corrections, html, Arendt, Cesarani and Eichmann
some corrections on my poll post:
Bob Dylan scored pretty high--I just added him into my poll two posts below. Also, I added Wuthering Heights to my list of favorite books and found 3 friends agree.
In other exciting news . . or not so exciting news, perhaps. . . school is over. . .grades are coming in (so far so good, though the worst is yet to come). . . and I'm on a job hunt. . .hope to turn up something good soon.
In my quest to become a more well-rounded person I'm teaching myself HTML. So I'm creating my first webpage and finding it to be a lot easier and more fun than I'd imagined. . .
In this week's NYT Book Review, Barry Gwen reviews a new biography of Adolf Eichman: 'Becoming Eichman' by David Cesarani.
Cesarani admits that "anyone writing on the subject [of Eichmann] today works in the shadow of Hannah Arendt." But where "Cesarani believes his details add up to a portrait at odds with Arendt's banal bureaucrat," writes Gwen, "what is striking is how far his research goes to reinforce her fundamental arguments." Both Arendt and Cesarani, according to Gwen, were ultimately concerned with proving that Nazis were ordinary people, not monsters, as we would like to believe, and that in their very ordinariness lies the danger. The capacity for evil is not limited to people on the fringe, but is something that exists within each of us. "Under the right circumstances," writes Gwen, paraphrasing Cesarani's argument, "normal people will commit mass murder. . . and the circumstances of our age — with its racism, ethnic cleansing, suicide bombers and genocidal killings — are ominous."
Where Cesarani takes issue with Arendt, then, is in her disavowal of the Holocaust or anti-Semitism as a unique problem facing the Jewish people. According to Arendt, the Holocaust was a "crime against humanity perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people."
Gwen points to Gershom Scholem who took Arendt to task for her universalistic approach to the Holocaust, accusing her of a lack of Ahavat Yisrael. Arendt's response: "I have never in my life 'loved' any people or collective — neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love 'only' my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons."
Read the full review here
Bob Dylan scored pretty high--I just added him into my poll two posts below. Also, I added Wuthering Heights to my list of favorite books and found 3 friends agree.
In other exciting news . . or not so exciting news, perhaps. . . school is over. . .grades are coming in (so far so good, though the worst is yet to come). . . and I'm on a job hunt. . .hope to turn up something good soon.
In my quest to become a more well-rounded person I'm teaching myself HTML. So I'm creating my first webpage and finding it to be a lot easier and more fun than I'd imagined. . .
In this week's NYT Book Review, Barry Gwen reviews a new biography of Adolf Eichman: 'Becoming Eichman' by David Cesarani.
Cesarani admits that "anyone writing on the subject [of Eichmann] today works in the shadow of Hannah Arendt." But where "Cesarani believes his details add up to a portrait at odds with Arendt's banal bureaucrat," writes Gwen, "what is striking is how far his research goes to reinforce her fundamental arguments." Both Arendt and Cesarani, according to Gwen, were ultimately concerned with proving that Nazis were ordinary people, not monsters, as we would like to believe, and that in their very ordinariness lies the danger. The capacity for evil is not limited to people on the fringe, but is something that exists within each of us. "Under the right circumstances," writes Gwen, paraphrasing Cesarani's argument, "normal people will commit mass murder. . . and the circumstances of our age — with its racism, ethnic cleansing, suicide bombers and genocidal killings — are ominous."
Where Cesarani takes issue with Arendt, then, is in her disavowal of the Holocaust or anti-Semitism as a unique problem facing the Jewish people. According to Arendt, the Holocaust was a "crime against humanity perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people."
Gwen points to Gershom Scholem who took Arendt to task for her universalistic approach to the Holocaust, accusing her of a lack of Ahavat Yisrael. Arendt's response: "I have never in my life 'loved' any people or collective — neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love 'only' my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons."
Read the full review here
posted by shoshana at 3:46 PM
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