This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
What a meaningful coincidence this week – the release of a new film on the ever controversial Hannah Arendt and the awarding of an honorary Doctorate to the newly controversial Judith Butler.
The media is having a field day with both. They’re certainly worth the attention.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Arendt’s reporting on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. According to the reviews, the film focuses on her reporting and its aftermath. I’ve been writing about Arendt for decades and know her vilification by the Jewish establishment well. It wasn’t pretty.
What Arendt was accused of then is more or less what Butler is accused of today.
With Arendt, it was her analysis of Eichmann and the Holocaust. She downplayed Eichmann as a faceless bureaucrat rather than a vicious Jew-hater. Arendt had a word or two as well about the Jewish Councils of Europe’s ghettoized Jewish communities. She thought they were compliant enablers of the destruction of Europe’s Jews.
With Butler, it is about her recent book on Israel. Butler exposes Israel’s misbehavior and imagines a future beyond a Jewish state. Butler’s pioneering feminism rode a wave of freedom consciousness. On Israel, she’s flying against strong headwinds.
Those who predict the demise of Jewish dissent – the end of the Jewish prophetic – should think again. Fifty years apart, Arendt and Butler represent the flowering of the Jewish prophetic in our time.
There’s another connection, though evidently downplayed in the movie’s interpretation of Arendt’s life. Arendt’s troubles with the Jewish establishment didn’t begin with her reporting on the Eichmann trial in 1963. They began earlier in 1948, when she opposed the creation of Israel as a Jewish state.
It’s amazing to read the commentary on both Arendt and Butler fifty years apart. Both are accused of wanting to destroy Israel. Both are considered self-hating Jews. The vitriol hasn’t changed. The Jewish establishment is still out for blood.
Arendt and Butler stand as bookends to the post-Holocaust Jewish drama. Arendt predicted that Israel, formed as a Jewish state, would become a modern day Sparta. Dissent about Israel would be forbidden.
Butler’s book confirms that Arendt’s predictions have come true – on both counts.
Little has changed in the last fifty years – except everything. The Eichmann trial galvanized support for Israel in Europe and America via the Holocaust. The experience of Sparta Israel has shattered Israel’s claim as a redemptive response to the Holocaust.
The idea of Israel as representing hope in a difficult world is now absent even from those who vilified Arendt then and vilify Butler today.
Arendt predicted the darkness to come. Butler is a shining a light in darkness arrived.
“Little has changed in the last fifty years – except everything. ”
“Vindicated causes are easy to endorse” says Andrew del Banco. Israel used to be vindicated. Now it is losing that status.
”Those who predict the demise of Jewish dissent – the end of the Jewish prophetic – should think again. Fifty years apart, Arendt and Butler represent the flowering of the Jewish prophetic in our time.”
I dont know that anyone predicted the total end of Jewish dissent…..but the problem is there arent enough them and most importantly they arent ‘in charge’ of the Jewish establishment (the political one).
I think they are growing but I dont know how they will ever seize the political power they need to prevail from the Zionist.
“The idea of Israel as representing hope in a difficult world is now absent even from those who vilified Arendt then and vilify Butler today.
Arendt predicted the darkness to come. Butler is a shining a light in darkness arrived.”
Nice to think these hopeful thoughts. I fear, tho, that Israel still represents “hope” (or “need” or “desperation”) to many Jews; and among them are those who empower AIPAC. And I know from those of my friends who are blissfully ignorant of events in I/P, that many Jews (especially “of a certain age”) also love Israel. They know it in their hearts and don’t know any facts.
“Those who predict the demise of Jewish dissent – the end of the Jewish prophetic – should think again.”
Agreed. Zionism ran a tight ship for a long time but the hasbara is dying and there is leakage all over the place. Careers have been destroyed so many times but it is coming to an end now. For all of the bluster and bravado, people like Oren and Netanyahu are just thugs who are now out of their depth.
More dissent please.
excellent. i’ll have to take my kids to the arendt bio-pic. i’m sure it will be as well attended as the sold-out local premiere of ‘fast 6′ we enjoyed so much. (i always appreciate ellis’ posts, but does he really need the ‘great man’ endorsement of butler to “confirm[] that Arendt’s predictions have come true”?)
just as interesting as Arendt’s opinion of Sparta-Israel are her general insights into the predicaments of modernity, which seem to be applicable to autistic Israel, the Israel in a bubble described by Diana Pinto.
The twentieth century philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard are rarely connected, yet there are significant areas of overlap regarding their account of consumerism and our consumers’ society. Both explain the recent trend of making what is private become public: Baudrillard describes this as making the private ‘explicit,’ while Arendt outlines the modern ascent of the activities of the private realm or oikos into the public realm. Secondly, both observe that human relations have been altered and are increasingly mediated by objects. For Baudrillard this entails an eclipse of reality, while for Arendt it entails a loss of the polis and life in the public realm. Hannah Arendt opens The Human Condition with a description of Sputnik, an exemplar for all that is wrong and dangerous in modernity. The passengers on this “earth-born object made by man”[5] would be the first to fully inhabit a realm entirely of human creation, in which humans were released from the confines of the human condition of earthly existence to fully enter the realm of the human artifice. For Arendt, this event, a “rebellion against human existence as it has been given”[6], indicates the magnitude of our worldly alienation. This rebellion means the loss of the polis and erosion of speech, in which we “adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful,” and “move in a world where speech has lost its power.”
Israel, the technophiliac, israelis floating in space, launched in a metaphorical sputnik. that sounds about right, and it would go along way towards explaining the lunacy and lack of empathy.