Volume 5, Number 7 · November 11, 1965
Footnotes to the Holocaust
By Walter Laqueur
And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, The Jewish Catastrophe and Hannah Arendt's Narrative
by Jacob Robinson
Macmillan, 406 pp., $6.95
The storm that followed the publication of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem raged for a long time; it provoked violent denunciation or emphatic assent; it even, I am told, poisoned personal relations among intellectuals in New York and to a lesser degree elsewhere. Above all, it drew attention to the many controversial issues in the as yet unwritten history of the Jewish catastrophe during the Second World War. The Arendt debate generated more heat than light; precisely because passions ran so strongly, historical truth at times suffered. It also seems, in retrospect, that a great many people felt impelled to take a position without sufficient knowledge to support their arguments. This does not mean that discussion of the Jewish fate in Europe should be restricted to the professional students of that period; this would be about as absurd as the attempt to confine the discussion of the outstanding political issues of our time to political scientists. But a minimum of factual knowledge is needed to make a genuine contribution to the debate if it is not to turn, as it has done on occasion, into a controversy about moral (or political) dilemmas in general, without reference to time, place, and circumstance.
Review, 2824 words
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