ARGUMENTS
MORE ON EICHMANN
MARIE SYRKIN
SIRS:
Though Miss McCarthy has injected an unrefreshing note
into the by now tiresome controversy about Hannah Arendt's book, her
frankness merits an equal candor in reply. Miss McCarthy notes that
the hostile critics of
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
with few exceptions, are
Jews, while its champions, again with a few exceptions dismissed by
Miss McCarthy as "special cases," are Gentiles. Miss McCarthy's "Gentile
friends and relations" were startled by the Jewish reaction: "It is as
if
Eichmann in Jerusalem
had required a special pair of Jewish spectacles
to make its 'true purport' visible."
Till Miss McCarthy's sally into the field the reason for this dif–
ference seemed fairly obvious. Jewish reviewers were for the most part
specialists in the areas discussed by Miss Arendt and able to challenge
those errors in fact on which interpretation depended. The unfriendly
Gentile critics whom Miss McCarthy darkly designates-Judge Mus–
manno, participant in the Nuremberg Trials, Trevor-Roper, historian of
the Nazi era, and Richard Crossman, "who winters in Tiberias," have
one thing in common: a particular competence in the subjects covered.
The division would appear to be between the adequately informed,
among whom J ews naturally predominate, and the uninformed, neither
intellectually nor emotionally involved
in
the questions under debate.
Miss McCarthy suggests that the wounds of the deeply involved may
be too raw for dispassionate jttdgment. But a paradoxical feature of the
discussion indicates that it is precisely the "propagandists" (among whom
Miss McCarthy kindly includes me) who have drawn up a formidable
dossier of objective material all relevant to Miss Arendt's theses, while
it is her champions who indulge in gross
ad h.ominem
arguments and
make no pretense of offering a serious rebuttal to the large body of
factual evidence given.
A prime example of this intellectual irresponsibility on the part of
Miss Arendt's defenders is to be found in Miss McCarthy's article. She
