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l e o n b o t s t e i n Liberating the Pariah P O L I T I C S , T H E J E W S , A N D H A N N A H A R E N D T The essay that follows is a condensed version of a piece written not long after Hannah Arendt’s death in 1975. The original essay took its impetus from a request from Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic, that I review Ronald H. Feldman’s pioneering collection of Arendt’s writings, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (1978), which now exists in an expanded version, The Jewish Writings, edited by Feldman and Jerome Kohn (2007). Peretz published the review as a cover essay in The New Republic in 1978. I was then encouraged to expand and revise the essay for publication elsewhere, and the most complete version of the piece appeared in Salmagundi in 1983.1 The essay escaped the notice of all but a few. My disadvantage was that Jewish history and politics were never my fields. As an outsider without standing in these disciplines, there was no scholarly or political reason for my essay to be remembered. When the editors of this new volume asked me to contribute to it, I briefly considered writing something new, but in the end thought better of the idea. Since the original, full-length version of the following essay disappeared without much of a trace, I thought that reviving it in summary form, if only for archaeological purposes, might be more useful. What qualifies me to publish another version of the essay? Insofar as there might be a positive answer to these questions, I submit the following. When I arrived at the University of Chicago as a sixteen-year-old freshman, I went to hear Arendt speak in defense of her Eichmann book. She had already come under public severe attack, even from the audience that evening. At the end of the lecture I introduced myself. She took a liking to me (even though it was difficult for me to convince her I was not a German Jew, but a descendant of Polish and Russian Jews), came to concerts I gave, and became an important figure in my undergraduate experience. She encouraged me to take courses from people whom I would otherwise never have thought of studying with, including Leo Strauss, whom she admired but with whom she disagreed. She read and helped me on my senior honors essay on Max Weber. Proof of her interest can be found in the now-published correspondence between Arendt and Karl Jaspers. Facing: Cover of Hannah Arendt’s copy of Rahel Varnhagen. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection, Stevenson Library, Bard College. 12 Politics, the Jews, and Hannah Arendt My relationship with Arendt derived not only from my role as a student , but also as the grandson and nephew of survivors and victims of the Holocaust. She knew that in 1939 my grandfather had refused the position of head of the Jewish Council in Lodz and fled from Poland to Russia in full recognition of the potential danger of collaborating with the Nazis. My grandfather , Maksymilian Wyszewianski, who survived and ultimately immigrated to New York in his late eighties during the early 1960s, was the first to bring my attention to Arendt’s New Yorker articles on the Eichmann trial. I was in high school, and since his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto and labor camp were a crucial part of our contact with one another, he recommended the articles with the observation that what Arendt had written was the most honest and perceptive thing he had ever read about the Holocaust. For those of us who were born abroad after the war but grew up in America , our parents’ and grandparents’ experiences during the war years were the object of intense childhood fascination. The world from which my parents emerged no longer existed. There was no hometown to visit, no gymnasium or university friends; there were only fragments represented by the random selection of survivors who gathered every Sunday in my parents’ home in the Bronx. My grandfather—who studied philosophy and politics in Heidelberg, got his law degree from Kazan State University, and lived in prerevolutionary Moscow, where he married the granddaughter of the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Leib Abramovich Kan—was articulate, learned, and kind. He helped teach me Russian...

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