A very interesting piece appeared in Slate magazine about Hannah Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger and anti-Semitic thought. I was quite convinced by the discussion of Arendt’s “banality of evil” phrase with regard to the Eichmann trial. But then the author, Ron Rosenbaum, goes out on a strange and offensive limb:

It may forever remain a mystery, even more so now. Wasserstein believes she internalized anti-Semitic literature; I would perhaps modify this to say she internalized the purported universalism of Germanic high culture with its disdain for parochialism. A parochialism she identified with, in her own case, her Jewishness, something she felt ashamed of on intellectual grounds, so primitive, this tribal allegiance in the presence of intellects who supposedly transcended tribalism (or at least all tribes except the Teutonic).

One can still hear this Arendtian shame about ethnicity these days. So parochial! One can hear the echo of Arendt’s fear of being judged as “merely Jewish” in some, not all, of those Jews so eager to dissociate themselves from the parochial concerns of other Jews for Israel. The desire for universalist approval makes them so disdainful of any “ethnic” fellow feeling. After all, to such unfettered spirits, it’s so banal.

Never mind the fact that people of Jewish heritage have rejected the xenophobia and particularism of Jewish tradition since before the Holocaust, before Arendt and within other, non-German schools of thought! And never mind the fact that the State of Israel is a new “homeland,” from which few Diaspora Jews can say their families emigrated. Is it really “the desire for universalist approval? What about the sincere adoption of universalist values? I think Rosenbaum’s suggestion is dangerously close to a racist one. We should be able to adopt universalism without being questioned on the basis of ethnic background.

Ah well, today’s news demonstrates (in case it was needed) the dangers of Jewish particularism in the modern world. Shin Bet has arrested a Jewish terrorist from a West Bank settlement who is accused of murdering Palestinians and attempting to murder Messianic Jews and at least one Israeli universalist. This is what happens when a people is chosen, a state must maintain ethnic purity, etc.