JUDITH N. SHKLAR
75
to reality," this time in defiance of her own people. Why, she asked,
had the East European Jews not behaved like Homeric heroes? Why
had they not resisted the Germans more courageously? Why had
they contributed to their own destruction? Why had they left no gal–
lant myth for us? All this in spite of the fact that she knew perfectly
well that, while Eastern Jews might have made minor difficulties for
the Germans, they never could have averted their doom . Only the
Allies could save them. One had to be educated, rich, or at least
have connections like Arendt (and my parents) to get out of Europe
at all. Only a fraction of the "elite"-and not a large one-could
hope to leave Eastern Europe at any time . For one of the happy few,
in the comfort of New York and in the pages of the
New Yorker,
stud–
ded with ads for luxury goods, to ask those "questions" was shock–
ing. The articles, moreover, displayed an extraordinary ignorance.
Arendt generalized wildly about the infinitely complex and diverse
communities of Eastern Europe, about whose history and structure
she knew exactly nothing. To be sure, there had been class conflicts
in those societies, and after the anguish of the Final Solution they
flared up with bitterness and violence among the survivors in Israel.
These also Arendt subjected to the simplicities of her theory of
assimilation. The final truth about who did what in Hungary, and
what the various Jewish Councils did and ·did not do during the Nazi
era, may never be fully known , but even Young-Bruehl is less than
certain that Arendt knew what she was talking about. Truth was not
her object.
The reaction from many American Jews was predictable. That
Arendt did not anticipate it and was utterly surprised by their anger
only shows how divorced she was from local Jewish society. Indeed,
apart from a few New York intellectuals, she did not really know any
American Jews and she had long ceased to take part in Zionist
organizations . But there was more than ignorance and dissociation
in her book. There was no particular reason to publish it in that
place and at that time.
It
probably gave no comfort to anti-Semites,
as some charged, but it caused pain and justified rage. She meant to
inflict the first and need not have been astonished at the latter. At
best one can say that she was consistent, because she had always
seen Jewishness as the personal acceptance of a fact, and not as a
communal way of living .
Eichmann
was, however, not her only lapse
into uncomprehending arrogance. Her obsession with pariah status
had three years before
Eichmann
provoked her into scolding those
