Lecture
Trudy Gold
Thursday 5.11.2026
Trudy Gold
Hannah Arendt and Rahel Varnhagen and Problematic Jewish Identity
Thursday 5.11.2026
How to watch
This lecture starts on 5 November at 5:00pm (UK).
Summary
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess was Hannah Arendt’s first book. Arendt wrote that Rahel “was my closest friend, although she had been dead some hundred years.” Ironically, her biography, or “autobiography,” examines the otherness of the Jew in early 19th-century Prussia, along with the painful desire to belong, an issue that dominated Hannah Arendt’s life and philosophy. It was a life full of controversy, from the intellectual repatriation of her former lover Martin Heidegger who had joined the Nazi party, to her controversial coverage of the Eichmann trial.
Trudy Gold
Trudy Gold was the CEO of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and a founding member of the British delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Throughout her career she taught modern Jewish history at schools, universities, and to adult groups and ran seminars on Holocaust education in the UK, Eastern Europe, and China. She also led Jewish educational tours all over the world. Trudy was the educational director of the student resources “Understanding the Holocaust” and “Holocaust Explained” and the author of The Timechart History of Jewish Civilization.