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Eichmann in New York: the New York Intellectuals and the Hannah

Eichmann in New York: the New York Intellectuals and the Hannah

Eichmann in New York: The and the Controversy Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021

ANSON RABINBACH

The Eichmann controversy, occasioned by Hannah Arendt’s five-part series that appeared in from February 16 to March 16, 1963, was certainly the most bitter public dispute among intellectuals and scholars concerning that has ever taken place. It was also the first time that both 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 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 , 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 , survivors tended to focus on her underesti- mation of the significance and extent of the resistance, while Israeli and 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: , Brace, ,Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 273–74.

OCTOBER 108, Spring 2004, pp. 97–111. © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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 to confront “unprecedented” crimes of “administrative massacre” for which no positive law exists.4 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 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 , Midstream, and Commentary by partici- pants who were already—with the exception of Robinson—well-known figures in the New York literary scene: , Marie Syrkin, Howe, , Robert Lowell, , 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 ’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 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, : A Report on the Banality of (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. 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 by

(who had testified at the trial, and is mentioned in Arendt’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 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 ,” 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 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 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 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 ,” 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 Hope, p. 274. 100 OCTOBER

Arendt’s detractors, of course, found their explanations for the affair not just in the moral and factual inadequacies of her “report” but in deficiencies of her character, above all her German-Jewish arrogance.18 Was it, as Marie Syrkin

asked rhetorically, “Jewish self-hatred or possibly the assimilated Jew’s aversion to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 all manifestations of organized Jewish life?”19 Or was it her characteristic “perver- sity of brilliance,” as called it, noting her German-Jewish arrogance in phrases like “the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East.”20 Or, was it the fact that she had raised “issues of the utmost gravity” in a periodical that “reached a mass audience almost certainly unequipped to judge them critically,” as Howe protested in Commentary.21 What united Arendt’s New York critics was above all the apparent moral superciliousness of her famous contention that the “recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis,” and that this cooperation was the “very cornerstone” of Nazi anti-Jewish policy.22 Her reviewers, most notably Abel, contrasted that judgment with what was perceived as her excessive toward the trial defendant. She had applied an exalted standard of judgment to the Jewish leaders, while applying no comparable yardstick to the likes of Eichmann, who, in Abel’s words, “comes off better in her book than do her victims.”23 The “line” of the New York intellectuals, wrote Macdonald glibly, was that Arendt’s book was “soft on Eichmann, hard on the Jews.”24 By so harshly judging the comportment of the Jewish leadership, they believed, Arendt had nullified her own earlier insight in The Origins of (1951) that under conditions of Nazi rule the choices facing Jewish victims were not dictated by any perverse desire to comply with, or “cooperate” with their persecu- tors, but by the condition of totalitarian terror, which “achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decision of conscience absolutely questionable and equiv- ocal.”25 That perspective seemed to situate the decisions of the Jewish councils in circumstances that were certainly not, as some of her critics believed, beyond the capacity for others to judge, but which did require a far more nuanced historical judgment and far greater empathy with their predicament. From that point of view, Syrkin was not entirely wrong to counter that the councils regarded themselves as a

18. Irving Howe considered her work the result of “the supreme assurance of the intellectual look- ing down upon these coarse Israelis.” Howe, A Margin of Hope, p. 271. 19. Marie Syrkin, “Hannah Arendt: Clothes of the Empress,” Dissent 10 (1963), pp. 43–73. 20. Norman Podhoretz, “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann—A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,” Commentary 36 (1963), p. 205. 21. Irving Howe, “The New Yorker and Hannah Arendt,” Commentary (October 1963), pp. 318–19. 22. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 124–25. 23. Lionel Abel, “The of Evil: Hannah Arendt on Eichmann and the Jews,” Partisan Review 30 (1963), p. 219. 24. Macdonald, “Eichmann,” p. 262. 25. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), p. 452. Eichmann in New York 101

“buffer between German savagery and the helpless ghetto.”26 Though Arendt was hardly blind to those circumstances, and though she certainly did not draw the insidious comparisons between the Jewish leadership and Eichmann that her crit-

ics accused her of, her judgments were not grounded in historically nuanced Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 distinctions but in a philosophical perspective concerning the behavior of Jewish “notables” in the past and in a set of political attitudes concerning Zionist leaders in the present. As Phillips rightly explained in his summation of the arguments in Partisan Review, the intensity of the denunciations of Eichmann in Jerusalem was to a large extent evoked by the fact that Arendt was “anti-Zionist, and this bias gives a snide, slightly hostile tone to many of the things she says about official or organized Jewry, that carries her beyond her intellectual intentions.”27 Despite the apparent unanimity of her detractors, her New York critics, who, after all, were professionally engaged in “higher journalism,” and were “men and women of letters” in the old-fashioned sense of the term, also did not rely on histori- cal evidence, but instead drew on literary arguments to find Arendt’s work wanting. Podhoretz, for example, compared Arendt to the African-American James Baldwin, whose article on the black Muslims had also just appeared in The New Yorker: “If Baldwin is all eloquence and no cleverness,” he wrote, Miss Arendt is all cleverness and no eloquence; and if Baldwin brings his story unexpectedly to life through the bold tactic of heightening and playing exquisitely on every bit of melodrama it contains, Miss Arendt with an equally surprising boldness rids her story of melodrama altogether and heavily underlines every of moral ambiguity she can wring out of it.28 Similarly, Abel’s famous denunciation was entitled “The Aesthetics of Evil,” and accused Arendt not merely of making “terrible charges against the Jewish leaders,” but of failing to justify them, largely because “her judgment of them is, I think, funda- mentally an aesthetic one.”29 Though Abel did not specify precisely what he meant by “aesthetic,” his main contention was that Arendt’s account ultimately rendered both Eichmann’s behavior and that of the Jewish leaders unfathomable: “And as for the aesthetic categories Miss Arendt relies on in the main to account for his [Eichmann’s] actions, they render him finally inexplicable, just as her purely aes- thetic judgment of the leaders of the Jewish councils renders their actions, as I have already shown, inexplicable also, the only being that Eichmann, under Miss Arendt’s treatment, comes off as considerably less ugly.”30

26. See Syrkin, “Clothes of the Empress”; Lionel Abel, “The Aesthetics of Evil: Hannah Arendt on Eichmann and the Jews,” Partisan Review 30 (1963), pp. 210–30; and Gertrude Ezorsky, “Hannah Arendt Answered,” Dissent (March/April, 1966), pp. 173–82. 27. Phillips, “Eichmann,” p. 281. 28. Podhoretz, “Hannah Arendt,” p. 201. 29. Abel, “The Aesthetics of Evil,” pp. 210–30. 30. Ibid., p. 223. 102 OCTOBER

Abel’s seemingly peculiar condemnation of Arendt as an “aesthete” was only one way of saying that her version of history is “beyond good and evil” and that she did not find any ground for redemption in the story of the Holocaust.

Though never fully articulated, it was not her per se that troubled Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Abel, but the intimation that some dark philosophy may be at work, an approach that turned her book into a stand-in for all those modernist texts once venerated by the Partisan Review, but now suspect for encouraging Jewish self-doubt and . What Abel, Podhoretz, and to some extent Howe failed to find in Eichmann in Jerusalem was an unambiguous and transparent Holocaust narrative. What they thought she had written was the German-Jewish version of the amoral European “modernist” story that many of the New York intellectuals had been struggling to come to terms with for decades. Many years later, in retelling the controversy, Abel offered a few more clues to his motives, admitting that having previously reviewed Arendt’s (1961) negatively, he “was prepared to be critical” of her Eichmann book. Arendt had turned Jewish memory into the dilemma of Shakespeare’s prince of Denmark by aesthetically contemplating, rather than assuming, the burden of being a Jew.31 What Arendt failed to do was to read the Holocaust as a tragedy with a redemptive message: “Some good must come of so much evil; and for the Jews this good was found only in the setting up of the state of Israel.”32 Ironically, if Arendt’s New York critics were convinced that she had subsumed the Shoah into a morally ambiguous “aesthetic” narrative lacking in a redemptive idea of history, her most loyal defenders, including Macdonald and McCarthy, shifted the focus of their defense to the figure of Eichmann to demonstrate that it was precisely Arendt’s modernism and lack of sentimentality that permitted her to see him as the “paradigm of danger latent in modern man.”33 Contesting Abel’s review, the poet Robert Lowell wrote in a letter to the New York Times Book Review that for him, Eichmann’s “life is as close to living in hell as I can imagine, and I’m able to see it as such because Arendt has not dabbled in melodrama.”34 Moreover, if her critics focused on the ways her report departed from The Origins of Tot alitarianism, Arendt’s defenders emphasized the continuities, as did Bell when he argued that Arendt’s preoccupation with justice, and with Eichmann as a “new type of criminal,” lead directly “back to her conception of totalitarianism.”35 In retrospect, neither Arendt’s explanation for the intensity of the contro- versy, nor the New York intellectuals’ conviction that at bottom it was her unacknowledged philosophical aestheticism and philosophical nihilism, can be vali- dated. Thirty-five years after the controversy we are able to see not only the

31. Lionel Abel, The Intellectual Follies: A Memoir of the Literary Venture in New York and Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 275. 32. Ibid., p. 221. 33. Cohen, “Breaking the Code,” p. 75. 34. Robert Lowell, letter to the editor, New York Times Book Review, June 23, 1963, p. 4. 35. Daniel Bell, “The Alphabet of Justice: Reflections on ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem,’” Partisan Review 30 (Fall 1963), p. 420. Eichmann in New York 103

misapprehensions of Arendt’s defenders and critics, but also the justice in Howe’s assessment that “there were polemical excesses on both sides since both were acting out of unacknowledged passions.”36 Just as Arendt could not fathom that the inten- sity or rancor of her critics stemmed from authentic concerns, her critics would not Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 allow that Arendt’s account was written in good faith, albeit from the perspective of a German-Jewish itinerary that was far from their own. Paradoxically, Arendt’s critics accused her of displaying both an Olympian propensity to sit in judgment of the victims, and of an amoral and “aesthetic” failure to render moral judgment. As a lecture she devoted to the controversy preserved in her archive reveals, Arendt was well aware of how central the issue of her “sitting in judgment” was in creating the furor; “hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person instead of blaming all deeds or events on historical trends and dialectical movements.”37 As Howe later admitted, there was a profound sense of “guilt” about the Jewish tragedy at work on all sides of the controversy.38

II

When do intellectual or scholarly disputes become the stuff of public contro- versy? The question, though often posed, is not easily answered. “Celebrity,” an historian once said, is “the amplification of personality.” Amplification and dissemi- nation, the creation of a certain “image” of her work, as Arendt recognized, play a key role. So did the prestige and clever insouciance of The New Yorker, which so irri- tated her American critics: “How many New Yorker readers . . . had ever before cared to read anything of the vast literature about Jewish resistance, martyrdom, and survival during World War II? How many would ever read anything about it again?” complained Syrkin to Howe.39 But there is more to public controversy than even “the prosperity and publicity” of The New Yorker. In such events, “timing” is often as important as substance, and the occasion is often less important than the public prohibitions that are violated and contested. Such events capture the public imagination at a moment when something larger is at stake in how public culture goes about redefining the prohibitions attached to certain emblematic experiences and ideas. The Eichmann controversy—in part because of the trial itself—was a watershed in the public uses and public acceptance of discussion of Holocaust memory, a memory previously restricted to a relatively small, and relatively unknown, coterie of scholars at the margin of the established disciplines. As Bell acknowledged, both the Israeli court and Arendt (as well as her critics and defenders) treated Eichmann as a “symbol.” For the Israelis he was the “eternal

36. Howe, “The New York Intellectuals,” p. 265. 37. Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under ,” Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: , 2003), p. 20. 38. Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals” (1969), in Selected Writings 1950–1990 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), p. 265. 39. Howe, “The New Yorker and Hannah Arendt,” p. 318. 104 OCTOBER

anti-Semite,” for Arendt, the totalitarian “everyman.”40 For Arendt’s critics, the Jewish leaders of Eastern Europe represented the “world of their fathers,” whose fate they had barely escaped; for Arendt they represented the failures of the Zionist

leadership, which she had experienced with such great disappointment only two Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 decades earlier. Still, the Eichmann controversy helped establish the legitimacy of public and scholarly dispute over the central issues taken up in Arendt’s book—the nature of totalitarianism, resistance versus complicity, and the nature of political justice. Most importantly, the dispute itself was in many ways evidence of a new acceptance of American Jews in the domain of public culture. I would argue that the Eichmann controversy arose at a crucial juncture in the history of American Jewry. Its brisanz (explosiveness) stemmed in part from the confrontation between Arendt’s personal and political itinerary with the itinerary of an intellectual com- munity that, having just completed its American political itinerary from the left of the 1930s to anti-, was shifting the focus of its attentions from “causes to culture.” In a larger sense American Jews had also just completed a journey from a in which, until the early 1960s, anti-Semitism and exclusion still circum- scribed American Jewish life to the newfound acceptance that allowed Look magazine, in 1964, to entitle a major article “The Vanishing American Jew.” Before the Eichmann controversy, the New York intellectuals rarely addressed the Holocaust. If their manifestly Jewish origins did play a subliminal role in their disaffection from Stalinism in the late 1930s, or in the creation of “liberal anti- ” a decade later, there is no evidence that they were moved by a preoccupation with either anti-Semitism or the Holocaust. Howe acknowledged that though they often “took an acute private pleasure, through jokes and asides, in those aspects of intellectuality that bore the marks of Jewishness,” the theme of Jewishness “did not surface in their writings, or in their thinking, until the 1960s.” He later recalled: “Before the war people like me tended to subordinate our sense of Jewishness to cosmopolitan culture and socialist politics.”41 In 1944, at the nadir of the Holocaust, Isaac Rosenfeld declared that Jewishness “should occupy no more of a man’s attention than any ordinary fact of his history.”42 A few years later, the impact of the Holocaust had registered, but no reaction seemed commensu- rate. As could write in 1950: “The great psychological fact of our time which we all observe with baffled wonder and shame is that there is no possi- ble way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald.”43 By the early 1960s, something had clearly changed. The self-conscious sense of shame that just a decade earlier still marked Jewish intellectuals such as Trilling now stood in uneasy tension with a willingness of American Jews to defend their

40. Bell, “Alphabet of Justice,” p. 420. 41. Howe, Margin of Hope, p. 252. 42. Cited in Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 196. 43. Lionel Trilling, : Essays on Literature and Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Scribner, 1950), pp. 264–65. Eichmann in New York 105

entry into the American melting pot by pointing to the sufferings only recently inflicted on their European brethren. Moreover, the Holocaust was beginning to be framed as “a distinct and separate process, separate from Nazi criminality in 44 general.” Bell was most perceptive about this aspect of the debate when he acknowl- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 edged that his generation “live[s] our lives as cosmopolitan beings [who]—accept in varying degrees the unresolved and perhaps irreconcilable tension between parochial identities . . . and universal aspirations.”45 In other words, as American Jews entered the cultural domain by struggling for universalist claims, for them the Holocaust and its survivors no longer carried the stigma of Jewish pariahdom. In this regard, Arendt’s report, precisely because it did not sanctify the Holocaust, because it continued to warn of the vulnerability of the pariah, and because it so manifestly seemed to question the virtue of victimhood, gave offense, and not merely because of its intemperate judgments and irreverent tone. Her account simultaneously enabled and violated the terms of the newly emerging pub- lic perception of the Holocaust. As Richard Cohen points out: “On one level, her work jolted individuals out of a certain complacency towards their immediate past; but on a deeper level, it undermined received myths and memories of the past, shaking the foundations of a postwar weltanschauung that had begun to integrate the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel as seminal movements in the history of the Jewish people.”46 Arendt’s article, by appearing in the The New Yorker, crossed an invisible line, and for that reason alone the New York intellectuals objected so passionately, not only to what Arendt said, but to where and how she had said it. The Eichmann affair acted as the imperfect vehicle for carrying the Holocaust from the private domain of Jewish memory—where many of the themes addressed by Arendt had in fact been broached—into the public domain of American culture, where a new and more reverential tone was required. By the time of the Eichmann controversy the New York intellectuals were already experiencing what the writer called “the breakup of our camp.”47 They had navigated the route from the Stalinist Left to liberal anti- Communism, via a brief detour through during the 1930s. Their political heyday had come and gone more than a decade earlier, when as “premature” anti- Stalinists they defined the crossroads of the American Left, i.e., whether to continue to excuse the crimes of Communism for the sake of anti-fascist solidarity, or to “break ranks” with wartime -Sovietism, despite the “common enemy.” The major politi- cal preoccupation of the New York intellectuals was Communism, not or . Most of them, like Macdonald, had refused to support U.S. participation in the wartime coalition, fearing totalitarianism in the U.S. as a direct consequence of

44. Peter Novick, “Holocaust Memory in America,” in The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, ed. James E. Young (New York: Prestel Verlag and the Jewish Museum, 1994), p. 161. 45. Bell, “Alphabet of Justice,” p. 418. 46. Cohen, “Breaking the Code,” p. 42. 47. Paul Goodman cited in Irving Howe, “Mid-century Turning Point: An Intellectual Memoir,” Midstream (June/July 1975), p. 23. 106 OCTOBER

the triumph of the popular front. In 1941, Partisan Review was so internally divided that it could take no editorial line on the war.48 In many respects the story of the New York intellectuals paralleled the story of

American Jewry at large. Most, though not all, had immigrant Eastern European Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Jewish parents, and were self-educated or products of the city colleges. In two decades they had moved from immigrant neighborhoods and left-wing journals to the Upper West Side and the center of American intellectual life. In the process, they had become, in Philip Rahv’s word, “reconciled” to America. The New York intellectuals’ denouement came in 1949, when at the famous Waldorf Conference for dissidents such as McCarthy, Macdonald, , and Lowell took potshots at Soviet cultural functionaries such as Alexander Fedayev, producing a parting of the ways that defined their politics as a resolute anti-Stalinism. Unlike most of their Jewish compatriots, however, they still maintained a critical distance from American society by the appropriation of European criticism of “mass culture,” in no small part the result of a productive cross-fertilization with the German émigré intellectuals. The impact of , , and Theodor Adorno’s analyses of mass culture was already evident in the pages of Partisan Review and in Macdonald’s Politics during the late 1940s and 1950s. Siegfried Kracauer wrote for Partisan Review and Commentary in the late 1940s, and and Erich Fromm were both occasional contributors to Howe’s Dissent from the mid-1950s until the 1960s.49 Those connections did not prevent the New York intellectuals from leaving the experience of Communism with a deep suspicion of European philosophy in general, and of in particular. The result was in an insistently moralizing atti- tude toward both politics and culture, and a suspicion of the philosophical and the aesthetic elitism of the German exiles. Among the New York intellectuals only Arendt became a “celebrity”—in large part because The Origins of Totalitarianism offered arguments that seemed to define the stance of the New York intellectuals better than they themselves had been able to. By the mid-1950s, of course, anti-Communism was no longer a “minority” position of the Left; it was the lingua franca of American political culture. For the first time, the views of the New York intellectuals were taken seriously, widely read, and even quoted in circles. But unlike them, during the 1950s right-wing anti-Communists hated intellectuals, threatened civil lib- erties tout court, and behaved in what called “the paranoid style of American politics.” Government-sanctioned anti-Communism, and its extreme vari- ant, McCarthyism, threatened not only current Stalinists, but former ones, liberal democrats as well as Communists, and it frequently implied that Jews of all sorts were ipso facto “un-American.” For that reason alone, discussions of Nazism and the genocide of the Jews seemed at best a diversion from the main issue.50 48. Wreszin, Dwight Macdonald, p. 107. 49. See , “German-Jewish Connections: The in Exile,” German Politics and Society 13, no. 3 (Fall 1995), pp. 108–29. 50. Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: , 1986), p. 273. Eichmann in New York 107

A decade after Phillips wrote (in a 1946 letter to ) that “the Left must not permit the struggle against Stalinism to be appropriated by the Right,” that was precisely what had occurred. How then to rescue and intellectualism,

and oppose McCarthyism and its inquisitional atmosphere, without abandoning the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 hard-won ground of anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism (fought for in the meeting rooms of the Left, rather than in the boardrooms of the Republican Right)? The problem in the mid-1950s was to create the space for an alternative version of anti- Communism, and from that new crossroads emerged “liberal anti-Communism,” arguably the most successful political invention of the New York intellectuals, an enterprise that embraced hardcore anti-Communism while protecting both current liberals and former radicals from illiberal politicians. The price was high, including estrangement from old allies on the Left, and unpopular campaigns against those who were condemned, such as Alger Hiss and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Indeed, the Rosenbergs’ trial and execution was an entirely “inner New York Jewish” drama, whose cast included Jewish Communist defendants, a liberal anti-Communist judge, and a right-wing anti-Communist prosecuting attorney named Roy Cohen. It fell to the New York intellectuals to organize the cultural and political alternative because to no small degree they sensed that McCarthyism threatened the progressive integra- tion of Jews and other minorities into American life, as Commentary argued in the 1950s. Liberal anti-Communism differed from the right-wing variant, not in its basic stance toward the Soviet Union and Stalinism but in its insistence on the distinction between totalitarian forms of political and organization and legitimate forms of political “dissent.” Anti-Communism served to make American Jewish liber- als more secure and to secure their liberal conviction, to some degree bolstered by Arendt’s theory that the fight against Communism was a continuation of the fight against fascism by other means. Finding similarities between the two political systems was the order of the day. Remapping the political spectrum placed Communism outside, not within, the traditional liberal-left continuum. The danger, as Arendt saw, was that it also permitted anti-Communist liberals license to apply the illiberal tactics of facism to Communists, and to convince such liberals that Communists could be legitimately deprived of their civil . By the late 1950s, McCarthyism and “illiberal” anti-Communism had been defeated and rendered marginal, while “liberal” anti-Communism dominated the era, and became the political and intel- lectual foundation of the revitalized Democratic party and the basis of John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960. As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl points out, The Origins of Totalitarianism initially played a part in the efforts of some liberals to combat that trend, specifically in the campaign against McCarthyism, organized by liberals like Maurice Rosenblatt, who was instrumental in creating a lobby against the Wisconsin senator in the 1950s.51 Arendt’s sympathies with the aims of the liberal anti-Communists notwithstanding,

51. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Press, 1982), p. 292. 108 OCTOBER

she was already highly critical of some of the New York intellectuals. “By the way,” she wrote to Kurt Blumenfeld in 1953, “the Jews are behaving themselves particularly badly; they comprise the larger percentage of the ex-Communists, and they bring

more fanaticism to the whole business than is otherwise there.” She was referring Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 specifically to individuals such as Commentary editor Elliot Cohen, whom she found “disagreeable,” and the “ex-Communist” philosopher , whom she regarded as “unbearable.” Arendt also recalled a non-Jewish friend saying that in drawing up a list of those who were reliable in matters of , “only Hannah of all those Jews is with us.” Before that, she added, “it [her differences from the New York intellectual ex-Communists] had not been so clear to me.”52 Several years earlier, in a 1948 lecture, Arendt had warned of illiberalism on the Left, expressing her disapproval of the term anti-Stalinism because it still preserved a stance of “inner- totalitarian” opposition, rather than a principled one. She wrote that it “indicates no , not even a definite stand on totalitarianism—one can very well be an anti-Stalinist and still believe in dictatorship, at least, if not in totalitarian rule.”53 In an article published in the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, she now drew the distinction between former Communists and ex-Communists. Whereas for former Communists, a political “past remained an important biographical fact,” it “did not become the nucleus of their opinions, viewpoints, weltanschauungen.” Unlike the ex-Communists, “they neither looked for a substitute for a lost faith nor concentrated all their efforts and talents on the fight against Communism.”54 Arendt underscored the danger of a free society relying on ex-Communists (her example was Whittaker Chambers) for defining the nature of both the enemy and freedom: Like the Communists, the ex-Communists see the whole texture of our time in terms of one great dichotomy ending in a final battle. There is no plurality of forces in the world; there are only two. These two are not the opposition of freedom against tyranny . . . but of one faith against another. These two faiths, moreover, spring from the same source. The ex-Communists are not former Communists, they are Communists “turned upside down.”55

It was all too easy for them to “use totalitarian means to fight totalitarianism.”56 When compared with the Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s warnings against the excesses of liberal anti-Communism define more clearly both the closeness and the distance she had already established from the New York intellectuals. As Steven Aschheim observed recently, their readings of Arendt were “relatively

52. Hannah Arendt to Kurt Blumenfeld, February 2, 1953, Hannah Arendt–Kurt Blumenfeld, “ . . . in keinem Besitz verwurzelt,” Die Korrespondenz, ed. Ingeborg Nordmann and Iris Pilling (Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 1995), p. 75. 53. Hannah Arendt, “The Ex-Communists,” Hannah Arendt: Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1993), p. 218. 54. Arendt, “The Ex-Communists,” p. 392. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., pp. 394, 399. Eichmann in New York 109

naive, innocent of the personal and philosophical baggage, the political and exis- tential predilections, that shaped and guided her analyses.”57 As Howe wrote, her “book on totalitarianism may now seem open to many criticisms, but it certainly

must rank as a major piece of work which at the very least made impossible—I Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 mean implausible—those theories of totalitarianism which, before and after she wrote, tended to reduce fascism and Stalinism to a matter of class rule or economic interest.”58 Those reviews did not notice, or hardly paid heed, to the fatal dialectic of European culture where, in a vicious circle, Jewish vulnerability to anti- Semitism was highlighted when “Jews felt simultaneously the pariah’s regret at not having become a parvenu, and the parvenu’s bad conscience at having betrayed his people and exchanged equal for personal privileges.”59 It is often forgotten that anti-Semitism increased steadily in the U.S. during World War II, reaching its zenith in 1945. In that year, Dartmouth President Ernest M. Hopkins declared the university to be “a Christian College founded for the Christianization of its students.”60 Fewer than four decades later, it was no longer newsworthy that Dartmouth and half a dozen other Ivy League colleges had Jewish presidents (including Princeton, once the preeminent symbol of exclusivity). From the mid-1940s through the late 1950s, Jewish and Christian organizations showed rare unity by campaigning intensively and successfully against anti-Jewish discrimina- tion in housing, employment, immigration, and above all, education. As late as 1968, for example, the University of Wisconsin enacted state residency quotas to keep New York Jews out. But by the end of the next decade student bodies, especially at the Ivy League institutions, reflected the change, with Jews making up one-fifth of Princeton’s students and one-quarter of Harvard’s. Not all Jews “made it,” but being Jewish was identified with “Making It,” as Podhoretz entitled his pretentious autobi- ography. When the character played by Walter Matthau in the film Pete ’n’ Tillie (1972) is asked why he still insisted on calling himself a Jew when he was three- fourths Lutheran and only one quarter Jewish, he replied, “I’m a social climber.”61 At the moment that the Eichmann controversy exploded, the Protestant caste system that had dominated America since its founding began to disintegrate, at least as far as Jews were concerned. Whether they knew it or not, Jews were ceasing to be a “minority” in America. Jewish acceptance was also beginning to underscore the difference between Jews and “other” (i.e., black) Americans. Despite Look magazine’s headline about “The Vanishing American Jew,” Jews were hardly vanishing, though Jewish parochialism and was. What was really vanishing was the American Protestant. American society did not become more Jewish as a result of Jewish advancement; on the contrary it became more diverse, more pluralistic, and, to use Harold Bloom’s phrase, “post-Christian.” And with de-Christianization came

57. Steven E. Aschheim, “Nazism, Culture and the Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil,” New German Critique 70 (Winter 1997), p. 118. 58. Howe, “The New York Intellectuals,” p. 259. 59. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966), p. 241. 60. Shapiro, A Time for Healing, p. 295. 61. Ibid., p. 94. 110 OCTOBER

de-Judaization. Ironically, both the Christian Right and Jewish conservatives agree that Jewish success threatened religious belief and community coherence. As David Hollinger has written, the story of Jewish success is the story of the long historical

struggle against a desecularized Christian culture in America. The Sombartian ques- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 tion, he has written, should have been formulated not as “Why is there no in America?” but as “Why is there so much Christianity in the ?”62 The early 1960s, we can now see, was not an auspicious moment for the New York intellectuals. Their “special position” as outsiders was threatened by unprece- dented Jewish success, their politics was no longer radical (or even interesting), and they seemed unable to look “beyond the melting pot,” to acknowledge an “other America” that was non-white, non-Jewish, and poor. The black-Jewish divide that would emerge at the end of the decade was already apparent in the emphasis on the pathologies of African-American life evident in and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1963 Beyond the Melting Pot, which argued that black Americans did not possess the viable institutions that offered other ethnic groups the possibility of success in America.63 The New York intellectuals could offer African-Americans a model of ethnic assimilation—via community organizations and education—that only reinforced Jewish stereotypes of black inadequacies. Arendt’s book seemed to parallel that same discourse of ethnic self-patholo- gization, and therefore had to be refuted. For that reason, as is evident from Podhoretz’s review, many were uncomfortable with how Arendt had attempted to tell the story of the Holocaust in a way that markedly departed from Baldwin’s “melodramatic” story of black victims and white perpetrators. By contrast, hers was a modernist tale, fraught with ambiguity, with shadings between victims and perpetrators, and with dark foreboding about the risks of assuming the role of the parvenu at the expense of Jewish pariahdom. If Arendt’s version of Jewish history had admitted only the choice between the parvenu and the pariah, American Jews rejected that choice as anachronistic. As Samuel Heilman recently noted, “Whereas European Jews in the past had faced a situation in which they could either be Jews or be something else, American Jews by the sixties discovered they could continue to call themselves Jewish even though they had also become something else.”64 But Arendt’s book was, for reasons having to do entirely with her own history, and her own very different Jewish background, regarded as an unwelcome warning against overestimating the opportunities for accommodation, and for living in the illusion that Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders could—by behaving unpolitically—escape the threat of anti-Semitism. If the theme of Jewishness and the Holocaust first surfaced as a distinctive fea- ture of American during the early 1960s, the Arendt controversy was a

62. David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton: Press, 1996), p. 21. 63. Harvey Teres, Renewing the Left: Politics, Imagination and the New York Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 223. 64. Samuel C. Heilman, Portrait of American Jews: The Last Half of the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), p. 58. Eichmann in New York 111

central—but hardly the only—reason. The and its effect on chang- ing allegiances toward Israel are also part of the story. The proximity of the New York intellectuals to the anti-Communists of the Right played an important part.

Arendt’s book on Eichmann, with its emphasis on the futility of Jewish accommoda- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228704774115735/1751113/016228704774115735.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 tion and the opportunism of Jewish leaders, was a lightening rod for all of the changes taking place in American-Jewish intellectual life in that era, changes that might be summed up as a subtle shift from causes to culture. At that juncture, the New York intellectuals, and a significant segment of American Jews, felt that their acceptance by American society “as Jews” brought new responsibilities: preserving the memory of the Holocaust, regarding survivors of the Holocaust as victims deserving of respect, and giving unequivocal support to Israel. Her book, as I have suggested, questioned those three trends. She appeared to be and to a large extent was hostile to Israel; she was judgmental toward survivors of the Holocaust—at least to Jewish leaders who survived the Holocaust; and she was skeptical of memorializa- tion as an inner-Jewish process. Indeed, in the Origins she had expressly warned against the “sophistic-dialectical interpretations of politics which are all based on the superstition that something good might result from evil.”65 The Eichmann controversy was not merely a challenge, but an opportunity for Jewish intellectuals and writers to meet the challenge posed by a new situation for Jews in America. In retrospect, the likelihood that Arendt’s book would have been a provocation seems “overdetermined.” Arendt herself reflected on the significance of the controversy several years later, noting that it had demonstrated that as far as the Holocaust was concerned “none of the concerned parties has as yet been able to reconcile itself. The Germans have coined for this whole complex the highly ques- tionable term of their ‘unmastered past.’ Well, it looks as though today, after so many years, this German past has turned out to remain somehow unmanageable for a good part of the civilized world.”66 In closing, it may also be useful to recall Howe’s assess- ment in order to underscore the virtues as well as the vices of such a divisive public bloodletting: Yet even in the debris of this quarrel there was, I think something good. At least everyone was acknowledging emotions that had long gone unused. Nowhere else in American academic and intellectual life was there such ferocity of concern with the problems raised by Hannah Arendt. If left to the rest of the American intellectual world, her book would have been praised as “stimulating” and “thoughtful” and then everyone would have gone back to sleep.67

65. Arendt, Origins, p. 442. 66. Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” p. 23. 67. Howe, “The New York Intellectuals,“ p. 265.

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