ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt approaches human rights as someone who lived through their failure in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. A German Jew, Arendt understood anti-Semitism, experienced the denationalization of Jews in Germany, and witnessed how the world and even the diaspora Jewish community largely ignored the plight of European Jewry. Arendt also saw how other minority peoples in Europe – Germans in Russia, Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, Muslims in Yugoslavia, Gypsies, and many others – were systematically denaturalized, persecuted, and killed – all, as she emphasized, within the strictures of national and international law. For Arendt, the failure of human rights is a fundamental fact of modern times.
