Irving Howe on Hannah Arendt

The American writer and founder of Dissent magazine Irving Howe wrote many of the best accounts of the controversy over Arendt’s publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. As the controversy swells yet again in the wake of the new movie “Hannah Arendt,” Dissent thankfully republishes an excerpt of Howe’s testamentary writing about Arendt.

My first encounter with Hannah had come in 1947 when she was editor of Schocken Books, the German-Jewish publishing house recently moved to New York. She needed a part-time assistant to do literary chores (copy for book jackets, cleaning up translations, and so forth), and for the handy sum of $150 a month I took the job. With it came the privilege of visiting Hannah at her office every week. She had not yet published her major work on totalitarianism, but everyone in the intellectual world respected her and some feared her. She liked to “adopt” young people, and while I was not one of her chosen—perhaps because I was deaf to philosophy, or had been contaminated by Marxism, or was visibly intent upon resisting her intellectual lures—she would take an hour off and talk to me about Kafka and Brecht, Yiddish folk tales and American politics.

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