Exile and the Prophetic: ‘Hannah Arendt’ and the future of conscious pariahs

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.

Hannah Arendt leaves us with the question of what it means to be Jewish in our time.  Though that’s not the intention of the film in the end there’s no other place to go. 

Whenever we think ‘Jewish’ will disappear, it reappears.  The prophetic is like that.  It flees the scene then unexpectedly returns. 

On the Jewish question, the charges against Arendt were extreme – she was a self-hating Jew without love for her own people.  The film faithfully records these charges.  Arendt doesn’t defend herself against these charges with florid prose.  She doesn’t defend herself at all. 

That Jewishness has anything to do with her thinking would surprise Arendt.   Nonetheless, when you spend the bulk of your thinking life on a subject at the base of your identity, an identity which forced you to flee Germany, escape internment in France and live the rest of your life in exile in the United States, it’s hard to escape the obvious conclusion.  Being a Jew defined with Hannah Arendt was.

Arendt’s Jewishness was the key that unlocked the world and her entry point into the public realm.  Arendt’s Jewishness is where she became well known and appreciated.  It is where she became infamous and disdained.  Arendt’s Jewishness was important for her admirers and detractors alike.   Arendt’s Jewishness energized her.

Unbeknownst to her and the film that carries her name, Arendt’s greatest feat was negotiating the Jewishness she took as a matter of fact. 

Arendt stands in the prophetic Jewish tradition though the word itself is hardly in Arendt’s lexicon.  Arendt’s stand-in for the prophetic is “conscious pariah.” The context of Arendt’s conscious pariah has Jewish content in the same way Arendt accepted her Jewishness – as a simple fact.   

For Arendt, Jews have often been pariahs but in recent centuries Jews have stood on the threshold of acceptance.  A conscious pariah is a Jew who stands on the border of European society and the Jewish community, feeling part of both and comfortable in neither.  A conscious pariah is a person who is neither an insider nor an outsider.  Being in between, conscious pariahs are aware of the strengths and pitfalls of the European and Jewish worlds. 

Pariahs have to be conscious because they aren’t fully accepted in either culture and, since they aren’t at home in either, don’t want to be.  Conscious pariahs can only survive and experience their desire for freedom by analyzing and thinking through their precarious situation. 

For Arendt, the in between status of conscious pariahs involves a responsibility as well.  Conscious pariahs have an obligation to think through issues that neither European nor Jewish culture, too ingrown and bound up in itself, can think through on their own. 

Of course, some pariahs are frivolous, taking their freedom without responsibility.  Arendt knows this.  But with Arendt, being in between is a calling.  Thinking beyond borders means acting on behalf of those denied a public voice and who exist on the margins of culture and society.  Being in between is thinking and acting on behalf of those who are suffering.

What is interesting here is that Arendt’s conscious pariah, seemingly distanced from the Jewish community and gravitating toward European non-Jewish culture, is actually refusing assimilation to either culture.  This is complex terrain but in general conscious pariahs aren’t content with the stability of either the Jewish or European models of right belief and right action.  By refusing to pledge loyalty to either, conscious pariahs choose the instability of marginality. 

Arendt contrasts conscious pariahs with socially ambitious parvenus.  Parvenus are Jewish upstarts, pretenders, social climbers who use wealth and social connections to ingratiate themselves to European culture and assert their leadership over the Jewish community.  Translated to our present scene, the Jewish supporters of Samantha Power – Abraham Foxman, Michael Oren and Alan Dershowitz for example – are parvenus.  Elie Wiesel is a parvenu.  The members of the entire Jewish establishment are parvenus.  They use their Jewishness to assimilate to power, at the present moment utilizing the Holocaust and Israel to facilitate that assimilation.

Jews of Conscience are Arendt’s conscious pariahs of our time.  The translation of Arendt’s analysis from Europe to America and Israel is a tricky one.   The reason is that for the first time in thousands of years, Jews as a collective have made it permanently into mainstream society in America and Israel.  Thus the border between American and Israeli mainstream culture and the Jewish community within both is blurred.

When Jews make it in society on a collective level and are succeeding and elevated as Jews, what option is there other than to thoroughly embrace the values of the culture Jews live in?  Being embraced, Jews embrace.  Thus, again for the first time in thousands of years, Jewish parvenus are less the exception than the norm.  This means that conscious pariahs, always a minority of Jews, are pitted against the majority of Jews who have made it.  

There are other complicating factors, beginning with an empowered Jewish state.  In general, however, rather than engaging in combat with the Jewish parvenu minority when the very idea of Jews is problematic in majority non-Jewish cultures, we live in a time when Jewish status is elevated.  But, then, again, this is the first time in Jewish history where conscious Jewish pariahs are able to fully join with other conscious pariahs across religious, ethnic and racial lines.  Among others, this includes Jews who identify and work with Palestinians and Christians and Muslims from various cultures and nationalities.

What is the future of the conscious pariahs of the world?  How can conscious pariahs serve others in the quest for justice in an unjust world?  Is there room for a specific identity among Jewish pariahs? 

Parvenus come in many sizes and colors.  Is the Jewish-identified Barack Obama a parvenu, being as it were vetted and welcomed by Jewish parvenus?  Watch Corey Booker, Mayor of Newark and candidate for the Senate from New Jersey, at a 2008 AIPAC summit as another fascinating example of the interplay of Jewish and African American parvenus.

Like Obama, Booker is an African American parvenu vetted and then welcomed at the summit of power by Jewish parvenus.  That indebtedness is the next phase of the Black-Jewish alliance.  African American and Jewish conscious pariahs should take notice.  Or is it already too late? 

Jewish parvenus are now the gatekeepers for pariahs who want to get through empire’s golden door.

Being governed, spied upon and mobilized by parvenus in line with what’s left of the old Protestant establishment, is that what conscious pariahs of all backgrounds are up against now?

The question now is where conscious pariahs from all backgrounds stand in between.

Hannah Arendt comes nowhere near these issues – at least directly.  Like any work of art, the film is sometimes direct, other times elusive. 

Nonetheless, Hannah Arendt should carry an epitaph for the future, placed either at the film’s beginning or end: 

With gratitude for the life of Hannah Arendt

Whenever we think ‘Jewish’ will disappear, it reappears. 

The prophetic is like that.  It flees the scene then unexpectedly returns.