76
PARTISAN REVIEW
black parents who had sent their children into forcibly integrated
schools in Littie Rock . They ought not to expose their children to its
humiliations, she argued, and in any case legal and political rights
ought not to be coercively extended into the "social" sphere . Her
ignorance of American post-Civil War history, of racism, of consti–
tutionallaw, and of Southern politics was total. That did not deter
her from writing an essay to advise and belabor the blacks in Little
Rock . Her essay might, in fact , have been of real use to racists, but
fortunately it was published in a radical journal,
Dissent,
which neu–
tralized the mischief. Characteristically she changed her mind about
the black parents when Ralph Ellison explained to her that they were
not parvenus after all, but were heroically sacrificing their children
to the future of black America. This sordid episode is, in some ways,
a better illustration than
Eichmann
of the fantasy world into which
her private responses had led her.
In spite of all this, the American Jewish establishment
did
over–
react. The charge of anti-Semitism cannot hold, even disloyalty is
too harsh a judgment. Her idea of what a Jew should be was
disastrous, but it began as an honorable reaction to the realities
of German-Jewish life. Her American-Jewish critics, even before
Eichmann,
were also too sure that there was only one way to be a
good Jew: theirs. There was a disproportion between her awful book
and the outbursts that it evoked, the most violent coming neither
from Israelis nor Jews of European origin, but from American and
English Jews who felt more directly attacked by it. They were cer–
tainly far too quick to say" anti-Semite" when they felt affronted. In
truth, relations between the German and American Jews had long
been simmering. The guilt that many American Jews felt for having
done less than they might to help the Europeans played its part;
hence their subsequent overidentification with the real victims.
There were also very real cultural tensions. The anxieties ofJews in
a pluralistic, multi-ethnic, democratic society with fresh memories
of the Depression were not those of Jews from unitary, class-ridden,
authoritarian societies with fascism to frighten them. Moreover the
hope, which Arendt shared, that the conflict between
Os~juden
and
Yeckes
would go away was realized only with the final disappearance
of the GermanJews. When they came to America they were uncom–
fortably unlike any other first generation of Jewish immigrants.
They were well educated, had been well off, were rarely observant,
and knew no Yiddish. They were strangers to the language and the
rituals of everyday life that make American Jews a cohesive commu–
nity. The two were at different stages of assimilation. The Germans
