February 23, 2022

“Arendt” was a name I heard quite often growing up, but one I didn’t think much of. I knew that Hannah Arendt had written “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” two seminal pieces of 20th-century literature that were never assigned to me even in the most comprehensive courses on despotic ideologies. Syllabus after syllabus was barren of her work, which made no difference to me—I figured there must have been a good reason for it. 

As I began my career in the Jewish world, I learned that the American Jewish perception of Arendt, certainly in my community of Jews who left Europe before the Shoah, was of a commanding intellectual with the insight to illuminate the human nature behind the Holocaust. This differs dramatically from the common European Jewish and especially Israeli perception of her, as a narcissistic observer who blamed the Jewish people for their own destruction while casually chain-smoking from her apartment in New York, miles from harm’s way. In reading her books for the first time and delving into the world of knowledge she had constructed for herself, I realize that neither of these characterizations of Hannah Arendt are entirely accurate.

To American Jews, this remains an intriguing insight that does nothing to absolve Nazis, but rather explains the psychology behind mass atrocity.

“Eichmann in Jerusalem” was never presented to me as controversial. It is in this 1963 collection of essays, originally published in The New Yorker as a commentary on trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, that the phrase “banality of evil” first appears, referring to Arendt’s hypothesis that the greatest evil in the world is committed not by savages and monsters but by ordinary men: nobodies, bureaucrats, meek subordinates who swallowed their orders and executed them without second thought. Arendt illustrated a portrait of Eichmann not as a brazen antisemite, but as a sluggish old man with a head cold who was swept away in the hateful climate of his age. Duty and loyalty were everything to him, the consequences of which never seemed to faze him. To American Jews, this remains an intriguing insight that does nothing to absolve Nazis, but rather explains the psychology behind mass atrocity. But for Europe’s Jews and Israel’s, fifteen years from the gas chambers, who wanted nothing more than to see Eichmann as the vicious tyrant he was and to have him hanged as such, Arendt appeared to be if not defending than at least minimizing the responsibility of all those in Nazi high command who “followed orders.” 

When Arendt discusses the Judenrat, Nazi-designed Jewish councils created to manage the Jewish communities and in some cases cooperate with the Nazis in the liquidation of ghettos and transport of civilians to concentration camps, she just adds insult to injury. She writes: 

“Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had been really unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and half and six million people.” 

Arendt continues, “To a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” 

Given the provocative nature of this passage, the outrage from her fellow Jews is understandable. In fact, The New Yorker received hundreds of rancorous complaints. It is rumored that the State of Israel itself attempted to prevent Arendt from publishing, and even personal friends of Arendt distanced themselves from her on account of the perception that she had betrayed her own people. This pain is real. Indeed, had I been alive then, I might have very well shared the same revulsion—bewildered by Arendt’s insensitivity regarding the choices the Jewish people were forced to make under the most depraved of circumstances, each individual a victim in his own way. The pages in her book dedicated to the Judenrat remain, at the very least, offensive, and a mischaracterization of the number of victims who died and how.

She was bound by her interpretation of truth, not by national or religious sentiments.

But Arendt did not report on the trial of Eichmann to defend the Jewish people or even to indict the evils of Nazism. Between her ears was the brain of a journalist and a philosopher, not of an ardent Zionist (though she worked with Zionist organizations in her youth) or a human rights prosecutor. She was bound by her interpretation of truth, not by national or religious sentiments. Furthermore, it is not entirely fair to brand her an enemy of the community, considering Israel was also harsh when it came to those believed to have collaborated with Nazis. Israel passed “The Law of Punishment of Nazis and Their Collaborators” in 1950, prosecuted collaborators throughout the decade, and even tried Rudolf Kastner, a politician in the Labor Party, for alleged crimes of cooperation during the war. Arendt was harsh, but perhaps her ideas came from a place of anger, not unlike the anger of her Jewish and Israeli contemporaries. 

Perhaps we might see Arendt not as a reckless provocateur or self-hating Jew, but as a thinker who sought to understand the reality of the world. Possibly the most prescient takeaway from Arendt’s work, spanning from the infamous Eichmann trial to her broad writings on human nature and authoritarianism, was, in her own words, the “totality of moral collapse” in Europe under the Nazis. She was able to investigate how and why and under what conditions genocide can take place, and in an era in which the violation of rights is pervasive I find her work not comforting, but perhaps necessary. Her work should certainly be listed in class syllabi, considering the discussions and controversies she provokes are still of paramount importance.

Blake Flayton is New Media Director and columnist at the Jewish Journal.

If one were to draw a straight line between recent controversies involving the Colleyville synagogue attack, Whoopi Goldberg, and Brooklyn College, respectively, one would find a common theme: the negation of Jewish identity. 

The attack on Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas was “not specifically related to the Jewish community,” an FBI agent said in a press conference afterward, even though the perpetrator’s stated intention had been to communicate with a rabbi in New York whom the attacker fancifully assumed controlled the fate of an imprisoned terrorist.

The Holocaust was not an example of Nazi genocide against the Jews, but rather a mere illustration of “man’s inhumanity to man,” Goldberg said on her talk show, “The View,” notwithstanding Hitler’s well-documented pronouncements about Jewish racial inferiority and his intention to eradicate European Jewry altogether. At Brooklyn College, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has opened an investigation into claims of anti-Semitic harassment, including a warning by an administrator to a Jewish student to “get your whiteness in check.”

Jews don’t conform to standard definitions of a racial, ethnic, or religious group, so the temptation to characterize all or most of them as white based on skin color is understandable, if problematic.

Increasingly, Jewish identity in America is subsumed by notions of “whiteness,” as the lens through which many Americans view race doesn’t allow for a nuanced understanding of Jewish identity. Jews don’t conform to standard definitions of a racial, ethnic, or religious group, so the temptation to characterize all or most of them as white based on skin color is understandable, if problematic.

But the consequences of diminishing Jewish identity and relegating Jews to the white and privileged class, as some of the Brooklyn College aggressors did, have already proven themselves to be serious.  The Colleyville episode showed that it is possible, even though the FBI later walked back the agent’s remark, to dismiss an attack on a Jewish target as an essentially random occurrence.

The Whoopi Goldberg episode demonstrated that, even at a time when some Holocaust survivors are still living, the power of the Holocaust to educate younger generations has been devalued, as the central narrative of anti-Jewish genocide has been undermined. At Brooklyn College, two Jewish students in the graduate Mental Health Counseling program felt compelled to withdraw because of the stress of the harassment they endured on campus.

To see how little regard is paid to Jewish sensibilities with respect to cultural slights, one need look no further than the University of California’s instructional publication, “Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send.”  The document provides a list of examples of comments that target individuals based on their memberships in “marginalized groups,” a category that seems not to include Jews or Israel supporters, despite the alarming degree of hostility directed toward Jews on UC campuses in recent years. We learn from UC’s list that the statement “America is a land of opportunity” is a microaggression, while none of the anti-Semitic tropes routinely used to bash Israel and intimidate Jewish students merit a mention.

But the gravest danger posed by the redaction of Jewishness from discussions about marginalized groups is the unsettling public apathy toward an antisemitism that has increasingly turned violent.  In October 2018, the deadliest mass killing of Jews in American history occurred at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.  Other deadly attacks on Jewish targets have followed.

According to 2019 FBI hate crime statistics, Jews are overwhelmingly the most heavily targeted religious group in the United States. More than 60 percent of hate crimes in that category were directed toward Jewish targets in 2019.  In May 2021 anti-Semitic violence spiked in the wake of clashes between Hamas and Israel.

Antisemitism comes from multiple sources: the far right, the far left, and Islamist extremists. All of these streams of Jew-hatred must be treated with great seriousness. They are all variations of an ancient social illness that has shown a unique ability to persist and adapt to modern circumstances.

The different forms of antisemitism that manifest themselves today find support across political, cultural, and religious lines. The overlap and interconnectedness of these viral hatreds has fed a normalization of antisemitism evidenced in public comments, violent attacks, the bullying of students, and the minimization of the Holocaust.  It is also reflected in the callous indifference of those who claim to protect vulnerable groups but reflexively opt to treat Jews as privileged oppressors, regardless of the vulnerability of Jewish individuals and institutions.

As we continue to devise and implement strategies to confront antisemitism in the U.S. and abroad, it is important to ask, when did the diminution of Jewish identity become acceptable? 

As we continue to devise and implement strategies to confront antisemitism in the U.S. and abroad, it is important to ask, when did the diminution of Jewish identity become acceptable? When did antisemitism stop being a form of oppression?  When did it become OK to dismiss antisemitism as a distraction from other social or political priorities? Most of all, where are our allies?

The answers may be uncomfortable for some, but for Jews, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Eric Fusfield is B’nai B’rith International’s director of legislative affairs and deputy director of the B’nai B’rith International Center for Human Rights and Public Policy.