HUE AND CRY
13
concession:
these Jews, many of whom call themselves friends of the
author, are more interested in enumerating the shortcomings of her
book than in repelling the slanders that are circulating about her in and
out of print, even though they know they are slanders. These slanders,
which they hear all the time and which are intended to destroy the
reputation of a living woman, excite them far less than Miss Arendt's
"slander" of the Jewish leadership, who are dead and beyond being
hurt by it,
if
it is a slander. I am told that at a meeting held under
the auspices of
Dissent
to discuss Miss Arendt's book only one voice
from the audience was raised in her defense and that voice was shouted
down ; some other Jews present disagreed with what was being said
but they remained silent.
In
such an atmosphere, so remote from that of free speech,
Partisan
Review
published Lionel Abel's "The Aesthetics of Evil," with the an–
nouncement that it was opening a discussion.
In
other words, Miss
Arendt's defenders would be given an opportunity to reply. Daniel
Bell's very good piece in the last issue was not so much a defense as a
plea for an armistice, so I am going to speak up, but it is with a heavy
heart. First because I am Miss Arendt's friend, and friends are regarded
as prejudiced. Second because I am a Gentile, and I fear that this
fact will only rejoice her enemies, since are not all Gentiles anti-Semitic?
Third, because I do not feel that Abel's piece deserves a reply on its own
merits. I can only see it as a document in the hate campaign against
Miss Arendt and one of the worst. The two serious points Abel raises–
a) how does Miss Arendt account for the mass slaughter of Jews in the
Ukraine when no Jewish organizations existed there? b) how does she
reconcile her criticism of the Jewish leadership with the picture of
totalitarian terror she gave in
The Origins of Totalitarianism?-are
so
entwined with insinuations, innuendoes, charges of bad faith that it is
hard to free the trunk of his argument from this mass of creepers and
look at it squarely. He accuses Miss Arendt throughout of deliberately
suppressing evidence ("She must know very well," etc.) that does not
suit her hand, and he nudges the reader to guess what that "hand"
may be: infatuation with her own ideas, a love-hate affair with totali–
tarianism, a preference for butchers over their victims, for the strong
over the weak, for-why not say it?-the Nazis over the Jews. As a
reader, Abel claims to feel that Eichmann "comes off so much better
in her book than his victims." This is given
a priori,
though it is also
his conclusion, which is arrived at by a vicious circle-the term never
sounded more apt. "Eichmann is aesthetically palatable, and his victims
are aesthetically repulsive," he finishes, as he began. He offers no