Reflections on Little Rock: from the Negro Question to the JewishQuestion

Abstract

In Hannah Arendt and The Negro Question, Kathryn Sophia Belle points out Arendt's mistake,
in Reflections on Little Rock, of failing to recognize school integration as a major political issue.
According to Belle, Arendt fails when imposes a rigid distinction between social and political to
understand what happened in Little Rock. In this text, I intend to indicate why Arendt understands
education as a social issue in Little Rock when we return to her reflections on the Jewish Question
and why she insists on not assuming the political dimension of this issue. I claim that from this return,
we identify Arendt’s assertion that education was not sufficient for the assimilation of the Jewish
people in Modern Europe. Education, in this context, was understood as a social gain insofar as it
allowed for partial (or temporary) social assimilation, but it never resulted in political participation.