Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy

Abstract

OCTOBER 108, Spring 2004, pp. 97–111. © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Eichmann controversy, occasioned by Hannah Arendt’s five-part series that appeared in The New Yorker from February 16 to March 16, 1963, was certainly the most bitter public dispute among intellectuals and scholars concerning the Holocaust that has ever taken place. It was also the first time that both Jews and non-Jews were witness to a controversy over Jewish memory, an affair that took place largely, but not exclusively, among Jews. The controversy elicited over a thousand published responses. It lasted almost three years from the initial burst of reactions to Arendt’s articles and book in 1963, gradually subsiding only after her response to Jacob Robinson’s book-length disputation, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, more than two years later.1 The animosity and rancor of the dispute was so extreme that more than two decades later Irving Howe could write that “within the New York intellectual world Arendt’s book provoked divisions that would never be entirely healed.”2 To varying degrees almost all her critics took up Arendt’s most controversial points: her characterization of Eichmann as a thoughtless and “banal” cipher of totalitarian rule, her judgments of the behavior of the Jewish leaders and Zionist officials in Eastern Europe, her analysis of the legal charges against Eichmann, and her accusation that the court proceedings were, in effect, a “show trial.” But as Richard I. Cohen has shown in his comprehensive rezeptionsgeschichte (reception history) of the controversy, despite a good deal of overlap concerning the main themes of Arendt’s work, substantial distinctions among different audiences and responses can be discerned. If, for example, German-Jewish critics tended to focus on Arendt’s alleged misrepresentation of the role of German-Jewish community leaders, most prominently Leo Baeck, survivors tended to focus on her underestimation of the significance and extent of the resistance, while Israeli and Yiddish writers more forcefully dissented from her assessment of Jewish councils, and