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September 22, 2026

Fred Stein Archive/Getty Images

	By Jennifer Szalai

Dear readers,

We cannot seem to get enough of Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political theorist who died half a century ago. I’ve been especially struck by how regularly I now encounter Arendt’s name in books that aren’t explicitly about her. There she is in Benjamin Moser’s “Anti-Zionism,” with her complicated relationship to the Zionist movement. There she is in Jill Lepore’s “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” with her warnings about totalitarianism and automation. There she is in Susan Neiman’s “Call It Evil,” with her ideas about “the banality of evil.”

Just this week, I experienced another Arendt sighting, in the closing pages of Sherry Turkle’s “Artificial Intimacy.” Turkle, who writes about our increasing emotional attachment to machines, cites Arendt’s observations about the dire political consequences of loneliness: Isolated people will seek out the seeming simplicity and comfort typically offered by a strongman.

But the Arendt cameos are just part of it; there’s also a bumper crop of books revolving around Arendt herself. Last month I reviewed the English translation of an exhaustively detailed biography of Arendt, by Thomas Meyer. In October, Yale will publish a brisk account of her friendships, by Roger Berkowitz. The month after that, McNally Editions will publish a reissue of Arthur A. Cohen’s 1983 novel, “An Admirable Woman.”

Cohen’s first-person narrator was clearly modeled on Arendt, and he teased readers by including many similarities between the two women — while cheekily denying he was doing any such thing. He even persuaded his publisher to market the novel with a winking phrase (borrowed, as it happens, from The New York Times’s review of the book): “NOT HANNAH ARENDT.”

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