ARGUMENTS
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concludes: "between four and a half and six million people." I would
not quibble about this (Miss Syrkin is probably using the
New Yorker
text, which I no longer have), except as a counterquibble; elsewhere in
my article I spoke of Miss Arendt's criticism of the Jewish leaders in
general. Miss Syrkin's own paraphrasing habits can be inferred from her
summing-up of the "famous sentence." "Miss Arendt accuses the Jewish
people in its totality." Does she?
The Neronic picture of myself listening to
Figaro
while the gas
ovens roar is quite in keeping with the general flavor of Miss Syrkin's
polemics, and I am grateful to her for giving your readers a sample.
If
anyone is willing to turn back to the last number of
PR,
he will see that
I did not find "Miss Arendt's account of the extermination of six million
Jews" morally exhilarating. What I found morally exhilarating was her
book, which is an account of the Eichmann trial. Nor did I say that the
extermination ,of the Jews "made sense." One of the functions of a work
of art is to give sense to suffering, such as the blinding of Oedipus. I
felt that Miss Arendt's book had given sense, through form,
to
Jewish
suffering;
in that respect, it resembled a work of art.
Mr. Weisberg's letter ends with an odd misunderstanding.} wrote
that Miss Arendt was interested in the safety of humanity. Mr. Weis–
berg's view of humanity seems to be: what has it done for the Jews?
