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On the subject of her work, the biographer, Arendt's former graduate student and now a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, is a little too charmed. "One of the qualities [she] most saliently lacked," notes Young-Bruehl, "was moderation in discourse." That is like saying that the Himalayas lack flatness. In her 1959 article "Reflections on Little Rock," Arendt attacked school integration: "Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world?" Four years later, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt decided that Nazi villainy was one of process, not people. Eichmann the war criminal was no monster; he was, instead, an instance of the "banality of evil." More offensive, in the eyes of many scholars and critics, was her charge that the Jewish councils of Europe met the Hitlerian threat with passivity and thus shouldered a burden of guilt in the "final solution." The fury that greeted her work still echoes. She was called a Jewish anti-Semite, a peddler of "pseudo-profundity." Historian Barbara Tuchman (The Guns of August) accused her of a "conscious desire to support Eichmann's defense."
Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz referred to Arendt's deliberate "perversity." Of all these furious counterattacks, Young-Bruehl comments disingenuously, "The low intellectual level of the controversy was largely determined by the editorial policies of the major magazines and journals."
Unhappily, about some subjects a lofty analysis is not always possible. Mass murder is one of them. Arendt's reputation never really recovered from her most discussed and least significant book. Yet even in Eichmann she aimed not for heat but for light. As Hannah Arendt makes clear, the writer did not wish to mitigate radical evil but to trace its genealogy back to the roots. Her attackers never quite appreciated her resolve; but then, she never fully understood those Holocaust survivors who were reinjured by her charges.
To the end, widowed and alone, despite incessant and often unfair criticism, she continued to work, the avian eyes considering the world. On the night of her death in New York City, in 1975, a paper was rolled into her typewriter, the first page of a final book. The title was Judging.
—By Stefan Kanfer
Excerpt
" 'I said to myself: if it is possible to do so decently, I would really like, still, to stay in this world.' This calm acceptance and appreciation of life ... echoed through her work for years. It deeply informed Eichmann in Jerusalem but it was most obvious in an essay she wrote about Pope John XXIII, whose funeral was held in Rome while Arendt was there in the summer of 1963, vacationing after the publication of the Eichmann book. She described this simple, proud, self-confident Pope, a man whose willingness to judge and to trust his judgments was remarkable, and she found his faith inspiring. This faith, she felt, was manifest in the words he spoke on his deathbed, 'his greatest words.' 'Every day is a good day to be born, every day is a good day to die."