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Hannah Arendt Controversy Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy ANSON RABINBACH The Eichmann controversy, occasioned by Hannah Arendt’s five-part series that appeared in The New Yorker from February 16 to March 16, 1963, was certainly the most bitter public dispute among intellectuals and scholars concerning the Holocaust that has ever taken place. It was also the first time that both Jews and non-Jews were witness to a controversy over Jewish memory, an affair that took place largely, but not exclusively, among Jews. The controversy elicited over a thousand published responses. It lasted almost three years from the initial burst of reactions to Arendt’s articles and book in 1963, gradually subsiding only after her response to Jacob Robinson’s book-length disputation, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, more than two years later.1 The animosity and rancor of the dispute was so extreme that more than two decades later Irving Howe could write that “within the New York intellectual world Arendt’s book provoked divisions that would never be entirely healed.”2 To varying degrees almost all her critics took up Arendt’s most controversial points: her characterization of Eichmann as a thoughtless and “banal” cipher of totalitarian rule, her judgments of the behavior of the Jewish leaders and Zionist officials in Eastern Europe, her analysis of the legal charges against Eichmann, and her accusation that the court proceedings were, in effect, a “show trial.” But as Richard I. Cohen has shown in his comprehensive rezeptionsgeschichte (reception history) of the controversy, despite a good deal of overlap concerning the main themes of Arendt’s work, substantial distinctions among different audiences and responses can be discerned. If, for example, German-Jewish critics tended to focus on Arendt’s alleged misrepresentation of the role of German-Jewish community leaders, most prominently Leo Baeck, survivors tended to focus on her underesti- mation of the significance and extent of the resistance, while Israeli and Yiddish writers more forcefully dissented from her assessment of Jewish councils, and 1. A partial bibliography is included in Randolph L. Braham, The Eichmann Case: A Source Book (New York: World Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1969), pp. 141–74. 2. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ,Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 273–74. OCTOBER 108, Spring 2004, pp. 97–111. © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704774115735 by guest on 24 September 2021 98 OCTOBER emphasized her lack of knowledge of Jewish history and sources.3 Ironically, only a few writers concerned themselves with Arendt’s central preoccupation, the capacity for justice to confront “unprecedented” crimes of “administrative massacre” for which no positive law exists.4 By far the most intense explosion over Arendt’s book, the ground zero of the controversy, occurred in New York and its environs. The loudest salvos in the dispute were fired in periodicals like Partisan Review, Midstream, and Commentary by partici- pants who were already—with the exception of Robinson—well-known figures in the New York literary scene: Lionel Abel, Marie Syrkin, Howe, Daniel Bell, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, and William Phillips. So impassioned were the accusations and counter-accusations that even among that group of seasoned professional polemicists the intensity of dispute exceeded all previous bounds. Howe aptly called the Eichmann controversy “a civil war that broke out among New York intellectuals.”5 That a mere “report,” as she called it, could give rise to such passions was initially “incomprehensible” to Arendt. She agreed with Karl Jaspers’s remark that she had “stumbled into an ambush”: “Everything proves in retrospect to have been a trap,” she wrote.6 She was convinced that she had become the hapless victim of an orchestrated “political campaign led and guided in all particulars by interest groups and governmental agencies.”7 To explain why the Jewish “establishment,” as she called it, would go to such extremes, she imagined an extensive intrigue to cover up the connections between the Zionist politicians in Europe such as Rudolf Kastner. Kastner had negotiated with Eichmann in Budapest (and was assassinated after his condemnation in a 1955 trial). Arendt also questioned the role of Zionist leaders in the yishuv: “The Jewish leadership . has much more dirty laundry to hide than anyone had ever guessed.”8 In one respect she was not entirely off the mark, since Arnold Forster, the general consul of the New York Antidefamation League (ADL), had in fact prepared guidelines to counter her “value judgments” concerning Jewish passivity and the integrity of the Jewish leaders.9 Robinson’s detailed refutation first appeared as a special ADL brochure that was distributed to most Jewish organizations, and was 3. Richard I. Cohen, “Breaking the Code: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and the Public Polemic: Myth, Memory and Historical Imagination,” in Michael: On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora 13 (Tel Aviv: TAU, 1993), pp. 46–60. 4. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1965), p. 288. 5. Howe, A Margin of Hope, p. 290. 6. Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, October 20, 1963, Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992), pp. 522–24. 7. “Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy,” October 3, 1963, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995), p. 151. 8. Arendt to Jaspers, October 20, 1963, Correspondence, p. 524. 9. Cohen, “Breaking the Code,” p. 45. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704774115735 by guest on 24 September 2021 Eichmann in New York 99 rapidly translated into French and German. Further evidence of the campaign against her, she believed, was the Partisan Review’s choice of Lionel Abel as reviewer, since he had been hostile to her earlier work, and of Judge Michael Musmanno by the New York Times (who had testified at the trial, and is mentioned in Arendt’s book). Feeling “the power of the image makers,” she saw all of these forces at work “to create an ‘image’ which eventually will cover the real book.”10 Arendt’s friend Mary McCarthy wrote to her that the onslaught was “assuming the proportions of a pogrom,” and Dwight Macdonald concurred that the choice of Abel was clear proof that Partisan Review editors William Phillips and Philip Rahv had hired a “hit man” who was malicious and acting out of “Jewish patriotism.”11 In her reply to Arendt’s critics, entitled “The Hue and Cry,” McCarthy did little to calm the waters by underscoring what she saw as a pattern of Jewish bias against Arendt and by asserting that she and her gentile friends, as she put it, lacked the “special pair of Jewish spectacles” required to make the controversy’s “true purport” visible: “As a gentile I don’t ‘understand.’ Neither do any of my gentile friends and rela- tions, who speak about it to me in lowered voices.”12 Sensing that McCarthy was not doing her friend any great service by “ethnicizing” the controversy, Macdonald observed that he was not convinced by her claim that despite a few exceptions, reviews by gentiles were generally favorable, while reviews by Jews were negative.13 Nevertheless, he too conceded in the end that “the hostile reviews I’ve read do seem motivated less by rationality than by Jewish patriotism—goys like [Richard] Crossman and [Michael] Musmanno might be called honorary Semites.”14 These efforts by Arendt’s friends largely backfired, only exacerbating the conviction on all sides that criticism of Arendt was a “Jewish monopoly,” and that Jews were “particu- larly sensitive about everything connected with the ‘dark’ chapter in their history,” as Phillips observed.15 One of the most damaging reviews was in fact by a non-Jew, Judge Musmanno, who, having attended the trial, asserted that her description of the proceedings was so often at variance with the facts that “it can hardly be accepted as an authoritative historical work,” and that her “scorn” for Israel and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion was evidence of “purely private prejudices.”16 And it was of little consequence that Daniel Bell defended her in a lengthy article, or that Alfred Kazin spoke up for Arendt at the New York forum at Town Hall sponsored by Dissent, though admittedly only after Howe’s repeated efforts to solicit a single pro- Arendt speaker were met with silence.17 10. Arendt to McCarthy, September 20, 1963, Between Friends, p. 147. 11. McCarthy to Arendt, September 24, 1963, p. 149. In Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 385. 12. Mary McCarthy, “The Hue and Cry,” Partisan Review 1 (Winter 1964), p. 82. 13. Macdonald in Wreszin, Dwight Macdonald, p. 385. 14. Dwight Macdonald, “Eichmann and the Jews,” Partisan Review 2 (Spring 1964), pp. 265–66. 15. William Phillips, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Partisan Review 2 (Spring 1964), p. 279. 16. M. A. Musmanno, “A Man with an Unspotted Conscience,” New York Times Book Review, May 19, 1963, pp. 1, 40–41. 17. Irving Howe, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Partisan Review 2 (Spring 1964), p. 260; Howe, A Margin of
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