Thinking in Public

"Long before we began to speak of "public intellectuals," the ideas of "the public" and "the intellectual" raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. 'Thinking in Public' examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing the lives and works of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, who grew up in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and studied with the philosopher-and sometime National Socialist-Martin Heidegger, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft offers a strikingly new perspective…