article to her two closest Zionist friends, Gershom Scholem and Kurt Blumenfeld.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Now, you might ask, why? Right.