Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on FilmIn 1963,The current Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, and a Gestapo division in charge of “Jewish Affairs.” Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt,the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and unleashed what Irving Howe called a “civil war” among current York intellectuals. While some reviews cursed Arendt as a self-hating Jew and Nazi lover,the Jewish Daily Forward accusing her of “polemical vulgarity,” Robert Lowell termed her portrayal of Eichmann a “masterpiece, and ” and Bruno Bettelheim said it was the best protection against dehumanizing totalitarianism.” Across the city,Arendt’s friends chose sides. When Dissent sponsored a meeting at the Hotel Diplomat, a crowd gathered to shout down Alfred Kazin and Raul Hilberg—then the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholar—for defending Arendt, and while in The Partisan Review Lionel Abel opined that Eichmann “comes off so much better in [Arendt’s] book than enact his victims.” …
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