Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Modernity, FQ 2011, Fr. Seminar B. Honig, Political Science. Scott Hall 302, Off. Hours: Thursdays, 9-11 and by apptment (b-honig@northwestern.edu) This is a seminar in political theory, a subfield of Political Science committed to the rigorous study of politics in a humanistic way, using hermeneutic, deconstructive, literary, historical, and interpretative approaches to study politics, justice, equality, identity, authority, power, and more. This seminar will be devoted to the study of Hannah Arendt’s work. We will assess her distinctive contributions to political theory, asking how her experience as a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany shaped her work in democratic theory AND whether her work in democratic theory provides a distinctive way to look at issues of Jewish modernity. By Jewish modernity we mean the impact on Jewish and political life more generally of the Holocaust and post-Holocaust diasporic conditions such as the acquisition of statehood and military power, and the development of particularly Jewish ethics and politics to respond to these and other new developments in the late modern world. Hannah Arendt is a major figure in 20th century political theory. Her many books and articles are dedicated to understanding what are the specifics of “the political” as opposed to a host of things we normally identify with politics -- such as administration, legislation, representation, voting, lobbying or polling. Arendt’s political theory was developed over a lifetime of political engagement and scholarly work. A Jewish refugee from Germany, she left Germany for France after being arrested by the Gestapo in 1933. She later escaped an internment camp in France to eventually land in the U.S. (after a three month wait for a boat to the US) in 1941, where she wrote and taught for the rest of her life. In 1951, the year she published her landmark The Origins of Totalitarianism, she became an American citizen, after 18 years of being stateless. In addition to her political theory writings on totalitarianism, revolution (comparing the French and American experiences), civil disobedience (in the context of the Vietnam war), and humanism, she also commented in more journalistic writings on the Eichmann Trial and the Little Rock school desegregation protests. In her writing and practical work in the 40’s, she opposed Zionism, favoring instead a structure for shared Arab and Jewish governance in Palestine. To engage her work is to engage most every major political issue of the 20th century. Of particular interest to us in this seminar will be Arendt’s study of antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism -- in her 3 Vol. Origins of Totalitarianism, her trenchant observations of how persons and communities in quest of equality or inclusion act out scripts of pariah (outcast) or parvenu (social climber), her critique of Herzl’s Zionism before and during the early years of Israel’s founding, her vision of politics as a distinctively human and ennobling activity, her account of the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she witnessed and recorded, in which she argued that this man responsible for genocide was a thoughtless bureaucrat rather than a demonic murderer. These mostly (so-called) Jewish writings are part of a broader political theory in which Arendt explores what she sees as the few remaining possibilities for authentic political action in the modern world, a world that she saw as increasingly dominated by statist, bureaucratic, and market institutions that undermine rather than promote authentic human experience.

Our aim in the class will be to understand her sometimes difficult work as a contribution to democratic political theory, to think about the issues she explores both in historical context and in relation to ongoing debates about Jewish ethics and politics, today, and to use Arendt’s intellectual career as a way to revisit ongoing issues in political theory and democratic life today, in the U.S. and Middle East, more than 30 years after her death. Since Arendt wrote in several different ways – as a historian, journalist, political commentator, public intellectual and political philosopher, we will attend to the form as well as content of the writings. That is, which genres of writing are most persuasive? What sorts of things count as evidence or argument in the various genres we look at here? Seminar Responsibilities: Students must read the assigned reading in time for class and come to class prepared to discuss it in an informed, thoughtful and considerate way. Class meets twice a week, there is a writing assignment due about every four classes. Most of the assigned material is accessible and politically provocative. Some of the assigned reading material is challenging. You have to read all of it. But you are welcome to work in reading groups and to come see me with any questions you may have. I can answer brief email questions on line. Longer questions are for discussion and face to face meetings in my office. NOTE: If you have questions about facts, places, historical events, figures, or movements mentioned in the reading assignments, please take the initiative to look them up on your own so that we do not spend class time on questions that can be easily answered that way. There is a no laptop policy in this class. Please come with your written work already printed out and be prepared to take notes by hand as we work through the material together. Cell phones, texting, surfing etc are not allowed in class. (Pretend we are on an airplane taking off or landing.) There is one exception to this rule: In each class meeting one student will have a laptop available for the purpose of googling answers to any google-answerable questions that come up in the course of our meeting together. This will be a rotating responsibility, shared among seminar members. Students will be graded in this class on attendance, level of preparation for class, quality of written and oral presentations, and quality (not quantity) of oral contributions to class discussions. Absences, failure to complete assignments on time, etc., will all bring your grade down. All writing assignments, including those to be delivered orally, must be turned in digitally before class via email and as hard copy during class (before oral presentation). Plagiarism: Don’t do it. Cite ALL your sources including Internet sources. Better yet, read only what has been assigned and sit down and write on it without any further investigation. This is faster, easier, and safer than the alternatives. Cases of plagiarism get an F and are reported to the Dean’s Office for adjudication. All suspected cases of plagiarism will be run through detection software. Grading: First writing assignment (1 page) 5%; Five writing assignments (2-3 pages) 15% each = 75%; Weekly participation in seminar 25% Yes, this totals 105% - a little wiggle room for you. BOOKS – Required: Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, The Jewish Writings, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Richard J Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

Recommended: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Honig FYI: The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College has a website that features events related to the study of Arendt and blog entries about current events, informed by her work and approach. Once we get in to the work, you may find this website of interest: http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/

Course Schedule, Assignments, Summaries and Questions to guide reading and writing: Week 1 (2 sessions, Introduction) Tues. Sept 20 - Introduction READ: Hannah Arendt, Speech on receipt of Denmark’s’ Sonning Prize for contributions to western civilization (1975) --(Prologue, in Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment) (Blackboard) – WATCH: IN CLASS screening: “What Remains? The Language Remains” – Interview with Gunter Gaus, for German TV 1964, English text avail as pp 1-23, Essays in Understanding on Blackboard; video also avail through Blackboard) Thurs. Sept 22 - Totalitarianism and Humanism “most interesting in Arendt’s response to Voegelin was her rejection of what might be called his ‘essentializing’ of modernity as uniformly a product of gnosticism as opposed to her emphasis upon the history of modernity as shaped by ‘facts’ and ‘events’” (Richard H. King, “On Race and Culture” in Politics in Dark Times, ed Benhabib et al, p. 127). READ: Arendt, Preface to the First Edition of Origins of Totalitarianism, (pp vii-ix) Eric Voegelin, review of Origins of Totalitarianism and Hannah Arendt’s reply, and Voegelin’s concluding remark, all in Review of Politics, 15/16, Jan. 1953 (Blackboard) WRITE: One page on why it might matter whether Voegelin or Arendt is right about the (dis)continuity of human nature after the Holocaust. Which thinker do you think has the more persuasive argument? Which do you think has the better view of how to study history? (5%) Weeks 2-3 4 sessions: 3 reading, 1 writing: Tues. Sept. 27 – Thurs Sept. 29, Tues. Oct. 4 – Thurs. Oct 6 Modernity, Evil, Alienation “suffering, of which there always been too much on earth, is not the issue, nor is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake” (Arendt, OT 433). Summary - Origins of Totalitarianism:

Hannah Arendt’s OT seeks to explain the appearance in the world of a new political phenomenon, totalitarianism, and to insist on its novelty (It is not a variety of despotism or authoritarianism…). She argues in this book that it is possible to identify certain crystallizations of thought and action that turn out to have enabled totalitarianism to come into existence. The first is the shift from Jew hatred (which targets some) to anti-Semitism, an ideology that explains everything and does not require actual Jews for its vitality. The second is the overtaking of politics, which is by nature bounded (she says), by expansionism which moved in the 19th century from the domain of capitalism (which is all about growth) to imperialism (which is also all about growth but is no longer tethered to productivity). Race hatred mutates into racism, an ideology, and is one of the effects, not the causes of imperialism, Arendt argues. The third is the development of totalitarianism, a regime form that accesses instruments of governance to erase all forms of mediation and difference: between public and private, fact and fiction, self, and other, reality and appearance, truth and lies, nation/group and “the movement.” Under totalitarianism, traditional politics are distilled down to propaganda, policing and terror. Camps are the mark of its unique success (concentration, refugee, displaced persons, POW, internment camps). Not all camps are products of totalitarianism (historically some preceded this regime form), but all camps exhibit the view of the human as superfluous that is the mark of a totalitarian regime. A New Political Problem? Tues. Sept. 27 “Social factors…changed the course that mere political anti-Semitism would have taken if left to itself and which might have resulted in anti-Jewish legislation and even mass expulsion but hardly in wholesale extermination” (Arendt, OT 87). (i)Richard J Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, chapter 3: 71-78 Arendt’s bio. (ii) Origins of Totalitarianism, Preface to Part One: Antisemitism xi-xvi; and Part One, Antisemitism: (excerpts): Chapter Three, “Between Vice and Crime” (on Proust, 79-88) and Chapter Four (on the Dreyfus case, entire) 89-120. Recommended: Morris Kaplan, “Refiguring the Jewish Question: Arendt, Proust, and the Politics of Sexuality” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt Thurs. Sept. 29 Cecil Rhodes “fell into despair for every night he saw overhead ‘these stars…these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could.’ He had discovered the moving principle of the new, the imperialist era…and…recognized at the same moment its inherent insanity and its contradiction to the human condition. Naturally, neither insight nor sadness changed his policies” (Arendt, OT 124).

Origins of Totalitarianism, Preface to Part Two (xvii-xxii) and Part 2, Imperialism: (excerpts): 155 (start at “the alliance between capital and the mob…”) -161, 183-184, 216-221, 267-9, 276-302. Recommended: *Richard J Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Chapter 3 Karuna Mantena, “Genealogies of Catastrophe: Arendt on the Logic and Legacy of Imperialism” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt. Ed. Seyla Benhabib (Blackboard) Anne Norton, “Heart of Darkness,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig Joan Cocks, “On Nationalism: Rosa Luxembourg, Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt, ” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt Tues. Oct 4 “By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them; compared to the condition within its iron band, even the desert of tyranny, insofar as it is still some kind of space, appears like a guarantee of freedom” (Arendt, OT, 466). Read: Origins of Totalitarianism – Part Three, Totalitarianism, 323-326, 337-340, 348-354 (top) 387-88, 411 (“To be sure…”) – 459, 474-479. View: contemporary map of displaced persons and refugee camps in Europe (Blackboard). Recommended: *Richard J Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Chapter 4 George Kateb, Chapter Two, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Blackboard) Julia Kristeva, Chapter Two: “Superfluous Humanity,” (excerpt: 101-143), Hannah Arendt (Blackboard) READING QUESTIONS FOR ORIGINS: What was the most persuasive argument you encountered in the assigned readings. Why? What was the least persuasive argument you encountered in the readings so far? What would you change to improve that argument and make it more persuasive? Can you identify which elements of Arendt’s writing ‘work’ on you or fail to? Some examples of arguments you might consider as your focus when you consider these questions are: Arendt claims that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, in spite of their obvious differences, are both totalitarian regimes and are best analyzed in terms of this commonality. What might be gained and what lost through such an approach?

Arendt claims that Jews in Europe mistook social inclusion for political equality, and this at their peril, Is she right to insist on the non-overlap and even the tensions between these two? Is she blaming a minority for their own mistreatment by others? Arendt proclaims a “right to have rights” in order to respond to the problem of statelessness. If rights depend on citizenship, as she claims, how can such a proclamation work? Arendt argues that the concentration camps are the key to understanding totalitarian ambitions precisely because of their apparently inexplicable superfluity. It is their non-sense that makes sense, she says, once we see that what they seek is the production of superfluity: the transformation of persons with rights into ghosts with no juridical, moral or individual qualities. Is she right to seek a rationale for something as horrifying as concentration camps? Elsewhere she emphasizes contingency and accident in politics; does she here assume mastery and control when she sees the camps as serving an end sought out by the Nazis? Arendt claims that totalitarianism is in part an effect of some kind, a “boomerang effect,” she calls it, of imperialism. When democratic citizens practice forms of governance as domination abroad that are at odds with their commitments to liberty and rights at home, their imperial violence finds it way home. But she says very little about German Imperialism, though it is Nazism she seeks to explain, and spends quite a lot of time on French and British imperialism, though she claims these countries’ liberal democracies were fairly well insulated from the boomerang effect and did not become totalitarian. What do you make of this? is it a problem for her argument? WRITING QUESTION: Is Young-Bruehl right to think the arguments of Origins can be usefully extended to post 9/11 (US or non-US) politics? Why (not)? (Be sure to use in your response some material from Arendt’s Origins.) Weeks 4-5: 4 sessions: 3 reading, 1 writing Tues Oct. 11- Th. Oct 13, Tues. Oct 18 –Th Oct 20 Zionism, Liberalism, (bi)Nationalism, Shared Governance “It was politics – the need for a Jewish politics – that led [Arendt] to Zionism. And it was politics – her critique of Zionist politics – that was the reason for her later break with it” (Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 102) A New Political Solution – Beyond philanthropic and nation-state-centered politics? A Jewish army and a structure of cohabitation for Palestine

Tues. Oct 11

Contemporary Relevance of Arendt’s critique of Herzl’s Zionism READ: (i)Kushner contretemps 2010/11 (Blackboard) (ii)Peter Beinart, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” NYRB June 2010 (Blackboard) (iii)Noam Pianko, “What Will Become of the Jewish People?” Zionism and The Roads Not Taken 197-209 (Blackboard and on reserve) VIEW: in class screening: Bruce Robbins’ film (excerpts)

Thurs. Oct 13

(i) Arendt, “The Crisis of Zionism” 329-37; “Zionism Reconsidered” 343-374; “To Save the Jewish Homeland” 388-401; “The Failure of Reason: The Mission of Bernadotte” 408-413; “Peace or Armistice in the Near East?” (selection 430-450); “Magnes, the Conscience of the Jewish People”451-452; all in The Jewish Writings

(ii) Contretemps: Ben Halperin, “The Partisan in Israel,” Jewish Frontier, August 1948. and Arendt’s reply to Halerpin “About ‘Collaboration’” in The Jewish Writings, 414-16;

Recommended: Historical context:

(i) Richard J Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Chapter 5 (ii) Noam Pianko, Zionism and The Roads Not Taken pp. 1-25 and Chapter 3 (on

Rawidowicz) (on reserve). Contemporary context:

(i) On “Zionism Reconsidered,” Steven Aschheim “Hannah Arendt’s Trials” TLS Sept 28, 2007 (Blackboard)

(ii) Udi Aloni, “Judith Buter: As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up” in Haaretz.com

Tues. Oct 18 Judith Butler, ‘I merely belong to them’ - Review of Arendt, The Jewish Writings, London Review of Books, Vol. 29 No. 9 · 10 May 2007, pp 26-28 (Blackboard).

RECOMMENDED: Forgiveness, a film by Udi Aloni (avail as free download from Amazon, to Prime members). Guest: Akiva Leibowitz, co- chair of Hagar School: (http://www.hajar.org.il/). READING QUESTIONS FOR THIS SECTION:

What are the differences between Herzl and Lazare (or between Herzl and Magnes) and why do they matter? Are there contemporary rough corollaries of those positions identifiable today, in your view?

Arendt argues in “To Save The Jewish Homeland” that the council system is the only realistic option for a Jewish-Arab future (cf Bernstein, 122). Her critics charge (e.g., Bernstein, 118, an admiring critic) that her proposal is completely unrealistic. What do such charges and counter-charges tell us about “realism” in political debates? Is being realistic always a virtue? And who do you think is right in this contretemps? Arendt thinks the nation-state model is a relic of 19th century politics and she is especially critical of its tendency to produce majority politics and minority populations, which may be possessed of minority rights but are also inscribed as “minorities.” What do you make of her seeming vision of a politics without minorities? What generally accepted truths of politics would have to give way in order for such an alternative to emerge as possible? Thurs. Oct 20 -- WRITING SESSION, II (15%) READ: Judith Butler. "Israel/Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom," Radical Philosophy. Vol 135. pp. 8-17, January/February 2006. At http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/israel-palestine-paradoxes-of-academic-freedom/ (Blackboard)

Recommended: Joan Cocks, “On the Jewish Question: Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt,” Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question (on reserve). Isaiah Berlin, “Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity” in Against the Current. Compare to Arendt’s discussion of Disraeli in OT Part One.

WRITE: 2-3 pages on any ONE of these topics: 1.Is it possible to teach politics un - politically? Drawing on the work you read for this section of the class, which arguments are the best (and why?) and which are the worst arguments (and how might they be improved)? Focus on just one or two examples. Do you know why certain arguments, framings, stories, examples ‘work’ on you and others do not? Give an example or two of ones that are (in)effective with some analysis. 2. Assess the exchange between Halperin and Arendt. With whom do you find yourself more in agreement, and why? (if you see connections between their argument and the one Arendt had with Voegelin, note it. but you need not do this). 3. What are the one or two best arguments you found in the readings for shared co-governance in a federated structure with Arabs and jews in Israel/Palestine? and what are the one or two least good arguments in favour of co-governance? Assess the arguments and explain WHY they are in your view powerful or not. One argument for each side is enough if you think one stands out. Weeks 6-7 4 sessions, 3 reading, 1 writing Tues. Oct 25 – Th, Oct 27, Tues. Nov 1-Tues Nov. 8

Acting/World-building: Politics as Natality not Sovereignty

I. The Human Condition (Natality)

Tues. Oct. 25 Arendt, THC – Prologue (1-6), Part I, The Human Condition, Chapter 1 (7-11), Part III, Labor, Chapters 12, 13, 16, 17. Zygmunt Bauman, “The Meaning of the Civilizing Process,” Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 12-30 (Blackboard) Recommended: *Margaret Canovan, Introduction to THC Aristotle, Politics, Book I (on reserve) Hanna Pitkin, “Conformism, Housekeeping and the Attack of the Blob,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt Thurs. Oct 27 (i)Arendt, THC – Part IV, Work, Chapters 18, 19, 20, 23 (ii)Joan Cocks, “Is the Right to Sovereignty a Human Right? The Idea of Sovereign Freedom and the Jewish State,” in Silencing Human Rights (p. 109, section II - end) (Blackboard) (iii)Appendices in Jeff Halper, An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, (2010) 301-312 (Blackboard) Recommended: On Arendt’s distinctions Mary Dietz, “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt On THC with OT: Mary Dietz, “A Transfiguring Evening Glow: Arendt and the Holocaust” in Turning Operations (on reserve)

Tues. Nov 1 Arendt, THC Part V, Action, Chapters 24, 25, 26, 32, 33, 34 and Part VI, The Vita Activa and the Modern Age, chapter 45. Recommended: Dana Villa, “Totalitarianism, Modernity, and the Tradition,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, (Berkeley UP, 2001) (on reserve) On politics as requiring not just acting or speaking but also listening, Susan Bickford, “In the Presence of Others,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt

Th. Nov. 3 – NO CLASS (writing weekend) TUESDAY Nov. 8, WRITING SESSION, III (15%) (Final meeting on Arendt’s philosophical text: The Human Condition)

READ: Neve Gordon, “The Human Condition under Occupation” (Blackboard) WRITE: a 2-3 page paper assessing Gordon’s use of Arendtian categories from The Human Condition for purposes of analyzing contemporary Israel/Palestine politics. (How) Does the example (Israel/Palestine politics) vivify the work of theory (THC), and/or vice versa? Or is it misleading? Week 8-9: 4 sessions: 3 reading, 1 writing Thurs. Nov. 10, Tues. Nov. 15, Thurs. Nov. 17, Tues. Nov. 22 How to Judge the Unprecedented? Or, War Crimes and the Trials of Judgment and Nation-Building “war is a violent teacher”… “words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book III, 3.82-[4]

II. Eichmann in Jerusalem “When do intellectual or scholarly disputes become the stuff of public controversy?” Anson Rabinbach (http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704774115735 - p. 7). Thurs. Nov. 10 -- Historical and contemporary context

(i) Contretemps: exchange of letters with Gershom Scholem (Blackboard) (ii) Amos Elon, The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt, at

http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/classics/essays/eichmann.html And/or see also Amos Elon, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/nov/06/the-case-of-hannah-arendt/

(iii) “Is Hannah Arendt a Nazi?” Letter in Le Nouvel Observateur, Oct. 26, 1966

Recommended: *ANSON RABINBACH, “Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy” (Blackboard) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/audio/2011/aug/17/big-ideas-podcast-banality-of-evil Judith Butler, chapter on Arendt’s Eichmann (MS)

Moshe Zimmerman, “Hannah Arendt, the Early ‘Post-Zionist,’” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven Aschheim (on reserve). Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, chapter 7 Seyla Benhabib, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem , Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Villa (on reserve) Tues. Nov 15 VIEW: The Specialist, dir. Sivan (Blackboard; excerpts to be re-screened in class) READ: (i)comments excerpted re the film (Blackboard) (ii)Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial Fifty Years Later (2011) (on reserve), Chapters One and Two (iii)Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapters 1, 2, 3, 8 and pp. 190-194 Recommended: (i)Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial Fifty Years Later (entire) (on reserve). (ii)Kristeva, Chapter Two, “Superfluous Humanity” (excerpt: 143-154), Hannah Arendt (Blackboard) READING QUESTION: Judith Butler says Hannah Arendt in the closing pages of her Eichmann book adopts a sovereign voice, notwithstanding her own critiques of sovereignty. Butler has in mind pp 277-279 in particular. Reread them. What do you make of Arendt’s adoption of the judicial persona in these pages? Is it a betrayal of her critique of sovereignty in The Human Condition and in her Jewish Writings? Why (not)? Thurs. Nov 17

(i) Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapters 14, 15, Epilogue, and postscript (ii) Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, chapter 4 excerpt:132-159 (end at last break:

at “convert this narrative possibility into legal meaning”) (Blackboard) Recommended: *Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, chapter 8. Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt's challenge to Adolf Eichmann, The Guardian, U Mon., Aug, 29, 2011, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/hannah-arendt-adolf-eichmann-banality-of-evil Michael Ignatieff, “Arendt’s Example,” Hannah Arendt Prize Ceremony Bremen, November 28, 2003. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/pdf/arendt.24.11.03.pdf Steven E. Aschheim, “Nazism, Culture and the Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil,” New German Critique 70 (Winter 1997) (Blackboard) Steven E. Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles (on reserve) Tues Nov 22 - WRITING SESSION, IV (15%)

READ: (i)Bilsky, Leora, "Judging Evil in the Trial of Kastner," Law and History Review 19 (2001) (Blackboard) (ii)David Luban, “A Man Lost in the Gray Zone” (response to Bilsky) http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/19.1/luban.html (Blackboard) Recommended: *Zygmunt Baumann, “the ‘save what you can’ game,” Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 129-142 (Blackboard). Lida Maxwell, “Toward an agonistic understanding of law: Law and politics in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Contemporary Political Theory, 2012 (Blackboard) Write: In the debate between Bilsky and Luban regarding how to read the Eichmann trial, which position do you find most and least persuasive and why? Take a position on Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, using any of the previous sources and any of the following questions or others of your own: Arendt is accused at least twice in the literature of heartlessness: Once by Scholem who says she lacks empathy and love for the Jewish people. Once by Felman, who says she lacks feeling for K-Zetnick, the witness at the trial who fainted on the stand. What do you make of the charges of “heartlessness?” How do they help or hinder our consideration of the politics of this trial in particular and of war crimes trials more generally? (Note: David Luban, in the assigned reading, also notes the charge of heartlessness – albeit directed elsewhere: Israeli historian Tom Segev says that Judge Halevi opinion in the Kastner case is "one of the most heartless in the history of Israel, perhaps the most heartless ever”). What should we make of the fact that the Kastner and Eichmann trials seem to be about more than the guilt or innocence of a defendant? Does this corrupt or fulfill the proper purpose of a trial? Consider here Arendt’s criticism of the prosecution for politicizing the trial and her own (seemingly contradictory) political closing of the book in which she calls for Eichmann to be killed on different grounds than those invoked by the Court. According to both Bilsky and Luban, the Kastner trial “involves a confrontation between conflicting images: the traditional Diaspora Jew who seeks an accommodation with a hostile environment and the “new Jew” rooted in the soil of the homeland, whose behavior, according to the Zionist narrative, exemplifies physical courage and self-sacrifice. The failure to resist appears as a fault of the victims, for which the leadership is guilty . . .The Eichmann trial, by way of contrast, presents the survivors as heroes who have withstood the suffering inflicted by the Gentiles. Deemphasized are divisive issues, such as Jewish collaboration, which Judge Halevi, who had sat on the bench in the Kastner case, as he did on the three-judge trial panel in the Eichmann trial, sought to raise, and which were so prominent in the Kastner trial” (Shapiro on Bilsky, Transformative Justice http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/bilsky505.htm. Might we conclude from this that Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is a Zionist book?

What does Arendt mean by the “banality of evil” and do you, like others, find the phrase offensive? Or enlightening? Does it suit Kastner and Eichmann, either or neither? Bilsky calls attention to the importance of framing, imagery and metaphor in the supposedly neutral fact-finding process of adjudicating guilt or innocence. Is she right? Should we conclude from this that trials are all about framing and facts are unimportant? Recommended: Leora Bilsky, “The Eichmann Trial and the Legacy of Jurisdiction” in Politics in Dark Times, ed Seyla Benhabib (198-218) (on reserve). HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

III. Natality is not for Children: Children in Politics and the Politics of Sacrifice

Tues. Nov 29 – READING AND WRITING SESSION, V (15%) (READING WEEK) READ: (i) Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in Responsibility and Judgment (Blackboard) (ii)Ralph Ellison, response, “Who Speaks for the Negro?” 434-4 (Blackboard) (iii) Arendt, letter to Ellison, July 19, 1965 (Papers of Hannah Arendt, Library of Congress, Box 9, 4C) (Blackboard) and “Reply to Critics” Dissent VIEW: The now iconic photograph of a girl trying to go to school, which occasioned Arendt’s essay (Blackboard) WRITE: a 2-3 page position paper on this issue, considering any of the following questions. This is your final piece of writing for this class In this contretemps with Ellison, who is right, in your view? Are there Arendtian grounds (drawing on The Human Condition or Origins of Totalitarianism or essays from The Jewish Writings) for endorsing (rather than as Arendt does here, condemning) the politicization of children? What might be the best Arendtian arguments for or against such politicization? (How) might these arguments apply (or not) to the activism of children in Israel and Palestine today? How might Arendt’s distinctions between public and private, social and political, come under pressure in relation to the particular contexts of the Little Rock protests or other scenes of political resistance or civil disobedience? In her “Reflections,” Arendt imagines herself in the position of the mother of the young girl (an African American) and in the position of a white mother. But the photograph depicts a white man offering some protection to the young African American student under pressure from a hostile crowd. What do you make of the fact that Arendt, who was not a mother, imagines herself in the maternal position? Do you think the photograph

incites such a response from the viewer? Does Arendt’s own political theory incite such a response in the thinker? Thinking back to Arendt’s own Jewish Writings, why do you think she might have been open to Ellison’s invocation of a politics of sacrifice? Recommended: Robert Bernasconi, “The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions,” Research in Phenomenology, 26, 1996, 3-24 (*esp.sections I and III). *“Kirstie McClure, “The Odor of Judgment” (Blackboard) Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Political Children” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt Danielle Allen, “Little Rock, a New Beginning” in Talking to Strangers (on reserve) Jerome Kohn, “Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Experience: Thinking, Acting, Judging” (Thinking in Dark Times) (on reserve). ARENDT BIO: Hannah Arendt was born October 14, 1906, Hannover, Germany, and died December 4, 1975, in New York. She was a German-born American political theorist known for her critical writing on Jewish affairs, her study of totalitarianism, and her distinctive contributions to 20th century political theory, criticizing what she took to be that discipline’s usual focus on states, sovereignty, and violence as its prime subject matter and promoting instead a focus on power, collective action and the plight of stateless persons. Arendt grew up in Hannover, Germany, and in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). Her father died when she was a young child. Beginning in 1924 she studied philosophy at the Universities of Marburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg. At Marburg she began a romantic relationship with her teacher, Martin Heidegger, that lasted until 1928, when she moved to work with Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. In 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and began implementing Nazi educational policies as rector of Freiburg. Jaspers, whose wife was Jewish, managed to survive the war without complicity. In September 1929, Arendt married Günther Stern, who wrote under the name of Günther Anders. That year, she also completed her dissertation on the idea of love in the thought of St. Augustine and earned her doctorate. However, the rising anti-Semitism afflicting the German polity distracted her from metaphysics and compelled her to face the historical dilemma of German Jews. By writing a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish salon hostess in Berlin in the early 1800s, Arendt sought to understand how her subject's conversion to Christianity and repudiation of Jewishness illuminated the conflict between minority status and German nationalism. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was not published until 1958. As the National Socialists grasped power, Arendt became a political activist and, beginning in 1933, helped the German Zionist Organization and its leader, Kurt Blumenfeld, to publicize the plight of the victims of Nazism. She also did research on

anti-Semitic propaganda, for which she was arrested by the Gestapo. But when she won the sympathy of a Berlin jailer, she was released and escaped to Paris, where she remained for the rest of the decade. Working especially with Youth Aliyah, Arendt helped rescue Jewish children from the Third Reich and bring them to Palestine. In Paris, she met Heinrich Blücher, a formally uneducated Berlin proletarian, a communist who had been a member of Rosa Luxemburg's defeated Spartacus League, and a gentile. After both had divorced, Arendt married Blücher on January 16, 1940. When the Wehrmacht invaded France less than half a year later, the couple was separated and interned in southern France along with other stateless Germans. Arendt was sent to a camp at Gurs, from which she escaped. She soon joined her husband, and in May 1941, both managed to reach neutral America, where her mother was able to reunite with them. While living in New York during the rest of World War II, Arendt envisioned the book that became The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was published in 1951, exactly a decade after she arrived in the United States and the same year she secured United States citizenship. From two separate launching pads, Arendt's career as an American intellectual took off. Her writing appeared early in Jewish journals such as Jewish Social Studies, and she was befriended by the editor and historian Salo W. Baron and his wife, Jeanette M. Baron. In magazines such as Jewish Frontier and Aufbau [Reconstruction], Arendt argued on behalf of a Jewish army and expressed the hope that Arabs and Jews might live together in a postwar Palestinian state. She also served as an editor at Schocken Books, a German Jewish publishing firm that reestablished itself in New York and in Palestine, and brought to the attention of English readers the diaries of Franz Kafka and the fin de sìecle Jewish polemics of Bernard Lazare. After the Holocaust, Baron put Arendt in charge of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, the effort to locate and redistribute the shards of Judaic artifacts and other treasures that had been salvaged from a doomed civilization. Her second launching pad was a circle of mostly leftist intellectuals associated with Partisan Review, especially non-Jews such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy. The critic Alfred Kazin, however, was also invaluable in enhancing the prose of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the work that made Arendt an intellectual celebrity in the early years of the Cold War. No book was more resonant or impressive in tracing the steps toward the distinctive twentieth-century tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, or in measuring how grievously wounded Western civilization and the human status itself had become. She demonstrated how embedded racism was in Central and Western European societies by the end of the nineteenth century, and how imperialism experimented with the possibilities of unspeakable cruelty and mass murder. The third section of her book exposed the operations of "radical evil," arguing that the huge number of prisoners in the death camps marked a horrifying discontinuity in European history itself. Totalitarianism put into practice what had been imagined only in the medieval depictions of hell. In the 1950s, The Origins of Totalitarianism engendered much doubt, especially by drawing parallels between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia (despite their obvious ideological conflicts and their savage warfare from 1941 to 1945). The parallelism continues to stir skepticism in some readers, especially because of the unavailability and unfamiliarity of Russian sources when the book was researched and written. But Arendt's emphasis on the plight

of the Jews amid the decline of Enlightenment ideals of human rights, and her insistence that the Third Reich was conducting two wars—one against the Allies, the other against the Jewish people—have become commonplaces of Jewish historiography. Much of her book is stunningly original, and virtually every paragraph is ablaze with insight. More than any other scholar, Arendt made meaningful and provocative the idea of "totalitarianism" as a novel form of autocracy, as springing from subterranean sources within Western society, but pushing to unprecedented extremes murderous fantasies of domination and revenge. An expanded edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1958, taking into account the Hungarian Revolution of two years earlier. Arendt's next three books--The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), and On Revolution (1968)--could be characterized by a yearning to reconstruct political philosophy rather than to explore the devolution of political history. The Human Condition, in particular, was a wide-ranging and systematic treatment of what Arendt called the vita activa (Latin: “active life”). She defended the classical ideals of work, citizenship, and political action against what she considered a debased obsession with the mere needs of biological life (food, reproduction) and modern consumerism.Remarkably enough, in 1963 she also published what proved to be the most controversial work of her career: Eichmann in Jerusalem. In 1960, Israeli security forces had captured the S.S. lieutenant colonel who had been responsible for transporting Jews to the death camps. The following year, he was tried in Israel, where Arendt covered the trial as a correspondent for The New Yorker. Her articles were then revised and expanded for Eichmann in Jerusalem. Highly controversial, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) argued that Eichmann's crimes resulted not from a wicked or depraved character but from sheer “thoughtlessness”: he was an ambitious bureaucrat who failed to reflect on the enormity of what he was doing. His role in the mass extermination of Jews epitomized “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” that had spread across Europe at the time. Arendt was denounced by both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals who insisted it was important to see Eichmann as “inwardly” evil. In the domain of Political Theory, Arendt was read in the later 60’s-90’s mostly as a Grecophilic or republican theorist of action and activism in a US context. Her Jewish writings and her wartime past were utterly neglected. There are likely two overlapping but distinct reasons for this. One (intimated by Ron H Feldman in the introduction to The Jewish Writings) is that she was so thoroughly castigated by and virtually excommunicated from the Jewish community in the US after her Eichmann book that her Jewish writings simply fell out of account and she further allowed this to happen by ceasing (after being booed at a lecture in which she praised Judah Magnes’ alternative to Herzlian Zionism) to speak publicly about Jewish matters altogether. Two, the 60’s-90’s were a period in which multiculturalism had not really had an impact in political theory and the religious and other biographical details of a theorist’s life were considered, in any case, in every case, to be quite irrelevant to their work in political theory. The irony is, that in the absence of such details, this particular theorist of political action was read without anyone situating her in her own action context. Sources (amended and augmented): bio.com: http://www.biography.com/articles/Hannah-Arendt-9187898 and Jewish Virtual Library

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