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IRVING HOWE
IRVING HOWE
In the Winter 1964
PR,
Miss Mary McCarthy writes: "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 disagreed
with what was being said but they remained silent. In such an
atmosphere, so remote from that of free speech,
Partisan Review
pub–
lished Lionel Abel's 'The Aesthetics of Evil' ..." etc.
Miss McCarthy has been misinformed.
When
Dissent
first planned its forum, we invited Miss Arendt her–
self to speak. She declined. So did Bruno Bettelheim, whom we next
invited as an authority holding views similar to Miss Arendt's. We then
asked Raul Hilberg, author of a scholarly volume on which Miss Arendt
leaned, and Daniel Bell-two writers whose views, we had reason to
believe, were more or less close to Miss Arendt's. When they accepted,
we felt we had a reasonable balance-the other speakers being Lionel
Abel and Marie Syrkin, whom Miss McCarthy designates as "propagand–
ists" (for what?).
At the meeting itself, most of the discussion from the floor was
critical of Miss Arendt. The chairman, myself, therefore asked twice
for speakers who might support her. None rose
to
speak, though several
of her supporters were present. (Whether they were all or mainly Jews
I did not try to determine, since it is not our policy to arrange discussions
on the basis of a racial census.) Only after the chairman announced
that discussion from the floor was over, did Alfred Kazin jump up to
speak. Though I regarded this intervention as irregular, I gave him the
floor and he spoke his piece.
The meeting was excited and passionate; there were occasional
interruptions from the floor ; but at no point- I repeat:
at no point-was
anyone, not Bell or Hilberg or Kazin, "shouted down." Everyone who
rose to speak was allowed to finish .
Had Miss McCarthy troubled to check her story, she might have
spared herself a needless error and
Dissent
a gratuitous insult.
