Submitted by Neil Fiertel, Mar 21, 2007 14:30

The review by Adam Kirsch was really excellent, thoughtful and even- handed in a way that would be approved by ...Hannah Arendt herself, I should think. I often harken back to Arendt's ideas and structured arguments when discussing modern Jewish history as she is one of the few writers who manages to separate religion from nationality and it is this latter aspect of being Jewish which is often given short shrift by those of the Left and of traditional Jewish writers. There is a kind of dichotomy between those who subscribe to mythic Jewish religious beliefs and those that, rather, see themselves as a part of a cultural continuity and of a nation that does not need, necessarily, a piece of land to call it itself that and in such a form are similar to the Romana in Europe ( and suffer the same kind of discrimination for being so.) Okay, Arendt was naive in trusting somehow that Soviet and the Left would protect the interests of Jews living in Palestine or anywhere for that matter but she was not alone in believing the Left were somehow "good." The Left and the Soviets ( not one and the same, certainly) seemed to subscribe to a sympathy to their survival of Jews not because they liked them, not at all but rather as a kind of international principle as they were seen as the underdog but as soon as they were no longer considered the victims the Left turned upon them. Naturally as we know today, the Soviets treated their own Jewish nationality with a nastiness just this side of the Nazis but much of this was not known during the years that Arendt wrote. Geopolitics being what it is has made rather more black and white the consequences of this than was seen at that time,i.e. that the Left subscribes primarily to a bizarre blindness to ethnic differences as if these things do not or should not matter in spite of the fact that humans do take these things very seriously and thus, they must always be a part of the equation and a part of any solution. Arendt's love of the individual over the collective is rather more normal than not and is not simply some kind of Leftish European eccentricity...It is rather an honest appraisal of most of us who love our friends and families over some larger entity and so they should. We are after all primates and the instinct is to love and defend the village over the nation. It is this very dichotomy which when overturned leads to what? Fascism..How else can one understand a child who rebukes his family and turns them into the Gestapo? How else can one understand the East German experience where everyone turns in everyone to the Stazi? When one loses the sense of instinctive loyalty, all is lost. Arendt objectively told us what she analyzed and observed. Hiding the cowardice of some Jews who rationalised their part in the Holocaust would not teach us anything but exposing it as she did in its banality exposes each of us to our sense of loyalty to our families and to our need for own self preservation. Without recognising that the Nazi State used human weakness against itself as well as the natural instincts of the others to separate our humanity from their humanity and thus making Jews the "other", she manages to explore how each small consequence emboldens the enemy to greater and greater evil. It does not require the presence of ultimate evil in the form of a mythic Devil to produce ultimate evil..It takes just small and banal events and peoples to do this. Arendt makes this ulitmately clear and her words must be seen as a revolutionary treatise on such a discovery. It is when we disavow what she has seen and written as the result of a lack of "LOVE" for her people that the concept becomes diluted and made somehow less relevent.

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