Dealing with Histories of Oppression: Black and Jewish Reactions To

University of Miami Law School University of Miami School of Law Institutional Repository Articles Faculty and Deans 2000 Dealing With Histories of Oppression: Black and Jewish Reactions to Passivity and Collaboration in William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem David Abraham University of Miami School of Law, [email protected] Kimberly A. McCoy Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.miami.edu/fac_articles Part of the Law and Race Commons, and the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation David Abraham and Kimberly A. McCoy, Dealing With Histories of Oppression: Black and Jewish Reactions to Passivity and Collaboration in William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, 2 Rutgers Race & L. Rev. 87 (2000). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty and Deans at University of Miami School of Law Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of University of Miami School of Law Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DEALING WITH HISTORIES OF OPPRESSION: BLACK AND JEWISH REACTIONS TO PASSIVITY AND COLLABORATION IN WILLIAM STYRON'S CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER AND HANNAH ARENDT'S EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM::* DavidAbralwmn** and Kimberly A. McCoy*** I. INTRODUCTION ....................................................... 88 II. THE LITERARY-CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF THE 1960s'............................................................ 95 III. THE AUTHORS AND THEIR PERSPECTIVES ....98 IV. THE FOCI OF THE DEBATE ................................... 101 * For fruitful discussion and useful comments on my text, I would like to thank Professor Peter Novick (University of Chicago), whose recently pub- lished book entitled, The Holocaust in American Life, will define the field, and Professor Anson Rabinbach (Princeton University), who helped organ- ize the June 1997 conference in Potsdam, Germany, where I presented a part of this essay. I benefited there also from insightful conversations on Arendt with Raul Hilberg (University of Vermont), Seyla Ben-Habib (Harvard University), Gary Smith (Einstien Forum, Potsdam), and Gabble Motzkin (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). For valuable discussions of Styron, I would like to thank the perspicacious Peter Novick and my colleague D. Marvin Jones of the University of Miami. ** Professor Abraham, Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law, Coral Gables, Florida. Professor Abraham received his J.D. from Uni- versity of Pennsylvania Law School in 1989. Upon graduation, he clerked for Judge Leonard Garth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and as an associate with Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett. Subse- quently, he joined the University of Miami School of Law faculty in 1991, where he teaches Labor and Employment Law, Property, Elements of Law and Immigration. He is currently at work on a project examining the declin- ing significance of both social and political citizenship in Germany and the U.S. *** Kimberly A. McCoy is an associate with the Law Offices of Robert E. Weisberg in Coral Gables, Florida and concentrates her practice in the area of employment and civil rights litigation on behalf of employees and other aggrieved individuals. RUTGERS RACE & THE LAW REVIEW [Vol. 2 A. Continuity or Discontinuity of a People's Past with its Present ......................................................... 101 B. Empathy and Subject Positionality ........................ 113 C. H eroes and Victim s ................................................. 125 D. Simplicity and Complexity ...................................... 130 E. Perpetrators and Victims ........................................ 139 F. Communal Political Strategies ............................... 147 V. CON CLU SION .............................................................. 156 I. INTRODUCTION The 1950s and 1960s have witnessed the growth of a literature [of which The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron is a part]-notably that produced by Hannah Ar- endt and Bruno Bettelheim-insisting that oppressors... succeed in making their victims over into the image which1 rationalized the efforts at victimization in the first place. Since the publication of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner in 1967 and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusa- lem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963 and, in the aftermath of the cultural strife they simultaneously reflected and ag- gravated,' American society and historiography have both changed and not changed. Given the success and power of the American Jewish community today, as well as its ideological commitments, it is difficult to take ourselves back thirty-five years when matters were surprisingly different. Given the tur- moil and distress that afflicts Black America and the ideological debates taking place among African-American intellectuals to- 1. Herbert Aptheker, Slavery, The Negro and Military, 46 POLITICAL AFFAIRS 36,42 (1967) (emphasis added). 2. As we shall see, both Styron's novel and Arendt's report unleashed massive and lengthy controversies. The literature prompted by the Eich- mann trial and the Arendt book is cataloged in RANDOLPH BRAHAM, THE EICHMANN CASE: A SOURCE BOOK 141-74 (1969); see also Pinina Lahav, The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Question, and the American Jewish In- telligentsia, 72 BOSTON UNIV. L. REV. 555, 568 (1992) (discussing the aftermath of Arendt's work); ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL, HANNAH ARENDT: FOR THE LOVE OF THE WORLD 349 (1982). The Styron controversy and the work it produced are discussed generally in ALBERT E. STONE, THE RETURN OF NAT TURNER: HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN SIXTIES AMERICA (1992). 2000] HISTORIES OF OPPRESSION day, it is surprisingly easy to identify and understand the posi- tions of thirty-five years ago. On one side, we see a tremendously successful and secure American Jewish community, deeply wed politically and ideo- logically to the principles of universalism, objectivism, and merit. At the core of the organized Jewish communal belief system today stands support for the State of Israel and the mobilized col- lective memory of the Holocaust Effectively organized and present in politics, economics, and the cultural-ideological spheres, Jewish community leaders worry most about whether it's all too good to last: intermarriage, a sign of acceptance, is the chief threat to its welfare. On the other side, we see an African-American community struggling and suffering in the United States. It is a community still deeply ill at ease with its history of disablement and oppression under American slavery and its political and socioeconomic consequences. For the most part, its intellectuals today are deeply committed to principles of special recognition, a diversity of cultural epistemologies, the impossibility of objectivity and, occasionally, the proposition that understanding itself is race- based. Historical pathologies continue; they are mitigated in a significant number of ways, exacerbated in others.4 Today, alas, these two communities, who thirty-five years ago were loosely allied politically as underdog communities seeking equality and rights, often stand in sharp political conflicts A 1963 image is powerful, even if perhaps transient: Berlin refugee Rabbi Joachim Prinz-at that very time involved with both the 3. See Lahav, supra note 2, at 559-60 (discussing the emergence of these two icons in the context of the Eichmann trial). 4. See generally ORLANDO PATTERSON, BLACK AND WHITE (1997); cf ANDREW HACKER, Two NATIONS: BLACK & WHITE, SEPARATE, HOSTILE, UNEQUAL (1992); DERRICK BELL, FACES AT THE BoroM OF THE WELL: THE PERMANENCE OF RACISM (1992). 5. See generally Nancy L. Green, Blacks, Jews, and the "NaturalAlli- ance": Labor Cohabitationand the ILGWU, 4 JEWISH STUDIES 79,80 (1997): Clayborne Carson, Blacks and Jews in the Civil Rights Movement, in JEWS IN BLACK PERsPEcrrvEs 113 (Joseph Washington ed., 1984) (discussing "Afro- American-Jewish radical culture"); Jonathan Kaufman, Blacks and Jews: The Struggle in the Cities, in STRUGGLES IN THE PROMISED LAND 107 (Jack Salzman & Cornell West eds., 1997). RUTGERS RACE & THE LAW REVIEW [Vol. 2 books under discussion here-reviewing events of the 1930s in Europe while introducing Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the great Civil Rights March on Washington. Nonetheless, the distance from 1933 to 1963 is now less than that from 1963 to today, and relations between the two communities soon turned competitive and sour.6 Beginning as early as the aftermath of the Six Day War (itself now thirty years ago), Black intellectuals began to break with Jewish allies and universalist ideological models. Following the urban riots of 1968, communal relations between the two groups deteriorated sharply. Jewish small businessmen and service class professionals, especially teachers and social workers, came to be widely viewed as the adversaries and competitors of Blacks, rather than their allies. It was a gulf that King and his support- ers, like the new left movement of the time, had difficulty bridg- ing. By the time of the 1973 Mideast War, Black intellectuals were more likely to see their lot like that of both Israel's victims and foes rather than that of the Jews. Today, Black writers rou- tinely use the word "holocaust" to describe their situation. Toni Morrison, for example, dedicates

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