Whenever I read a professional Chomsky-basher…
Whenever I read the work of a professional Chomsky-basher*—you know, the person whose passport to mainstream respectability is stamped with a...
View ArticleAnti-Semite and Jew
As someone who identifies as Jewish—who periodically goes to shul, celebrates some if not all of the holidays, and tries at least some (ahem) of the time to get off the internets for shabbos—yet...
View ArticleCareerism: Prolegomena to a Political Theory
Someone recently tweeted this article on Hannah Arendt that I wrote in the London Review of Books many moons ago. Re-reading it, I was reminded of this closing passage on careerism. I’ve long wanted...
View ArticleNYPD in Israel: Hannah Arendt on the Best Police Department in the World
In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt famously argued that one of the hallmarks of Nazism was the supremacy of the police over the military, even in—especially in—occupied territories. Nothing...
View ArticleThe Army as a Concentration Camp
Reading this terrific piece about James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, I stumbled across this passage from Jones’s WWII, a nonfiction treatment of the Second World War: Everything the civilian...
View ArticleAll that good, expensive gas wasted on the Jews!
People sometimes ask why I’m a fan of Hannah Arendt. I’ve a complicated relationship to her work, so I wouldn’t characterize myself as a complete fan. But I do love reading her, and one of the reasons...
View ArticleThomas Jefferson: American Fascist?
It’s Old Home Week in the American media. First there was the welcome back of Abraham Lincoln (and the brouhaha over the Spielberg film). Now Thomas Jefferson is in the news. But where it was Lincoln...
View ArticleThe Question of Palestine at Brooklyn College, Then and Now
In 1942, Brooklyn College hired a young instructor to teach a summer course on Modern European history. Though academically trained, the instructor was primarily known as the author of a series of...
View ArticleThe History of Fear, Part 4
Today, in part 4 of our series on the intellectual history of fear, we turn to Hannah Arendt’s theory of total terror, which she developed in The Origins of Totaltarianism (and then completely...
View ArticleThe N Word in Israel
Jodi Rudoren has a fascinating piece in the Times on proposed legislation in Israel that seems to be gaining ground. Israel is on the brink of banning the N-word. N as in Nazi, that is. Parliament gave...
View ArticleHannah Arendt, Lawrence of Arabia, and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
This peculiar preoration by Geoffrey Gray in The New Republic (h/t Aaron Bady) about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370— I’ve found myself asking a different question: Do we really want to find this missing...
View ArticleThe Disappointment of Hannah Arendt (the film)
So I finally saw Hannah Arendt this weekend. As entertainment, it was fine. I enjoyed the tender portrayal of Arendt’s marriage to Heinrich Blücher (though the rendition of her relationship to Mary...
View ArticleThe Higher Sociopathy
In the annals of moral casuistry, you’d be hard pressed to find a better example of the perils of moral reasoning than this defense, brought to you by The New Republic, of the slaughter of Palestinian...
View ArticleWhy Arendt might not have read Benito Cereno (if she did indeed not read...
For a change of pace… In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt makes the argument that one of the reasons the French Revolution took such a violent and authoritarian turn was that it allowed the social...
View ArticleThinking about Hannah Arendt and Adolph Eichmann on Erev Rosh Hashanah
George Steiner writes somewhere that the deepest source of anti-Semitism may lie in three Jews: Moses, Jesus, and Marx. Three Jews who formulated a great and demanding ethics/politics, an almost...
View ArticleThe Arendt Wars Continue: Richard Wolin v. Seyla Benhabib
Richard Wolin has written a response to Seyla Benhabib’s New York Times piece on Arendt and Eichmann. I hesitate to weigh in on this controversy for two reasons. First, I know both Richard and Seyla,...
View ArticleDid Hannah Arendt Ever See Eichmann Testify? A Second Reply to Richard Wolin
In his critique of Seyla Benhabib’s account of the Arendt/Eichmann controversy, which I wrote about earlier today, Richard Wolin makes an additional claim I’ve been puzzling over: Second, a perusal of...
View ArticleReferences No One Seems to Have Checked
Amos Elon on how Eichmann in Jerusalem was treated after its publication: Hand-me-downs from one critic to another drew on alleged references in the book which no one seemed to have checked. The...
View ArticleAdolph Eichmann: Funny Man?
One of the criticisms often made of Hannah Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial was that she found Eichmann to be so unintentionally funny. Throughout Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt can barely contain...
View ArticleDayenu in Reverse: The Passover Canon of Arendt’s Critics
One of the more recent criticisms I’ve read of Eichmann in Jerusalem—in Bettina Stangneth’s and Deborah Lipstadt’s books—is that far from seeing, or seeing through, Eichmann, Arendt was taken in by his...
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