Journalist Dara Horn was determined to tell his story. In a revelatory Kindle Single published today by Tablet Magazine, Horn reports on how Fry came to his rescue work and what became of him after the war. (You can read a preview on Tablet.) But how did this hero decide whom to save in the first place? Horn spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivy about Fry’s exploits, the arguably eugenics-like nature of his mission, the cultural heritage that was not protected by his and other rescue missions, and why so few know of his heroic work. [Running time: 22:09]

Between 1940 and 1941, working out of a hotel room and later a small office in the French port city of Marseille, Varian Fry rescued hundreds of artists, writers, musicians, composers, scientists, philosophers, intellectuals, and their families from the Nazis, taking enormous personal risks to bring them to the United States. Fry was one of the only American “righteous Gentiles,” a man who voluntarily risked everything to save others, with no personal connection to those he saved. At the age of 32, Fry had volunteered to go to France on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an ad hoc group of American intellectuals formed in 1940 for the purpose of distributing emergency American visas to endangered European artists and thinkers. The U.S. Department of State, which initially supported the committee’s mission, slowly turned against it in favor of its supposed allies in the “unoccupied” pro-Nazi French government—to the point of arranging for Fry’s arrest and expulsion from France in 1941. During Fry’s 13 months in Marseille, he managed to rescue 2,000 people, including a hand-picked list of the brightest stars of European culture—Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and André Breton, to name a few. Until recently, I had never heard of Fry, even though it is arguably because of him—and because of his equally brave colleagues, including several other non-Jewish Americans—that these artists and intellectuals not only survived but reshaped the culture of America. But now I was driving through Los Angeles to see the former homes of some of these rescued luminaries—and to meet a filmmaker who is one of the few living Americans who has heard of Varian Fry.

“We pay tribute to the righteous in order to ignore them. There have been no high-caliber books written about the righteous, no rigorous, critical studies of what made these people do what they did.” This is what I was told by Pierre Sauvage, a filmmaker who has spent much of the past 14 years working on a documentary about Varian Fry. Bearded and bespectacled in a red polo shirt and looking less like a French cineaste than an American dad who had just dropped his daughter off at college, Sauvage is convinced that the stories of Holocaust rescuers like Fry should be not merely inspirational, but instructional—that by studying these exceptional people, we can learn to be more like them. It’s a surprisingly lonely point of view. In 1984, Sauvage helped organize an international conference on the righteous, chaired by Elie Wiesel. “We brought all these righteous Gentiles to Washington,” Sauvage recalled. “In the breaks between sessions, the righteous Gentiles were standing around being ignored by the scholars. No one spoke to them, no one engaged them. How can scholars not be fascinated by these people?”

Sauvage is the director (and proprietor) of the Varian Fry Institute, a nonprofit archive of “Fryana,” as he calls it. On a warm winter morning in Los Angeles, he welcomed me to the “institute,” which turned out to be a small office with floor-to-ceiling shelves of binders that revealed an obsession bordering on mania. Sauvage’s collection of Fryana included everything from copies of Fry’s letters to textbooks Fry wrote for a public-affairs think tank to a poem he composed in French not long before his death. But most of the Fryana was stored on computers containing video files of what was easily several months of Sauvage’s filmed interviews with nearly every person who ever worked with, talked to, knew of, or breathed near Varian Fry.

Sauvage’s fascination with rescuers comes in part because he owes his life to them. He was born in 1944 in Le Chambon, France, a Huguenot village in the south central part of the country in which the entire town, following the leadership of its Protestant clergy, formed a silent “conspiracy of goodness,” as Sauvage has called it, to shelter Jews from the Nazis. Sauvage’s parents were among the thousands of Jews hidden by the righteous of Le Chambon. His 1989 film Weapons of the Spirit is a documentary about the village; it has become an educational staple that I watched in my high-school French class. Sauvage’s parents went to Le Chambon, he later discovered, after being rejected for rescue by Varian Fry.

Fry was honored by Yad Vashem in 1997, 30 years after his death, as one of the Righteous Among the Nations; there is also a street named after him in his hometown of Ridgewood, N.J., not far from where I live. But to Sauvage, this kind of recognition is meaningless when we make no attempt to learn what motivated people like Fry. “Many years ago in New York, I read about a guy who had fallen onto the subway tracks, and another man had jumped down to rescue him,” Sauvage told me. “When he was asked why he did it, he said, ‘What else could I do? There was a train coming.’ For most people, that would be the reason not to do it. But this man’s response was automatic. Fiction and drama have given us a distorted sense of how rescuers think. Writers need a narrative arc, so they show these people wrestling with themselves, agonizing over what to do. But rescuers actually don’t hesitate or agonize. They immediately recognize what the situation calls for. When they say that what they did was no big deal, we think they are being modest. They aren’t. They genuinely experienced it as no big deal.”

From his research in Le Chambon, Sauvage developed his own theory about the righteous: that they are happy, secure people with a profound awareness of who they are. “I’ve never met an unhappy rescuer,” he claimed. “These are people who are rooted in a clear sense of identity—who they are, what they love, what they hate, what they value—that gives them a footing to assess a situation.” He described the inspiration the people of Le Chambon drew from their Protestant history and faith. Then he began showing me his interviews with Fry’s colleagues, introducing me posthumously to several exceedingly intelligent, colorful, and sincere Americans. All of them did indeed seem like happy people, with a deep sense of who they were.

The only person missing from his footage is Varian Fry.

I’ve long been uncomfortable with stories of Holocaust rescue, not least because of the painful fact that they are statistically insignificant—as are, for that matter, stories of Holocaust survival. But for me, the unease of these stories runs deeper. When I was 23 and just beginning my doctoral work in Yiddish, I barely understood the world I was entering. It is a very distant world from what we are taught to assume in American culture, where happy endings are so expected that even our stories of the Holocaust somehow have to be redemptive. In Holocaust literature written in Yiddish, the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers, because there actually wasn’t much of that. Instead one finds cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance. Stories about Christian rescuers are far more palatable to American audiences, because while they have the imprimatur of true stories, they also conveniently follow the familiar arc of fiction. The overwhelming reality of the unavenged murder of innocents—the reality one finds recorded in the culture that was actually destroyed—doesn’t play as well in Hollywood.

But unlike the humble peasants of Le Chambon, Varian Fry felt oddly familiar to me. Not just because he was young and American, but because he was very much the kind of young American I know best. Like me, he grew up in a commuter suburb in northern New Jersey; he graduated from Harvard in 1931, 68 years before I did. In photographs, he looks a lot like the guys I went to college with: thin, awkward, but handsome in a dorky way, his then-stylish glasses and carefully knotted ties a failed but endearing attempt at coolness. His personal letters, which I read in Columbia University’s Rare Book Room, are well-written and irreverent in a tone I recognize from my college friends—full of witty references to nerdy things ranging from the Aeneid (“I was surprised to find so many more/ had joined us, ready for exile …”) to Gilbert and Sullivan (“I am never disappointed in them [the rescued artists]—what never? Well, hardly ever!”). If he hadn’t been dead for more than 40 years, I might have dated him.

What felt creepily familiar about him, too, were his motivations.

To read Dara Horn’s full story in Tablet Magazine’s first-ever Kindle Single, see here. And remember: You don’t need a Kindle to read—Kindle Singles can be read with a free Kindle app for your iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry smartphone or tablet, or on your computer. The complete, 16,000-word version of The Rescuer costs $1.99.

The Dirge Singer (1922)
This radio special starring Al Jolson was based on the singer’s life. His character betrays his traditional Jewish family to sing in blackface (rendered on radio by his, er, different way of talking, about which the less said, the better). Yet emotional catharsis is achieved by the end, when he returns to sing “Ma’oz Tzur” on the first night of Hanukkah. Listeners complained that “Rock of Ages” lacked the necessary foundation on which to carry the climax of such an ostensibly moving story. They also expressed frustration at not being able to see Jolson transform to blackface and back. RCA bigwig David Sarnoff is said to have responded, “Well what would those [unprintable] suggest we do—invent some way that they could see Jolson and hear him at the same time?”

The Magical Maccabees (1955)
Sitting by a slightly threatening-looking fire, a gigantic Old Country menorah partially obscuring the camera’s view, Bernard Malamud sat for two hours and sternly lectured viewers about the importance of not giving in to modern-day Hellenization, much as Mattathias (whom Malamud insisted on calling Matityahu in part to prove his point) fought the oppressors rather than allowed himself to become assimilated. “Enlivening” the jeremiad were Malamud’s periodic stories about shtetl folk falling in love and performing magical acts, which all had the twist that these modest peasants actually lived in major United States cities. After the special aired, CBS’s Newark affiliate received an angry phone call from a young watcher who demanded why there were no Jewish writers who showed the Jewish community in America as it really was.

The Banality of Hanukkah (1962)
Taped during The New Yorker’s annual Christmas party from their midtown offices, this NBC special featured Hannah Arendt, at her desk, calmly explaining that Hanukkah is an ordinary holiday and the Maccabees were just ordinary people who happened, together, to commit an extraordinary deed (she also noted that not all the Syrians were evil, much as certain Nazi philosophers, for example Martin Heidegger, were good people). Arendt was frequently interrupted by the partiers outside her office: A clearly inebriated Joseph Mitchell noiselessly walked in, vomited on Arendt’s desk, and walked out; Lillian Ross brought in an unidentified man and proceeded to “neck” with him for several minutes before noticing the camera and embarrassingly fleeing. Some historians have suggested Arendt’s experience producing this special led her to be Tom Wolfe’s source for his articles about the magazine a few years later. Arguments over whether this special ought to be deliberately blocked from historical consciousness, so that nobody is ever subjected to it again, or specifically replayed every year, as a reminder of how awful television can be, have been known to ignite an Upper West Side salon to this very day.

The Smurfs Team Up With Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir for the Festival of Lights! (1973)
This extremely ill-advised special, meant to boost morale in the Jewish-American community after the Yom Kippur War, cast the Smurfs (who had yet to star in their own Hanna-Barbera TV show but had had a feature film) as the underdog Maccabees/Hebrews fighting oppression. Meir’s inclusion led to further incongruities, as when she declared, in reference to the Smurfs’ historic enemy and his sidekick cat, “Peace will come when Gargamel loves Azrael more than he hates Israel.”

Oiled Up (2006)
This Judd Apatow-directed special was based off scripts that Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen independently wrote at the ages of 12 and 10, respectively. In it, Benjamin, a contemporary kid played by Jay Baruchel, sits around with his friends (Hill and Rogen, as well as Aziz Ansari and Jason Segel), takes a hit of some really powerful marijuana and finds himself in ancient times, leading the Jewish revolt against their Syrian oppressors. Hiding out in the mountains with his parents, Mattathias (Adam Sandler, in a purposefully fake-looking white beard) and Ali (Leslie Mann), he figures out the best way to defeat his enemies is to distract them with scantily clad women, played by various models. It seems likely that the Jews will win but end up not having enough oil for the Temple because they used it to oil up their decoys. But we don’t know for sure: Despite being allotted a two-hour time slot by ABC, Apatow’s program went way too long and nobody has seen the conclusion. Nobody has ever wanted too, either.

Bonus fact! The most-requested Hanukkah special ever is 1981’s People, Chosen People. One word: Barbra.

The Ten Least-Successful Holiday Specials of All Time [Whatever]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government still hopes to restore ties with Turkey, but not at the expense of apologizing for the treatment of the flotilla, after a U.N. panel stopped short of suggesting one. [Haaretz]

• Not that Israel is holding its breath. “This is part of the Islamization spreading there,” said one official. “Therefore, unfortunately, we won’t be returning to the golden era of our relations with the Turks in the near future.” [Ynet]

• The first rule of doing drugs during a Birthright trip is: don’t. But there are other rules should you choose to ignore that one. [Jewlicious]

• Judith Butler on Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann. Surely this is of interest to some of you. [Guardian]

• One-time NBA baller Kenny Anderson will coach the team at a Jewish day school in Florida. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

Oh my God you can be Maccabi Tel Aviv in a video game!

“It is always bracing to recall the world in which the Eichmann trial was held,” notes Franklin Foer in his laudatory review of Nextbook author Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial in the New York Times Book Review “—where the slaughter was largely unacknowledged (and even unknown).”

Speaking today at the US State Department, Professor Lipstadt explained,

The Eichmann trial accomplished many things. It brought one of the chief operating officers of the Final Solution to justice.

It served as a stark warning to other Nazi war criminals that they had not escaped justice and that they should not sleep so soundly in their beds.

It retold the history of the murder of European Jewry in a fashion that it had not been told in the sixteen years since it ended.

It illustrated the fact that when someone who has the power to do you harm, threatens to do so, you are best to take them at their word.

Above all, by putting close to 100 survivors in the witness box it demonstrated to the world that this act of horrific violence was committed against men, women, and children who were no different than you or I. It reminded a world which had quickly moved on from the tragedy that the victims were six million individuals. Ultimately it put a human face on genocide. It is those faces – the faces of the innocent – that we forget at our own peril.

Today in Tablet Magazine, Professor Lipstadt annotates footage of the six most significant moments of the four-month trial. Senior writer Allison Hoffman examines the original manuscript of Hannah Arendt’s seminal and controversial report “Eichmann in Jerusalem” and discusses its reception. Also be sure to check out Lipstadt’s essay on the lessons she learned from writing her book.

For those in the New York area on April 14, Deborah Lipstadt will be discussing her book with Jewish Week’s editor Gary Rosenblatt at The Center for Jewish History.

Film Study
Draft of History
Trial and Error
Why The Eichmann Trial Really Mattered [NYTBR]
The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook]

On April 15, 1962, Hannah Arendt sent a brief personal note to William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, thanking him for some flowers he had sent. It had been a rough winter for the political philosopher: Her husband, Heinrich Blücher, was suffering from a brain aneurysm, and Arendt had developed a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics she was given to treat a cold. Then, in March, a truck had plowed into a taxi she was taking through Central Park, resulting in a concussion, hemorrhages in both eyes, broken teeth, and fractured ribs. Nevertheless, in her note three weeks later to Shawn—who had assigned her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem a year before, and was still awaiting her copy—Arendt sounded almost chirpy. “I am much better,” she wrote, in her blue-ballpoint cursive, spidery and cramped on cream-colored stationery, “and on the point of going back to work.”

Five months later, she was done. On Sept. 19, a sheaf of onion-skin pages arrived at The New Yorker’s office at 25 West 43rd Street, with the title, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report.” The manuscript was sent over to the typing pool, where it was copied onto heavy yellow bond, double-spaced, and then returned to Shawn for editing.

Meanwhile, a carbon copy was delivered to Arendt’s publisher, Viking Press. A lightly edited version of her manuscript was published as a book in May 1963 under the same title she’d picked for the New Yorker articles that were published in February and March but with the dramatically enhanced subtitle “A Report on the Banality of Evil.” The book, with revisions, has remained in print since. But it never reflected Shawn’s changes to Arendt’s draft, which was serialized in five issues of the magazine. So while The New Yorker remains almost reflexively associated with “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” the text that most people have in mind when they talk about Arendt’s report is not, in fact, the one that appeared in the magazine.

The Shawn typescript, cluttered with pencil marks, is now held with the rest of The New Yorker archive at the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. His major cuts and alterations to Arendt’s original are striking in their consistency: Almost all of them involve Arendt’s asides about the contemporary Jewish community and its handling of the trial. Many of the most controversial passages made it into the magazine intact, including her assertion that “if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between five and six million people.” But the final magazine text is in some ways less provocative, more streamlined, and—unsurprisingly, given the precision of The New Yorker’s legendary copy editor Eleanor Gould—more polished than what’s in the book.

In one sense, Shawn was simply exercising his preference for straightforward structure and well-modulated language: The sections cut from the magazine, especially near the beginning, are generally asides that distract the reader from the central focus of the Eichmann narrative. In some places, he reined Arendt in, softening her claim that Hitler was, in 1935, “admired everywhere as a great national statesman” with a judiciously placed “almost” before “everywhere.” But the cuts also reflect Shawn’s aversion to what Irving Howe, in his criticism of Arendt in Commentary, self-deprecatingly described as the “grubby” polemic of the little intellectual journals. (Ben Yagoda, in his New Yorker chronicle, About Town, noted that Arendt went to Shawn for the assignment on the advice of her friend Mary McCarthy only after Norman Podhoretz told her Commentary couldn’t afford to send her to Jerusalem; given that Podhoretz responded to Arendt’s finished piece with a scathing review subtitled “A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,” one can only imagine that the final product would have been quite different had Arendt been writing for him.)

Arendt doesn’t appear to have fussed over the cuts. “She did not like to look at things, or go back to things,” explained Jerome Kohn, Arendt’s former research assistant and now her literary executor. “What she gave to Shawn she left in his hands, and what she sent to the publisher, she left in theirs.” She did, however, send in corrections, and requested multiple sets of galleys during editing. “It would make things easier for me,” she wrote to Shawn on Sept. 30, 1962. After the first installment of the series was published, the following February, she wrote to chastise Shawn for an error she had found in the text concerning the date of Yad Vashem’s establishment. “This is an error,” Arendt wrote, noting she had spoken to the fact-checker, William Honan, who went on to be a culture editor at the New York Times. “This is not very important but it confirms my conviction that no dates or facts provided by your checking department should be inserted unless they are checked and approved by me.”

The date of Yad Vashem’s founding turned out to be the least of it, of course. According to Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Shawn cabled Arendt on March 8 to advise her of the response to her piece: “People in town seem to be discussing little else.” A few days later, on March 13, she replied that she had begun receiving angry letters. “Now the Jews know that enemy No. 1 is not ‘the German’ and the Germans agree that enemy No. 1 is not ‘the Jew,’ it is me,” Arendt wrote, in a letter held at the Library of Congress. “This, to be sure, is an exaggeration and your checking department would not let me get away with it.”

1. Hausner’s opening: In the name of 6 Million: J’accuse

Many Israelis, including those born well after the Eichmann trial, can recite Hausner’s opening paragraph by heart. In a few sentences it encapsulated how the young nation conceived of this trial. Here was yet another tyrant—in a long succession of tyrants—who was once again trying to destroy the Jewish people. This time, however, the Jewish people, acting through the agency of the State of Israel, could bring him to account for his evil deeds.

2. George Wellers’ testimony

Though much of the testimony concerned the fate of masses of people, sometimes it was an individual’s story that entered one’s heart. George Wellers described the French children who were rounded up in July 1942, separated from their parents, and held at Drancy. He recalled one young boy whom he knew was destined for Auschwitz but whom he tried to reassure.

3. Martin Foldi

The murder of Hungarian Jews came late in the war even as the Allies were landing in Normandy, Rome was liberated, and the Soviets were pushing eastward. Close to a half million Jews were murdered in the space of seven weeks. This action gave Auschwitz its reputation as the epitome of the world’s killing field. Here a Hungarian Jew, Martin Foldi, described arriving at Auschwitz and watching his wife and children move further away from him toward what he ultimately learned were the gas chambers. He was able to see them because his little girl wore a red coat. Many years later Steven Spielberg would reprise that little girl and her coat in his film Schindler’s List.

4. Magistrate Moshe Beisky

Moshe Beisky was a respected magistrate in Tel Aviv. He had passed up opportunities to escape from the camp in which he was being held because he knew the other people in the barracks would be killed as a warning to others who might contemplate escaping. When he entered the witness box he declined the judge’s offer to sit. He spoke for a while describing his experiences during the war. Then Hausner, with no warning, asked him why he did not fight back. Why, when a massive number of Jews were surrounded by only a few hundred SS men, did they not escape? Beisky, taken aback, sat down and gave one of the most honest and plaintive descriptions of what Jewish inmates faced.

5. Resistance fighters

Many Israelis anticipated that the testimony of the resistance fighters would provide the one moment of uplift in the trial. Here, after all, were those who had fought back against their murderers. These were the heroes. Yet in their testimony both Aba Kovner and Zvia Lubetkin-Zuckerman cautioned against asking why people did not fight back. Fighting back, Lubetkin noted, came in many forms including continuing to educate children when the Germans outlawed it. Kovner observed that resistance is only possible when there is someone to coordinate it and organize it. The Jews had no one to do that. Don’t, he cautioned, blame the victims.

6. Pastor Heinrich Grüber

Pastor Heinrich Grüber was the only non-Jewish German to testify at the trial. He had met with Eichmann many times during the war to negotiate on behalf of Jewish converts in his congregation. He found Eichmann to be like a “block of marble.” At the end of his testimony, paraphrasing the words of the Hebrew Prophets, he expressed the hope that the Germans’ sin would be forgiven by a forgiving people. People in the courtroom wept. Israelis showered him with cards and letters. Many believed his words marked the beginning of the process of “redemption.”

Deborah Lipstadt on The Eichmann Trial from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook Press]
The Trial [Tablet Magazine]

The Pugilist

I eventually found him—though he did not, at first, meet my expectations.

***

From my early teens, discussions around our family table took off from articles in Commentary, the only publication read in common by my father, my brother Ben, and me, five years Ben’s junior. These discussions continued once Ben and I formed our own families and became independent subscribers.

In all that time, few essays ever got us more riled up than “My Negro Problem and Ours,” written in 1963, at the height of the American civil rights movement, and almost certainly intended to provoke the hundreds of letters it generated. In it, Commentary’s legendary editor-in-chief, Norman Podhoretz, pitted his experiences as a poor kid in Brooklyn who was stalked and bullied by bigger black boys against the prevalent notion that Jews were rich and Negroes persecuted. He unearthed in himself emotions like envy and hate and examined them in light of what increasingly militant blacks were saying about their treatment in America. Far from minimizing their grievances, Norman concluded that the tortured relations between blacks and whites should be dissolved. “I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned.” Intermarriage was the desired resolution. Were he asked whether he would like one of his daughters to “marry one,” he wrote, he would have to answer, no, he would not like it at all, but he would accept it as the man he had “a duty to be.” There was real import to this statement by a man with three daughters.

“Politically incorrect” hardly suffices to describe the tenor and substance of this article, which retains every iota of its disturbing power to this day. Norman’s mercilessly rational analysis falls like a searchlight on thoughts and feelings that might have benefited from softer illumination. But what troubled us in Montreal was less the treatment of race, which hardly resonated north of the border, than the author’s indifference to whether his daughter’s hypothetical black suitor was Jewish. So the boy was black—big deal. But how could the editor of a Jewish magazine so casually treat his daughter’s marriage to a gentile?

And then, almost as an aside, came this reflection: “In thinking about the Jews I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant,” Podhoretz wrote. “Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction.”

Was the question terrible or simply off-key? Striving for ultimate honesty, it betrayed moral innocence without registering what Judaism had come to accomplish. Jews had forsworn human sacrifice. The Germans murdered because they were not Jews and did not follow God’s law. The genocide of the Jews was the consequence not of Jewish survival but of Nazism’s perverted search for the “fittest.” Surely the unspeakable crimes by enemies of the Jews ought to have prompted questions about the value of their existence.

***

It wasn’t until several months later that Norman received redemption in our family, which came as a result of his response to Hannah Arendt’s coverage for The New Yorker of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been captured and brought by Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, from his hiding in Argentina to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people. This was the first such reckoning, as earlier trials of Nazi war criminals had charged them with crimes against humanity or against other nationals. Israeli leaders felt duty bound to try one of the chief organizers of the Final Solution for the genocide that had inspired the jurist Raphael Lemkin to coin that term. Arendt, by contrast, was bothered by what she considered legal gerrymandering in trying the SS officer in the court of a country that had not existed at the time of the massacres, by the prosecution’s emphasis on the national catastrophe rather than the narrow specifics of the case, and by its inadequate understanding of the Nazi mind. Author of a major study of totalitarianism, Arendt was convinced that the modern technocrat—Nazi or Soviet—was so regimented and brainwashed that he was not intellectually agile enough to try to save himself in a court of law. Eichmann was dull-witted, a pencil pusher: It was ridiculous to cast an efficient bureaucrat as arch-villain in so large a drama.

Of all the prominent European Jews who found refuge in America during the war, Arendt had, before this, been singled out for homage by the New York intellectuals, who were just coming to terms with the Jewish national experience they had until then mostly ignored. They had not realized that she was moving in the opposite direction, distancing herself from her earlier Zionist and Jewish sympathies. Although no one at the time suspected her liaison with her teacher Martin Heidegger, or the resumption of her correspondence with him despite his wartime association with the Nazi regime, the Americans felt betrayed by her account of the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Saul Bellow ascribed his dislike to one of his characters, the Holocaust survivor Arthur Sammler, who protests that the Germans’ idea of making the century’s great crime look dull was not banal but an idea of genius: “Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abandon conscience. Is such a project trivial? Only if human life is trivial. This woman professor’s enemy is modern civilization itself.” The historian Jacob Robinson exposed Arendt’s many factual errors in a study called, after Isaiah, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, and Arendt’s German-Jewish landsman Gershom Scholem called her tone “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious.” Citing Scholem, Irving Howe recalled that what struck them both—“struck like a blow—was the surging contempt with which she treated almost everyone and everything connected with the trial, the supreme assurance of the intellectual looking down upon those coarse Israelis.”

The debate over Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial affected the American Jewish intelligentsia almost as powerfully as the trial shook Israelis.

Norman’s contribution telegraphed its verdict in the subtitle: “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance.” As if taking up her challenge to look at the universal aspects of what might otherwise seem merely a Jewish quarrel, he examined the symptomatic qualities of her reportage: Eichmann may or may not be a new type of modern man, but Arendt represented a new style of modern thinker. What she did, he noted incisively, was to “translate this story for the first time into the kind of terms that can appeal to a sophisticated modern sensibility. Thus, in place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim. It has all the appearance of ‘ruthless honesty,’ and all the marks of profundity—have we not been instructed that complexity, paradox, and ambiguity are the sign manifest of profundity?”

Norman identified the technique of postmodern inversion that destabilizes the moral order: preferring flawed originality to mere accuracy. Resentful of being a “young fogey,” he was by this point publishing articles as subversive as the work he was dissecting here. But the venerable Arendt was turning frivolous, and so he took on the task of undoing her mischief—a task that required a more patient pen and disciplined mind than the mischief-maker’s own. Distortion is to accuracy as snorting is to sobriety, but unlike the private vices that harm only their practitioner, the intellectual follies—to use Lionel Abel’s term—infect the body politic.

Let me quote Norman again: “The brilliance of Miss Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann could hardly be disputed by any disinterested reader. But at the same time, there could hardly be a more telling example … of the intellectual perversity that can result from the pursuit of brilliance by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle.” He was speaking here for almost all the New York Intellectuals, who had painfully outgrown their own misguided enthusiasms. One can hardly exaggerate how genuinely thinkers like Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and Irving Howe had come to value lucidity and intelligibility over other literary virtues. But attaining that clarity required filtering out pollutants, not once but repeatedly, in a society that embraced Arendt’s “perversity” as eagerly as France sanctified the criminal Jean Genet.

What no one foresaw, of course, was how quickly postmodern frivolity would engulf the elites and flood the humanities. Bellow would soon be savaged by the counterculture, and Howe by the New Left, the latter winning his way back into its good graces only once it had passed its faux-revolutionary phase. As for Norman, he cleaned the stables, earning the Homeric adjective that accompanied these labors.

Continue reading: Zionism, “our love for the State of Israel,” and being a soldier. Or view as a single page.

But underneath the reproach and the frustration, the longing for a Palestinian Gandhi is an expression of the Jewish desire to be enabled to make peace by being morally compelled to make peace. Gandhi, after all, did finally succeed in driving the British out of India, and his Palestinian equivalent would presumably succeed in making Israel withdraw from the West Bank. The key to this dream, however, is that such a Palestinian leader would be so trustworthy, so committed to peace and nonviolence, that an Israeli withdrawal would not invite future aggression.

Sari Nusseibeh is not a Palestinian Gandhi—he is a secular intellectual, not a saint, and while he has occupied prominent roles in Palestinian life (formerly as a leader of the first intifada and a Palestinian Authority diplomat, currently as president of al-Quds University), he has never commanded a mass following. But in his short new book What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (Harvard University Press, $19.95), he comes closer to advocating a Gandhian strategy than any other Palestinian leader I know of. Near the end of the book, Nusseibeh turns to Hind Swaraj, Gandhi’s 1909 pamphlet on Indian Home Rule, as a manual for the Palestinian cause: “The way for India to become free and exercise real self-determination or home rule is through swaraj, the inner freedom and self-sovereignty individuals achieve by remaining true to their humanity,” he explains.

If Palestinians would take their cue from Gandhi, they would cease looking upon their own patriotism as a religious or national cul-de-sac, and begin viewing it instead as an overarching affinity with the land and its multifaceted racial as well as religious history. They would have to transform their vision of a free Palestine from that of a princedom to be ruled by Arab Palestinian “princes” to that of a land of a free people living by moral values. In such a land, an Israeli could be just as patriotic a Palestinian as an Arab Palestinian!

These sentences capture both what is so admirable and encouraging about Nusseibeh’s book, and what, from a Zionist perspective, is ambiguous about it. On the one hand, for Palestinians to acknowledge the “multifaceted racial [and] religious history” of the region would mean, presumably, to accept the Jewish place in that history. But it is not wholly clear, from Nusseibeh’s language here and elsewhere in the book, whether that means accepting Israel as a Jewish state. For an Israeli to be a “patriotic Palestinian” seems to look forward, instead, to a binational state, in which Jews and Arabs would embrace a common political identity. “The vision of the peaceful and prosperous future may take any of several forms,” Nusseibeh writes: “one state, two states, confederation involving one country, or two, or three, and so on.”

This ambiguity is not strategic or accidental; it lies at the heart of Nusseibeh’s philosophical argument. Essentially, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? is a brief for liberalism—which makes it, in the generally illiberal political culture of Palestine, a radical document. The first principle of liberalism is that the individual is prior to the collective, that states and ethnicities and religions—what Nusseibeh calls, a bit awkwardly, “meta-biological” entities—are meant to serve human beings, not vice versa. “Moving along the garden path from I to we and then to the state,” he writes, is a “normal and justifiable psychological human need,” but it has the potential to become “a demented ideological imperative or dictate.” When that happens, “instead of individuals ‘having’ the state to fulfill their needs, the state is regarded as primary, as what ‘has’ individuals as its tools.”

It is here that the question of Nusseibeh’s title comes into play. If the state is more valuable than the individuals who make it up, then a Palestinian state is “worth” any number of human lives—for instance, the lives of a suicide bomber and his or her victims. “During the period after 2000,” he writes, “when Palestinian suicide attacks almost became the norm to express resistance to the occupation, disaffection with politics, or simply frustration and anger with life itself, I began asking myself what the state we were fighting for is worth. How much killing can a group suffer or commit before the suffering and the loss of life outweigh the values on whose behalf the killing is being committed?” Out of the horror of that period, Nusseibeh draws the following exemplary rule: “Respect for the preservation of human life, rather than violation of life in the name of any cause, should be what guides both Israelis and Palestinians in their pursuit of a just peace.”

No decent person could dissent from this principle. What keeps it from being observed, of course, is fear—fear that, if I do not use violence today, my enemy will use it tomorrow. That fear explained the Israeli invasion of Gaza, with its horrible carnage, and it explains the continuing Israeli reluctance to withdraw from the West Bank, despite all the demographic and political arguments in favor of such a step. Occupation, with all its costs, is still preferable to the creation of a hostile Palestinian state so close to Israel’s heartland.

One of the things that makes Nusseibeh exceptional among Palestinian commentators is his ability to sympathize with this Israeli fear: “Some might argue that Jews in particular, given their history, have no choice but … to rely on their own might, however detrimental its use may be to others, as a way to ensure their security, or at least to minimize their vulnerability as much as possible.” Most Palestinians, he writes, “cannot believe that Israelis live in perpetual fear,” partly because, in their own eyes, Israel seems to have a monopoly on force. Still more important, and more ominous, Nusseibeh suggests that Palestinians cannot imagine this self-protective fear because it “has been so incredibly exorcised” from the Palestinian psyche. “Among Palestinians,” he writes in the book’s most daring passage, “there may well be a more fundamental underlying cultural or religious disposition to believe in the reality of death so strongly as to view life as being on a par with death, or even of far less value.”

So long as this is true, there is no chance for peace between Palestinians and Jews, much less for the building of the kind of Palestinian society Nusseibeh hopes for. What is needed is a radical transformation of the attitudes of both Arabs and Jews—the kind of psychological paradigm shift that seems impossible, mere wishful thinking, until it actually occurs. “What we need to do is to redraw the current reality so as to provide, to both Palestinian and Israeli publics, an alternative vision of the future so overwhelming that it will make present-day political squabbling pale in significance,” Nusseibeh writes.

This is less a political project than a spiritual one: “faith, vision, and will are all indispensable to our quest for a better future.” And Nusseibeh’s challenging conclusion is that this transformation will have to come from the Palestinian side first. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between force and power, he explains: “if one defines power as the ability to cause political change to one’s own advantage, it is the Palestinians who hold this power even though (or precisely because) they are being held down by a mighty military force.”

The most controversial proposal in What Is a Palestinian State Worth? has to be understood, I think, as Nusseibeh’s attempt to change the terms of the Palestinian-Israeli discussion. At the beginning of the book, Nusseibeh suggests that the Palestinians give up their demands for sovereignty and instead agree to become second-class Israeli citizens—that is, citizens without the right to vote or run for office. “Thus the state would be Jewish, but the country would be fully binational, all the Arabs within it having their well-being tended to and sustained. … In any case, such a scenario would provide [the Palestinians] with a far better life than they have had in more than forty years under occupation.”

It seems to me that Nusseibeh, who was one of the earliest proponents of a two-state solution, is not seriously endorsing this idea. He is fully aware that it would not be feasible or desirable, from either side’s perspective. It is, rather, a thought experiment, designed to challenge the assumptions of both Jews and Arabs. For the Palestinians, it is a challenge to “think deeply about what states are for”—that is, to examine whether they want the trappings of statehood or a better, more secure life. For Jews, it is a challenge to contemplate whether such a two-tiered system, with its echoes of South African apartheid, is consistent with Israel’s principles—and whether such a system might not already be in place in the Occupied Territories. I wonder if Nusseibeh’s book, published in English by an American university press, is actually going to reach either of the audiences who need it most; let’s hope it does.



But what would we have done without him? To many Jews, especially in the Diaspora, he gave at least the illusion that some of the perpetrators would be brought to justice. “Justice not vengeance,” as Wiesenthal liked to say.

Segev, an indefatigable historian and highly respected reporter for the leftist Israeli daily Haaretz, tells us he had access to 300,000 Wiesenthal-related documents, although he doesn’t say how many he read. (Among his many human sources are agents of the Mossad who believe they deserve credit for some of his successes.) But his attempt at de-mythologizing Wiesenthal can sometimes make one feel he misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the Wiesenthal behind the legend may have been all too human, and it’s always valuable to set the record straight for history, but could this be a case where the legend is more important to the course of history than the life? Is publicity-seeking intrinsically bad if one is seeking to publicize the untroubled afterlives of mass murderers in order to shame the world into action?

The fact that this question has to be asked is due to something we have chosen to forget: the world community’s stunning failure after World War II to treat the Final Solution as a crime unto itself. The 19 Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were found guilty of “crimes against humanity” mainly for planning and starting a devastating war of aggression. Wiesenthal, Segev reminds us, was always adamant that the Final Solution was a crime against humanity as well as against Jews. But it was a different crime from that for which the Nazi leaders were tried at Nuremberg.

There was a lamentable loss of distinction between the two crimes, or rather a shameful failure to prosecute the second crime, for some 15 years after the war. Hitler lost the war against the Allies, yes. But in effect he won his personal “war against the Jews” (as Lucy Dawidowicz described his greatest priority) by a factor of some 6 million to one.

The world preferred to focus on the fact that the official war was won. We are fortunate that someone—Simon Wiesenthal—made the pursuit of the perpetrators of the second war his lonely obsession. But what if there had been no Wiesenthal? What if he hadn’t started pestering people around the world as early as 1953 that Adolf Eichmann, the chief operating officer of the Holocaust, was alive and living in Buenos Aires? Wiesenthal became the Ancient Mariner of Mauthausen, the Austrian camp he’d been sent to from his native Lvov, buttonholing anyone and everyone, trying to get them to care that there was a monster of evil living a thinly disguised second life in Buenos Aires. And for a long time nobody cared enough to do anything about it. It wasn’t a priority.

Eichmann still may have been caught—Segev is meticulous in disentangling the different threads of information that finally propelled the Mossad to kidnap Eichmann in Argentina and transport him to Israel for trial in 1960—but it was Wiesenthal who seized upon the capture (and his role in it) to make belated justice for ex-Nazi war criminals a worldwide cause.

That was the significance of the Eichmann trial, making the world face the fact that it had let the perpetrators of the greatest mass murder in history walk away for the most part unscathed and unindicted.

Wiesenthal or the myth that grew up around Wiesenthal—that Nazis all over the world were being pursued by the vast inexorable forces of Wiesenthal’s all-powerful, all-knowing “Documentation Center”—served several purposes. It was satisfying to a certain extent to Jews, particularly because many ex-Nazis believed the legend and could be thought of as living in fear of capture. But however exaggerated some of his claims may have been, the exaggerations (the hyping of the so-called ODESSA Nazi escape network, for instance) may have served a purpose—not just psychic healing for Holocaust survivors who could at least imagine justice would eventually be done. Alas, the legend also served as an excuse for the indifference of the rest of the world to the murderers in their midst. It allowed the rest of the world to think that there was no need to make a systematic effort to punish the perpetrators of the greatest mass murder in history—they were being hunted down by Simon Wiesenthal.

In Segev’s account, we come to understand how Wiesenthal was driven close to madness by the indifference of the rest of the world to the pursuit of justice and ironically, his work, his legend gave the rest of the world a fig leaf for its inaction.

Perhaps the most maddening aspect of it all was the way many Jewish leaders such as the World Jewish Congress’s Nahum Goldman failed to act with any vigor on the escaped Nazi information Wiesenthal supplied. And there was the episode when Austria’s Jewish chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, found excuses to attack Wiesenthal.

“The dispute with Kreisky caused Wiesenthal great pain,” Segev writes. “He reckoned that most, if not all, Austrians were happy that someone had taken upon himself to free them at long last from their Nazi past…. ‘I am their bad conscience,’ he wrote some time later, ‘because each one of them should have taken upon himself what I have done for Austrian society.’ Never had he felt so alone.”

And indeed looking back it’s rather astonishing that of all the Jews in the world just one man, however flawed, systematically unappeasably dedicated himself to being the world’s “bad conscience” and the Nazi’s living nightmare. Segev is good at capturing the catch-as-catch-can origins of Wiesenthal’s “Documentation Center.” He makes much of what a sloppy, disorganized, out-of-pocket, one-man shop it was for much of its early history, how it depended on stacks of newspaper clippings, old phone books, barely legible letters, flawed memories from camp survivors who randomly wandered in, false trails, red herrings—this was no CSI Vienna, no Cold Case Squad. For a long time it was one irritable guy who’d lived through a hellish experience he wasn’t going to allow the perpetrators to forget.

Wiesenthal started by collecting information from his fellow camp survivors and then looking up SS murderers in Austrian phone books and pressuring authorities to prosecute them, or dismiss them from whatever important office they held (often with the tacit knowledge of everyone around them). Soon his “bad conscience” became an inconvenience not just to ex-Nazis but to the American foreign policy, which was more heavily invested in prosecuting the Cold War than on prosecuting the many Nazi war criminals West Germany allowed to hold prominent state positions.

Segev demonstrates the way Wiesenthal learned to manipulate the media, play politicians against each other, sometimes plant false stories about sightings (Eichmann in Syria!) just to keep an escaped Nazi’s name in the news. He was a combination of detective and showman. Segev sometimes makes him seem like Geraldo Rivera, which I think is a bit unfair: Look at what he was taking on—the burden the world had shrugged off its shoulders, the moral weight of the world. The immoral wait of the world.

Yes, Wiesenthal was a born tummler. He stirred things up, made things up, sometimes got things wrong, but he made it impossible for people to forget the murderers—like Eichmann.

Wiesenthal and Eichmann: the two poles of post-Holocaust consciousness. Let us take a moment to give Eichmann some consideration since he was the central figure in the drama of Wiesenthal’s life and legend.

The late Milton Himmelfarb once wrote an influential polemic called “No Hitler, No Holocaust” arguing—against pseudo-sophisticated detractors of the “great man” theory of history—that in fact it had been Hitler’s implacable drive alone that made the Jews the victims, not just of oppression or Pogroms as they had been in the past in Europe, but of systematic extermination. One could say of Eichmann, “No Eichmann, no systematic, industrialized continent-wide extermination.” He made the trains run on time. To review: Heydrich called Eichmann and told him that the Furher has given the order for the extermination of the Jews. You’re in charge.

Aside from the industrialized gas chamber/crematoria complex, Eichmann can be held responsible for the psychological component of the continent-wide extraction, concentration, and transportation of Jews with minimum fuss. The technique of promising “work in the east” to the ghettoized Jews if they’d just get on board the trains. The diabolical “wish you were here” postcards home from the dead.

But you won’t find in Segev’s book a full description of the real Eichmann. He was not merely the neutral administrator par excellence but an ideologically committed, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating killer. You have to go to a book such as Neal Bascomb’s recent Hunting Eichmann, where in five pages he tells you more than Segev’s entire book does about Eichmann’s obscene ferocity in personally coming to Budapest at the end of the war to insure that the last surviving Jewish community, the 400,000 that had been protected in Hungary from extermination by the fascist but somewhat independent Hungarian regent, Admiral Horthy, were shipped to the death camps.

Even though the war was lost, and there was no point (as if there ever was) in Eichmann’s making sure every last Jew alive in Hungary died, but Eichmann did his best, sending the last 7,500 Jews left in Budapest to Auschwitz until, Bascomb reports, Eichmann had to be summoned by Himmler himself (who was trying to make some devil’s bargain for the lives of those Jews), who ordered Eichmann to stop the final frenzy of extermination. Wiesenthal pieced it altogether from the ground up, from Eichmann’s collaborators and victim/survivors. That’s why he got into everyone’s face about Eichmann. He was no cog in a machine, he was the screeching driving wheel.

At least Segev doesn’t buy into Hannah Arendt’s fatuous pseudo-profound notion of Eichmann’s “banality of evil,” a scandalously inaccurate, philosophically meretricious phase that historically ignorant people parrot to make themselves seem intellectually sophisticated.

Actually, Segev’s attitude toward Eichmann seems inconsistent, which is a problem since he is so central to the Wiesenthal narrative and Wiesenthal’s iconic triumph, however much he may have exaggerated his role in the final denouement.

In fact, Segev seems to be of two minds about Eichmann. When he first introduces him early in the book he claims Eichmann “was never a maker of policy, he implemented it. He was one of those Nazi killers who as a rule did his work sitting behind a desk.” In Eichmann’s case this is utterly misleading considering how eager Eichmann was to get out from behind his desk to outrace the coming end of the war to complete his final evil project, the murder of the Hungarian Jews.

Which gives you the feeling that Segev buys into Arendt’s bogus “banality of evil” theory—that Eichmann was merely a paper-pushing bureaucrat who had no emotional investment in the mass murder he was enabling, a follower of orders, an exculpatory line Arendt foolishly took directly from Eichmann’s own dishonest attempt to exculpate himself—and save himself from the hangman—at his trial in Jerusalem.

But then Segev seems to have had a change of heart because a hundred pages later he tells us that he was shocked, shocked by some new Eichmann revelations in the year 2000, “when Israel permitted the publication of an autobiography written by Eichmann in prison,” and, Segev says, “a different person emerged.”

Different person! No more Mr. Nice Guy, I guess. Anyone who didn’t know the nature of Eichmann by 2000 was ignoring the well-documented history of his fanatic frenzied last-ditch crusade to kill every last Jew in Hungary.

Which leads one to wonder about Segev’s imputing a belief in Arendt’s banality theory to Wiesenthal, although Segev offers an empathetic (or perhaps patronizing) explanation.

“As a man who identified with the principles of humanistic ethics, Wiesenthal found it difficult to accept this [the profound and vicious calculation behind Eichmann’s hatred,] so he preferred Arendt’s thesis. She too refused to see in Eichmann a thinking person, she therefore erred in her assessment of him as did Wiesenthal.”

So now Segev tells us Arendt was wrong to see Eichmann as a mere paper-pushing deskman but uses the fraudulence of her theory to reprove Wiesenthal for an alleged failure to see Eichmann’s anti-Semitic “ferocity.” Somehow I doubt Segev’s claim to see Eichmann’s nature more clearly than Wiesenthal.

What’s fascinating is that, despite all his strenuous debunking and attempted debunking of the Wiesenthal myth, Segev is too good a reporter, too honest an observer, not to have developed a grudging admiration for his subject that he will sometimes allow to slip through.

What could be the cause of the demythologizing impulse that seems to drive Segev’s book, though? I believe it can be traced back to something Segev himself describes:

Many of the Israelis who had settled in the country before World War II or were born there, tended to relate condescendingly to Holocaust victims and survivors, identifying them with the Jews of the Diaspora, whom they despised as the polar opposite of the “new Hebrews” they were trying to create in the Land of Israel, in the spirit of the Zionist vision. It was the customary to blame the victims for not coming to the country beforehand, remaining in Europe instead and waiting to be slaughtered without doing anything to prevent it.

Harsh, no? And the length to which he goes to describe this prejudice suggests that part of him still shares the Israeli contempt for the survivors and that part of him treats Wiesenthal as the man who thrust the Holocaust upon Israel—an unwanted legacy for a nation founded on a vision of the future not the past, as the central focus of Jewishness. One could argue this case, but it’s unfair to take it out on Wiesenthal.

It’s hard to read Segev’s mind, but he is one of the leading “revisionist” historians of Israel. Does he resent the focus on the Holocaust of the European Jews as a rationale for the state of Israel, as a focus of Jewish identity? Does he share the early Israeli’s contempt for alleged Diasporic weakness that allowed the Holocaust to happen? This blame-the-victim attitude all too prevalent in Jewish and non-Jewish circles discounts the hideous progressive dehumanization of the victims before the slaughter. I actually think Segev has overcome a great deal of this Sabra attitude. One could speculate that Segev’s Mossad sources convinced him Wiesenthal grabbed too much credit for the Eichmann capture and other exploits. One could also speculate he sold the book as a sensational debunking project but the deeper he got into the documentation of the crimes Wiesenthal was seeking justice for, the loneliness of his quest, the more Segev’s integrity as a historian and a human being deepened his own world view to see the value as well as the hype in Wiesenthal’s work.

Try this thought experiment: What would the history of post-Holocaust Judaism have been like without Wiesenthal, this edgy irritable man who loved to spend his weekends with a stamp-collectors club at the Museum Cafe in Vienna but who managed—like pasting stamps in an album—to put hundreds of ex-Nazis in jail and redeem a portion of justice for Holocaust perpetrators?

Does Wiesenthal represent the inexorable triumph of justice? Alas no, we should be grateful for his work but realize that it was a lucky accident in a world that didn’t want to care, an aberration in a world where people and nations consciously and unconsciously fled from facing the fact of their complicity in perhaps the greatest crime in history. Sought to bury it in the past. Is too much attention to the past being paid now? How much does it matter that the Wiesenthal legend was exaggerated? Segev’s book provokes fascinating and important questions, especially when the prospect of a second holocaust (from a nuclear attack on the Jewish state) is not out of the question. If few cared then, will many care next time?

Wiesenthal was a tummler, but there’s something more to him, a moral seriousness that gets lost in Segev’s focus on the colorful fabrication of the legend surrounding him. He was a tummler but he was also kind of golem summoned up from the collective unconscious of the survivors and dead souls of the victims, someone who, as Segev points out, would almost have had to be invented if he hadn’t existed.

He was a larger-than-life figure and his stories were sometimes larger than truth, but he was dealing with a crime that was larger than death.

Ron Rosenbaum, the author of Explaining Hitler, The Shakespeare Wars, and a forthcoming book on the new age of nuclear war, is a cultural columnist for Slate.

Although we’ve never met, I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate you for your pending purchase of Newsweek magazine.

I’m not assuming you’re hearing much by way of congratulations these days. After all, everywhere you turn, you come across another report of the magazine industry’s nearing demise: Circulations are down, advertising is down, U.S. News & World Report has abandoned its print edition, 279 magazines folded in 2009 alone, and TV Guide—a magazine that once boasted the highest circulation in the country—was sold for $1, the same price you paid for Newsweek. And yet, you chose to enter the industry at this tough time, and I won’t be surprised if some in your circle tried to talk you out of the move.

As one who has devoted his life to writing for, editing, and publishing magazines—including 30 years as editor and then publisher of The Nation, and now as chairman of Columbia Journalism Review—let me try to put your mind at ease. Magazine journalism, Mr. Harman, isn’t busy dying, it’s struggling to be reborn. And now, as it was in the golden age of magazines, it would likely be us Jews who’ll revolutionize this essential industry.

Jews, after all, have always had a special place in their hearts for magazines. Even at this difficult moment, there is Nadine Epstein’s Moment (“the independent national Jewish magazine”), there is Commentary, there is Tikkun (the anti-Commentary), there is The Jewish Review of Books, there is Lilith (“the American-Jewish feminist magazine”), there is Jewish Frontier (for organized labor), and for young, Holocaust-mocking hipsters there is even Heeb, along with many, many others. If you’re reading this letter, you’re surely also aware of Tablet Magazine, which represents, along with jewcy.com and several other Web sites, innovative attempts to carry on the magazine tradition on a new technological platform.

As you walk into Newsweek’s offices, and as you wonder in which direction to lead a great American magazine, let me share with you a bit of good advice I once received from an unlikely source. Although I disagreed with the late Irving Kristol, the so-called godfather of neoconservatism, on many things, I think he was onto something almost existential when it comes to magazine publishing. “A lot of New York intellectuals”—which is to say, Jews—“have roots in Eastern Europe, where, unlike in England or France, there was no tradition of civility,” he told me once when I was interviewing him about intellectuals and magazines. “In England or France, you operate within a framework of existing institutions. In Eastern Europe, we wanted to change existing institutions, to improve them. The Cossack was the existing institution, so ideas were more important than institutions. That is why if you disagree with someone, you stop talking to him and start your own magazine.”

I would add that, whatever one thinks of the neoconservative movement, one must concede that, for better or worse, it would not have come into being had it not been for magazines like The Public Interest (co-edited by Kristol), which in effect launched it, and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary (now edited by his son, John), which nourished it. Most likely, you have no designs to turn Newsweek into an ideological organ; but you would do well to heed Kristol’s advice, and perceive of your magazine not just as a source for news but also as an institution for the manufacturing and dissemination of ideas.

Having sat on the publisher’s chair for enough time myself, however, I can guarantee that if you go on talking about ideas, someone is going to try to tell you that magazines have no place in the Internet’s age of immediacy. Simply remind these gloomy folks that the year’s biggest political story—the fall of the general who wouldn’t shut up, Stanley McChrystal—was caused by a magazine, Rolling Stone, one of the few media organs that still permit reporters to hang out with sources for long periods of time, and that still allocate 7,500 words or more for a worthwhile story. I’d like to see a Web site, or even a newspaper, have this kind of patience.

I am tempted to end my letter by citing any number of examples from the past glories of American magazine journalism. I’m tempted to remind you of Ida Tarbell’s exposé of Standard Oil Co. in McClure’s at the turn of the last century, of John Hershey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in The New Yorker. But instead, allow me to end with an anecdote that neatly captures what magazines, at their best, can do, and why we need them now more than ever.

Some years ago, when I was helping to put together a group of small shareholders to invest in The Nation, I was making a pitch before a group of well-wishers assembled by my friend Stanley Sheinbaum in his Brentwood, Calif., living room, when a middle-aged woman raised her hand and said, “Count me in. I can’t not invest.” When asked to say more, she told her story. Her father, she said, used to go to shul every Saturday with his father. And his father would sit there with a copy of The Nation on his lap, reading while the rabbi spoke. Why, her then-9-year-old father asked her grandfather, are you reading while the rabbi is talking? “Because,” said her grandfather, “what he is saying up there, I already know, but what this magazine is telling me down here, I don’t know.”

This, Mr. Harman, is our past. It is up to you to make it our future, as well.

Kirsch reviewed the correspondence between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt (his lover!) in 2004 for Nextbook.org, Tablet Magazine’s precursor.

Paul La Farge reviewed an earlier Irène Némirovsky biography for Nextbook.org in 2006.

And Francine Prose discussed Anne Frank on a Vox Tablet podcast last year.

This NYT podcast is really good by the way. Not, you know, National Magazine Award-winning good, but good.

Book Review Podcast: Heidegger, Irène Némirovsky and Anti-Semitism [Arts Beat]

West, not to be outdone, introduced himself as a “bluesman,” delivered his discussion of prophetic religion with the cadences of slam poetry, credited the Jews with the “breakthrough” philosophy that one should “treat the Other as thyself,” and alluded to Hillel: “The rest,” he said, “is just footnotes.”

Rethinking Secularism: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere [Cooper Union]

At a time when most European Jews lived in abject poverty and weren’t even allowed to vote, Benjamin Disraeli’s career reached stratospheric heights. Intimate with royalty and the elite of British society, he was twice prime minister, and served as leader of the Tory party. Yet, because of his Jewish background, his loyalty was questioned, his motives thought suspect, and his honesty was a frequent topic of debate.

Born into an unobservant, middle-class Jewish family, Disraeli was baptized by his father—who was irate over a perceived snub by his synagogue—at the age of twelve. Ambitious, driven, and charming, Disraeli embellished his Jewish ancestry with great flair, creating a vibrant (albeit false) aristocratic personal history to compensate for his status as a relative outsider in British society. Blending his talents as the author of almost twenty novels with astute political skills, Disraeli was in the public eye for over fifty years, as writer, politician, and statesman. In his new biography of Disraeli (to be published next week as part of Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters series), Adam Kirsch elegantly untangles the mythology to reveal a man who in many ways lived his life as a character in one of his own novels, a creation unique to himself.

Is Disraeli’s life story a particularly Jewish one? Is it more particular to the Jewish experience in England than to the experience of Jews in the rest of Europe?

It’s a story that couldn’t have happened anywhere but England, because England did have this very liberal, tolerant attitude toward Jews, compared to other European countries. It was still very difficult for him. He had this remarkable self-confidence and towering ambition, and also a very deep, instinctive sense of how to turn his Jewishness into something appealing to the English, making it an asset rather than a handicap in politics. Compared to the men who were his rivals and colleagues, he was always the lowest born and the one with the least advantages. But he recognized that because there was this margin of opportunity in England, he could make being Jewish something that was not contemptible, but was great and aristocratic.

For all of Disraeli’s success and integration into the highest levels of English society, he was, for the most part, pretty much an outsider.

I was surprised to see how much that remained true during his life and even long after his death. I asked English people as I was writing this book, “How were you taught about Disraeli in school?” And they always said that, to this day, he’s taught as the brilliant but unreliable Jew. Churchill, The Encyclopedia Britannica, very established sources, the very first thing they all say about Disraeli is he wasn’t an Englishman.

What do you mean when you talk about Disraeli as an “exception Jew,” in the words of Hannah Arendt?

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt talks about Jews who made a place for themselves in nineteenth-century European society by virtue of their great talents and gifts, but always knew that they were exceptions. They were able to have success because they were not like the ordinary Frenchman or the ordinary Englishman; they were exotic and interesting. Arendt says Disraeli is the great example of the exception Jew who managed to do everything he wanted.

But there was also a great psychological cost, which you see in all kinds of Jewish stories in Europe leading up to the Holocaust. Between emancipation, beginning in the early nineteenth century, and the Holocaust, there was this open question—could Jews belong in Europe? Could they succeed in Europe? That question, for the Jews as a whole, was answered negatively. But for Disraeli, it was answered positively. So that is the tragic tension in his life: He had to accommodate himself to the expectations of England in order to get what he wanted.

Earlier in his career, he had a more nationalist leaning, and then, when he became a greater political actor, he favored these large multiethnic empires that, if you think of the Austro-Hungarian empire, really worked better for the Jews in the long run. But at the same time, he didn’t really work in any way to further Jewish causes.

Before he really got into politics, in the 1830s, when he was beginning to make his name as a politician, he was able to entertain these Zionist fantasies. In his novel Alroy, he imagines what it would be like to be a Jewish national leader, which at that time was a completely hypothetical prospect, because there were no Jewish national movements to be the leader of! I think that there’s a part of his nature that was very proud of being Jewish and wanted to make that the basis of his career. But he was also very practical and worldly, and he recognized that that was not in fact a possibility for him. He basically decided that he was going to be an English leader, not a Jewish leader. An observer of the time said that England was the Israel of his imagination. And that’s a good way of saying that he transferred the idealism and historical imagination that might have gone toward Judaism and Jews into England and the British empire.

He liked that idea of power, of running the world. He preferred the powers-that-be pretty much always; that was part of what it meant to be a conservative in the nineteenth century. At the time when the Liberal party, especially in England, was associated with national liberation movements, Disraeli was always on the other side. He wanted to be the person who controls the great empire rather than the person who liberates the people.

Which brings to mind the character Sidonia, who appears in not one but three of Disraeli’s novels. He’s an admirable character—full of power, has lots of prestige—but carries with him so many nineteenth-century stereotypes about Jews.

Sidonia was a Jew who exercised power, but always behind the scenes. He was very rich, was the kind of person everybody respected, was attractive to women—he has all of these fantasy elements. To Disraeli, who often found himself being snubbed and excluded, this was an appealing image. Today, in a post-Zionist context, I think we now see that this is the opposite of what Jews want to present to the world. All of these ideas of secret power and operating behind the scenes and being not quite human, we now associate with anti-Semitism. That’s a good example of the tragedy of Disraeli: In order to feel proud of himself as a Jew, he had to erect this image of Judaism that’s actually reprehensible.

Do you have a favorite of his novels?

I find his novels slightly difficult to read. The early ones in particular, the ones that aren’t about politics, you wouldn’t necessarily read them unless you were a student of Disraeli or the period, novels like Vivian Grey or Contarini Fleming.

Which was his favorite, wasn’t it?

Contarini Fleming was his favorite, yes. It’s a very romantic book that fits in perfectly with the literature of the period. It’s about a brilliant young artist and how he realizes that he’s gifted and different from everyone else. And in that sense, it tells in an allegorical form the story of Disraeli’s own growing up. It’s significant in that unlike any other novel that I know of, it’s one in which the poet character decides that actually he would rather be a politician. I do think that although he was a natural-born novelist, he wasn’t really a great novelist. Sybil and Coningsby, I’d say, are probably the best. Tancred, I think, is the biggest surprise, or would be the most interesting for someone today. It starts out being the story of a naïve aristocrat and his education, but then the action moves startlingly to Palestine, and it suddenly becomes this Zionist fantasy of a Jewish society that didn’t really exist at the time. He imagined this whole Jewish world, with Jewish tribesmen on horseback and Jewish debutantes and merchants. You see how it might be to live in a Jewish society and belong to it, rather than living as an exception. Later, he transferred his imaginative abilities from novel writing to politics. I think he actually always preferred politics and wrote novels only so long as he couldn’t get anywhere in his political career.

What was his relationship like with Queen Victoria?

He started off on the wrong foot with Queen Victoria. She didn’t trust him and she particularly disliked the way that he came to power by overthrowing Robert Peel. She and Prince Albert thought of him as dangerous and disgraceful. The real turning point came after Albert died in 1861, when Disraeli, with his talent for flattery, became one of Albert’s most vocal eulogists and gave speeches about how he represented the ideal human being. All of that was music to Victoria’s ears, because she was so deeply in mourning for him and thought that he wasn’t sufficiently appreciated. And then, as he served in offices where he had to deal with her officially, he charmed her very much by his manner—he gave her the sense that she was hearing things about politics that other people wouldn’t tell her. He was very reverential toward her in a way that had a definite romantic tinge to it, a courtier’s way of dealing with a queen.

Although this may make Disraeli seem like a court Jew, or a Jew behind the scenes, he was a politician in a democracy, or a limited democracy. He managed to win the approval of the electorate in a way that would have never been possible before. He was actually in front of the scenes, at center stage, and had to win power on his own account.

What do you think being Jewish meant to Disraeli beyond a means of aggrandizing his own background?

It meant contradictory things. He was an outsider in the land that he was born in and could never truly belong to the class that he admired the most, which was the English aristocracy. As a response to that, he made his Jewishness into a racial aristocracy with a very ancient tradition that he was proud of belonging to. I don’t think that he thought very much about Judaism as a religion or knew much about it. He didn’t necessarily care about existing Jews so much as the idea of what Jews and Judaism could be. That’s both what kept him from being a Zionist or Jewish leader, and also what allowed him to reinvent Judaism as this gorgeous myth.

Do you think ultimately that his life was a tragedy?

Well, I went back and forth on that. I started out thinking of him as someone who told lies about Jews in order to serve his own ends, and who gave up what might have been a Zionist career for this English political career—which was very successful, but was, as we were saying, an exception, like a flash in the pan that didn’t lead to anything for the Jews, although it obviously had lots of consequences for English history. In the end I came to see that we all have our own ways of dealing with what it means to be Jews in the Western world.

Last October, at a Bard College conference in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s birth, Christopher Hitchens made an interesting, if troubling, argument about Arendt’s analysis of anti-Semitism in modern times. Hitchens’ argument went more or less like this: (a) Arendt treats anti-Semitism as if it can be understood in rational, historical terms, as a disorder in the nation-state, which led, over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the rise of a totalitarian government in Germany. But (b) consider the remarkable tenacity of anti-Semitic thought! Sixty years after the Holocaust, that old hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is posted on Hamas’ Web site; meanwhile Mel Gibson has been maligning the Jews to a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy. Might it not be, therefore, that (c) anti-Semitism requires an extra-historical explanation? Here Hitchens cited a remark from Rebecca West’s Balkan travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “Now I understand another cause for anti-Semitism; many primitive peoples must receive their first intimation of the toxic quality of thought from Jews.” The Jews, Hitchens suggested, generalizing from West’s observation, may have introduced the rest of the world to the pain of intellectual activity and its attendant torments of doubt. And if that’s so, then could it not be that (d) the hatred of Jews is as intractable as the hatred by unthinking people of thought itself? In that case, Hitchens concluded, anti-Semitism would predate history; when we study it, “we would be looking down the corridors of our past and discovering the original scenes of tragedy.”

This is, it seems to me, a strange argument, not least of all because it presumes that there were entire peoples who walked the earth for centuries, and maybe even millennia, without thinking too hard about anything. It is also a depressing argument, in that if it’s correct, then the battle against anti-Semitism will never be won; thinking people can only struggle on the side of thinking for as long as their strength lasts, and hope that others will follow their example. I don’t know what spirit Hitchens offered it in, whether it was the product of long reflection, or something more fleeting: a collection of provocative thoughts offered to an audience who would, as he must have known, ask him about the Iraq war no matter what he said. I reproduce his remarks here not so much because they require a serious refutation, as because they testify to the strangely persistent difficulty of thinking about anti-Semitism as Arendt thought about it: in historical terms. Can it really be that, as she took pains to demonstrate in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine [of the Nazi ideology] in motion”? And if the “Jewish problem” really did play such an important role in the history of the twentieth century, doesn’t it make more sense to think of the Jews as representing something greater than themselves, something like “the toxic quality of thought”?

Hitchens is certainly right about one thing: questions about the nature of anti-Semitism have once again become pressing. And that being the case, the publication of a new volume of Hannah Arendt’s work, which casts a great deal of light on how she thought about the Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, is timely, to say the least. Arendt, who was born to Jewish parents in Hanover, in 1906, worked for Zionist organizations in France and Germany in the 1930s, and emigrated to New York City, where she died in 1975, is best remembered now for one particular work on Jewish themes: Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which was the object of much controversy upon its publication in 1963. Because Arendt noted that the Judenräte, or Jewish Councils, in Europe cooperated with the Nazis (a fact which had come to light at the trial), individual Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world accused her of having blamed the victims of the Holocaust for their fate. Her enemies branded her an anti-Semite in public; her friends reproached her in private with lacking “love for the Jews.” Now that the cooperation of the Judenräte is a part of orthodox Holocaust history, the controversy over Eichmann is becoming hard to understand. Even so, one of the many good things about The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman, is that it includes Arendt’s replies to a few of her accusers, which will, in their exhaustive precision, hopefully lay the specter of Arendt’s alleged anti-Semitism once and for all to rest.

These replies, however, constitute only a small part of a large book. The Jewish Writings collects pieces written by Arendt from the 1930s to the 1960s, many of which have never been published in English before, or were only published in newspapers and periodicals and have long been unavailable. The subjects of some of these pieces have grown obscure with the passing of time: a 1943 essay on “Why the Crémieux Decree Was Abrogated” may puzzle a reader who has forgotten (or never knew) what the Crémieux Decree was in the first place. But the fact that these pieces were written in response to current events in most cases only adds to the interest of the book. In a series of articles written for the German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau between October, 1941 and November, 1942, Arendt made the case again and again for the formation of a Jewish army to fight the Nazis. The insistence with which she returned to this subject leaves the reader with a feeling very close to anguish: On the one hand, you feel the absolute urgency of Arendt’s argument that the Jewish people need to take an active part in the making of their history if they are to survive as a people at all; on the other, you witness the failure of this argument to sway the British government, or the American government, or even the American Jewish organizations which could have done something about it. (Indeed, The Jewish Writings speak eloquently, if implicitly, on a subject that is perhaps not discussed often enough by political theorists: the almost insurmountable difficulty of getting people and institutions to do anything.)

Arendt titled one of the Aufbau articles “Ceterum Censeo,” an allusion to the Roman statesman Cato the Elder, who called at the end of every speech for the destruction of Carthage, but the identification is wishful; in the 1940s, Arendt was less a Cato than a Cassandra. As the tide of the war turned, and the survival of at least some fraction of the Jewish people seemed assured, Arendt turned her attention to Palestine. She questioned the wisdom of obtaining a state from the British Empire’s colonial largesse, and observed presciently that “even a purely Jewish Palestine would be a very precarious structure without a prior agreement with all the Arab peoples on all its borders.”

The rise of Nazi Germany led Arendt to wonder if the nation-state had outlived its usefulness, or at least if it needed some other form of political organization to keep its excesses in check: “Future historians will perhaps be able to note that the sovereignty of the nation-state ended in absurdity when it began to decide who was a citizen and who was not,” she wrote, an assertion that must echo uncomfortably in the ears of any American who opposed the Military Commissions Act last year. Arendt argued for a commonwealth of nations in Europe, not unlike the present-day EU; she argued for a Mediterranean federation in which “the Arabs would be strongly represented and yet not in a position to dominate all others.”

The Jewish Writings is that most heartbreaking of books, an atlas of roads not taken, illuminated now and then by a sentence that rises out of the past to warn us against an error which it may still not be too late to avoid. Here is Arendt, writing about the onset of totalitarianism in Germany: “Once the businessman’s opportunism has suffocated peoples and nations by atomizing them in a politics of cliques and clans, despotism takes this atomization to its logical conclusion, until finally sons denounce their own fathers, neighbors and friends denounce one another, for the sake of their careers or personal security.” We have not, for the most part, yet begun to denounce one another (though Ann Coulter’s recent remarks about John Edwards suggest that American politics, at least on the right, is getting just about as ugly as it has ever been), but already globalization is atomizing us: our public space is broken into a thousand channels, an assortment of niche markets and fan bases, each with its tiny fraction of MySpace and its circle of Friendsters.

Whatever their ostensible subjects, the essays and articles collected in The Jewish Writings do not stray far from a single theme, which Arendt expresses now in one way and now in another, always in the hope that her words will lead, somehow, to action: the necessity for the Jewish people to recognize that they participate in history along with everyone else. “It is not true,” she wrote in Aufbau, “that we have always and everywhere been the persecuted innocents. But if it were true, it would be dreadful indeed—it would remove us far more completely from human history than any actual persecution ever could.” The emphasis is Arendt’s. She says it again and again: the Jews were betrayed by their naive sense that they had no political role to play in, say, early 19th-century Germany, or late 19th-century France. She calls this naivete “worldlessness,” and it is the Jewish analog of anti-Semitism: the belief that the Jews are fundamentally different from all other peoples, and therefore need not—or cannot—take part in world affairs. Neither a rush into the embrace of great Gentile thinkers (the description of which gives Arendt occasion to write one of the funniest sentences in The Jewish Writings: Of Dorothea Mendelssohn, who married the philosopher Schlegel, Arendt remarks, “She did not encounter the world, she encountered Schlegel”), nor a wild belief that the Jews can maintain themselves in Palestine against all comers (which amounts, Arendt contends, to a “despair of everything and a genuine readiness for suicide”) can remedy this worldlessness. The only cure for it is for the Jews to take their place as Jews among the other peoples of the world, to understand themselves as historical actors, to act and be acted upon, like everyone else.

But who are these Jews to whom Arendt is speaking? The question is perhaps so basic that she did not think to ask it. And yet it seems worth asking: Are the Jews adherents of a religion, like, say, the Catholics, or are they an ethnicity, like, say, the Kurds? Are you a Jew by birth or by election? In fact—and this is one of the more complicated things about The Jewish Writings—Arendt defined Jewishness in different ways at different times. In the summer of 1940, she wrote to a French friend:

The first prerequisite [for obtaining recognition of the Jewish people in a European parliament] is for us to be rid of all those Jews who do not want to be Jews. Even under the best of circumstances the times will remain far too grave for us to continue to afford the luxury of assuming before the whole world moral and political responsibility for people who do not want to be a part of us. 

Which would seem to imply that Jewishness is elective: one can opt out of the Jewish nation—or at least be expelled from it. A year later, though, she wrote an article for Aufbau, in which she took to task “those Jewish snobs who… loftily declare themselves above ties to their nation.”

Well [she remarks], treason has never yet put an end to the existence of an entire people, and just as “emancipated” women have had little success in saving the world by removing the difference between male and female, our “emancipated” Jews will not succeed in arguing themselves and us out of this world. 

Setting aside the interesting implications this sentence has for Arendt’s sense of the relations between the sexes, it’s not hard to see the parallel she is drawing here: Jewishness is like womanhood, at least to the degree that neither one can be erased by an act of will. One can no more expel a Jew from the Jewish people than one could expel a woman, however “emancipated,” from the biological condition of womanhood.

Beneath this apparent contradiction lies a fact which would have been as obvious to Arendt as it was to anyone reading her at the time: Between the first statement and the second, Germany and its allies had completed their conquest of Western Europe. It had become unconscionable to think of “being rid” of any Jews, even those who by inaction functioned as traitors to their people. In the end, Jewishness is, for Arendt, a political category: Neither a biological fact nor a matter of individual election, it is an alliance between one person and another, between writer and reader, an alliance whose terms vary depending on the circumstances in which it is formed. The Jewish people, united neither by country nor by language, exist in a public space, the existence of which cannot be taken for granted; it must be maintained by assent (and communication, and dissent) among the community of Jews. In other words, the “emancipated” Jews did not succeed in arguing Jewry out of existence for this reason alone: there was someone who argued back.

In this, if Arendt is correct, the Jews are no different from any other people. And the converse is also true: other peoples are no different from the Jews. As Ron Feldman notes in his introduction to The Jewish Writings,

[I]t wasn’t the spread of the Jewish “god” of money that defined the modern age, as Marx would have it. Rather, the modern age was characterized by the cause which underlay the Jews’ reliance on money wealth: the lack of any physical place to which people were rooted and from which they could orient themselves to the world, grasp reality, and experience history. The unique worldless situation of the Jews increasingly became the generalized condition of mankind. 

The Jews are exceptional among human beings only in that, for a moment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were ahead of other peoples: They were like the land on the other side of the valley where the storm has already hit. Now the storm has hit everyone, and we have all, to some extent, been uprooted. In light of this frightening fact, Christopher Hitchens’ gloomy assertion of an original, ineradicable anti-Semitism looks almost like nostalgia. For a time when it was possible to believe that the Jews really were different from everyone else, and that—because they were different—some people on earth might not share their fate. History has already proved that belief false. If Arendt teaches us anything, it is that our only hope for survival lies in history, and not beyond it.

Martin Heidegger

The correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt was a rumor long before it was a book. In 1982, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt, For Love of the World, revealed publicly what Arendt’s friends had long known: that in the 1920s, Arendt and Heidegger had been lovers. But it was only in 1995 that their relationship, which ended only with Arendt’s death, became a subject of urgent debate in the world press. The reason—one might say, the culprit—was a slim book by Elzbieta Ettinger, Martin Heidegger/Hannah Arendt, which revealed the existence of the unpublished correspondence, and used it to draw a lurid, judgmental portrait of their relationship. Ettinger did not have permission to quote the original letters, but her paraphrases were calculated to excite readers who might not have previously devoted much attention to Heidegger’s Being and Time. “He needed her in order to breathe fully and deeply, to enjoy being alive”; “Arendt gave her love freely, happily, defying convention”: in such cliched phrases was the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence first reported to the world.

But for all its flaws, the publication of Ettinger’s book had two good results. First, it convinced the Heidegger and Arendt estates to authorize a complete edition of their letters; it appeared in Germany in 1998, and now arrives for the first time in English as Letters 1925-75. Second, in addition to all the gossipy speculation, it set off a significant debate about the intellectual legacies of both thinkers. A leading figure in this discussion has been Richard Wolin, whose book Heidegger’s Children argued that Heidegger’s philosophical influence on Arendt was negative, even sinister. In his New Republic review of Ettinger’s book—tellingly entitled “Hannah and the Magician,” after Thomas Mann’s parable of fascist demagoguery, “Mario and the Magician”—Wolin argued that Arendt’s loyalty to Heidegger may have “led her to purvey…calumnies about the Jews” in her controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem. For Seyla Benhabib, writing in Boston Review, on the other hand, the German publication of the letters was an occasion to argue that, for Arendt, “the personal is not the political,” and to insist that “politics should not…force individuals to make public the shadowy and obscure recesses of the human heart.” Now that the Letters are no longer just a rumor to readers of English, this debate can be, if not finally settled, at least easier to understand.

Hannah Arendt

As the Letters show, the Arendt-Heidegger story is really three stories, each of considerable human and symbolic interest. First, it is a story of lovers separated by the disasters of the 20th century, only to be reunited decades later. When they first met, in 1924, Arendt was an 18-year-old student at the University of Marburg, Heidegger her charismatic (and married) 35-year-old professor. The first group of letters in the book, written between 1925 to 1928, show their official relationship giving way to an intimate one. “You are my pupil and I your teacher,” Heidegger wrote, “but that is only the occasion for what has happened to us.” A few weeks later, he describes “what has happened” in the poetic language typical of his philosophical writing: “The demonic struck me”; “This is the homeland of pure joy.”

However, throughout the book, Heidegger’s testimony is not balanced by Arendt’s. In fact, of the 166 letters that survive, about three-quarters are from Heidegger; what’s more, the majority of Arendt’s date from the 1960s and 1970s, when their relationship had become more sedate and professional. It is hard to know, then, what the ambitious young woman made of Heidegger’s warning against “the terrible solitude of academic research, which only man can endure.” Here, as throughout the early letters, we see the commanding position Heidegger enjoyed—as a professor, an older man, and of course a genius. When Arendt left Marburg in 1926 to continue her studies in Heidelberg, Heidegger encouraged her to go, but the affair continued. The letters chronicle their clandestine meetings (“If the light is on in my room, then I am home”) and Arendt’s half-hearted attempts to escape into other relationships, to which Heidegger responded with ostentatious generosity (“You will not know how joyous I am about your happiness.”) Not until 1928 did Heidegger finally break off the affair, provoking one of Arendt’s few surviving letters of the period. “I would lose my right to live if I lost my love for you,” she writes in farewell, “but I would lose this love and its reality if I shirked the responsibility it forces on me.” The next year she married Gunther Stern, another pupil of the Master’s, but the marriage quickly failed. “I married,” Arendt was to confess years later (oddly enough, in a letter to Heidegger’s wife, Elfriede), “somehow indifferent as to whom I was marrying, without being in love.” Not until she met her second husband, Heinrich Blucher, in 1936, did Arendt leave her romance with Heidegger behind.

The correspondence trails off, before coming to a grinding halt in a letter dated “Winter 1932/33.” And here we see the emergence of the second great Arendt-Heidegger story: that of a Jew and a German turned from lovers to something like enemies by the rise of Nazism. Responding to a lost letter of Arendt’s, Heidegger indignantly defends himself against the charge of anti-Semitism: “That I supposedly don’t say hello to Jews is such a malicious piece of gossip that…I will have to take note of it for the future.” But the ensuing 17-year gap in the correspondence tells a more troubling story. For in 1933, after Hitler took power in Germany, Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University, where he eagerly participated in its Gleichschaltung, or “alignment” with Nazi principles. Arendt, meanwhile, fled the country; she would spend the next eight years in France before escaping to New York in 1941.

Heidegger’s behavior during the Nazi period has attracted a huge amount of scholarly attention in recent years. Books by Hugo Ott, Victor Farias, and Rudiger Safranski have helped to fill in the stark gap in the correspondence. Heidegger’s rectorship lasted only a year, but his eager embrace of Nazism has large implications for his whole philosophical achievement. Though he never endorsed the Party’s biological racism, he carried out its anti-Semitic edicts and counted the vilest propagandists among his colleagues. Perhaps even more troublingly, in his Rectorial Address he fused his own philosophical language with the rhetoric of Nazism: “Our nation realizes its own fate by risking its history in the arena of world power in which all human existence is affected and by continually fighting for its own spiritual world.” The very ease of this fusion has led recent critics to explore the fascist affinities of Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger’s Roots, an excellent study by Charles Bambach published last year, showed that many of Heidegger’s philosophical themes—the overcoming of nihilism, the importance of rootedness, the need for decisive action—found vulgar echoes in Nazi “thought.”

When the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence resumes in 1950, the shadows of Nazism, war, and the Holocaust are unavoidably present. Yet the letters demonstrate a remarkable evasion of the subject, by both parties. Just after the war, Arendt had written in public and private blaming Heidegger for his conduct. But when they met in person for the first time in two decades, during Arendt’s trip to Germany on behalf of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, her reservations seemed to fall away. On February 9, she wrote: “This evening and this morning are the confirmation of an entire life.” Heidegger, too, dwells on the continuity, not the rupture: “I am delighted to have the chance to acknowledge our early encounter as something lasting.”

Yet over the next two years, as Heidegger sends Arendt romantic-philosophical poems and attempts, rather comically, to include Elfriede in their friendship, the evasions only continue. At times, the reader is even angered by Arendt’s refusal to engage with Heidegger’s provocations. His self-pitying references to the Soviet threat (“I, with my ideas, am among the most threatened, the ones who would be wiped out first”) echo Nazi apologetics about defending the West against Communism. Incredibly, in the whole correspondence, he makes only a single oblique reference to the Holocaust: “the fate of the Jews and the Germans has its own truth, for which our historical calculation is no match.” This evasive fatalism, this refusal of concrete politics and moral judgment, surely infuriated the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Yet Arendt, whose voice is again missing much of the time, seems never to have argued back. Heidegger’s absolute control of the terms of their relationship is never so damaging as here.

What brought the letters to another halt was, instead, an entirely personal matter—evidently, an explosion of jealousy by Elfriede. The correspondence does not resume until 1966, when for the first time it becomes something like an equal dialogue. Equal in terms of space, at least—for the first time, Arendt was keeping copies of her letters. But in practical terms, Arendt remained subordinate, advising Heidegger on translations and the sale of manuscripts, responding eagerly to his new work. Heidegger’s resolute silence about her work—by then world famous—is all the more glaring by contrast. Writing to Karl Jaspers, the philosopher who was her mentor and Heidegger’s rival, Arendt explained:

I know that he can’t bear to see my name appear in public, that I write books, etc. All my life I have, as it were, pretended to him, always acting as if all this didn’t exist, that, in a manner of speaking, I couldn’t count up to three, except of course in interpreting his own writings; in that respect he was always very pleased to find that I could count up to three and sometimes perhaps up to four.

Arendt’s submissiveness is what allowed the relationship to continue, but it is very damaging to the correspondence as an intellectual document. Worse, Arendt extended it to her public discussions of Heidegger. In her celebrated broadcast on Heidegger’s 80th birthday—helpfully included in the Letters—Arendt spoke indulgently of his Nazi involvement. He “once succumbed to the temptation…to ‘intervene’ in the world of human affairs,” but after “ten short, hectic months,” she declares, “Heidegger recognized this ‘mistake’…and then risked considerably more than was common at German universities back then.”

This parrots the self-serving account Heidegger had given her, which subsequent historians have shown to be false: Heidegger remained a party member to the end, and never came into serious conflict with the regime. But coming from a Jewish intellectual like Arendt, it was a powerful absolution. Arendt never takes Heidegger to task for his long, deliberate silence about Nazism and the Holocaust, and she never even conceives of interrogating his thought for the sources of his politics. The problem with the speech, in fact, is the problem with the Letters as a whole. What Heidegger called “our encounter” was built on a failure to encounter the most urgent questions. To understand what matters most about Arendt and Heidegger—their thought—we have to look elsewhere.

Adam Kirsch is the book critic of the New York Sun.

Letters © Vittorio Klostermann GmbH: Frankfurt am Main 1998 English translation copyright © 2004 by Andrew Shields. Courtesy of Harcourt Books. Photos: Dr. Hermann Heidegger; Hannah Arendt Literary Trust.