ARGUMENTS
263
gross as
to
raise doubts about Abel's competence in both departments.
As to the second, I would answer with the rhetorically expected No,
adding that it also would seem to me "improper," to say the least, to
present Eichmann as "better" than his victims.
If
I thought this were
the tendency of the book, I should not defend it, nor should I have
the respect and affection for Hannah Arendt that I do. In fact, I don't
see how I could bear to be in the same room with her. I have known
both Mr. Abel and Miss Arendt for many years, and I must confess that
the notion of the former giving lessons in morality to the latter strikes
me as comic.
But, not to be too hard on your reviewer, his line of attack is one
that has been taken by others, in print and in talk. Less crudely and
with less personal malice-I remember an extraordinary article by Abel in
New Politics
which contemptuously dismissed Miss Arendt as a philoso–
pher (indeed, as the most modestly endowed of rational creatures)–
but with the same content. A distinguished Jewish man of letters-an old
friend of Miss Arendt's who had defended her against intemperate
attacks like Abel's-said to me recently: "Yes, a brilliant book, but
I wish she hadn't blamed the victims more than the executioners." This
(to me) startling judgment was echoed in
Dissent
by Marie Syrkin :
"The only one who comes out better than when he came in is the
defendant. The victim comes out worst." And in
Commentary
by Norman
Podhoretz: "In place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the 'banal'
Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as
accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation of guilt and in–
nocence, she gives us the 'collaboration' of criminal and victim." To
"cultural lag" we must now add a new concept: "cultural throwback."
One would think Mr. Podhoretz had never read any of the literature
on the Nazi concentration camps, whose rationale was carried over into
the wartime death camps. As described by Rousset, Kogon, Bettelheim
and other survivors, this rationale was precisely what Mr. Podhoretz
describes with an air of incredulity.
"I have it on the authority of Dr. Jacob Robinson, special as–
sistant to Justice Jackson at the Nuremberg Trials and to Prosecutor
Hausner in the preparation of the case against Eichmann," Abel writes
impressively, "that there are some eight monographs in Yiddish and in
Hebrew on the discussions of the Jewish Council's leaders with left-wing
Zionists and Socialists." He continues less impressively: "I have not been
able to examine these monographs myself; they are yet to be translated.
But I have it again on the authority of Dr. Robinson that in these
discussions outright defiance of the Nazis was proposed.... What argu-
