At the end of the Second World War, the international military tribunal that met in Nuremberg for the trial of 22 major war criminals did not focus directly on the extermination of the Jews, in part because Eichmann had not been apprehended. Eichmann had headed Section B4 of the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office, or Reichssicherheitshauptamt), the branch charged with transporting the Jews of Europe to the death camps. With the help of the Nazi network, he had fled to Argentina, where he was joined by his wife and children and lived under an assumed name until his capture by the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, in April 1960. Some details of the capture were withheld for many years and were not yet public when Eichmann was brought to trial.
To apprehend prominent Nazis who had escaped judgment at Nuremberg, the German government created the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes. However, competing interests in Germany also favored obscuring the past, as every accused official was liable to implicate others who had attained respectability. It is now known that the Germans and the CIA were aware of Eichmann’s whereabouts and never acted on their information. When Fritz Bauer, a member of the German investigative commission, realized that his superiors were contriving not to go after Eichmann, he got the information to the Israelis, who captured him in Argentina and flew him to Jerusalem.
The trial itself was without precedent or parallel. The Israeli poet Natan Alterman wrote that it “would fill an eerie void that has been hidden somewhere in the soul of the Jewish people, in the history of its lives and deaths, ever since it went into exile.” The void he referred to could not have been filled previously because the Jews had never been in a position to prosecute their murderers. Now they were. Given that this was the first and, as seemed likely, the only time that Jewish survivors would be able to confront one of the individuals responsible for the murder of their relatives, the event assumed outsized importance.
I
When it became known that Hannah Arendt would be covering the trial for the New Yorker, there was great anticipation. “A foolproof choice,” wrote Marie Syrkin, one of American Jewry’s leading intellectuals. “Who better qualified to report on the trial in depth than Hannah Arendt, scholar, student of totalitarianism and of the human condition, and herself a German Jewish refugee who came to the United States after the rise of Hitler?”
Indeed, of all the German refugees who had been admitted to America just before or at the start of the war, none was better known or more widely admired than Arendt, who had been accepted by the New York intelligentsia not merely as one of their own, but as prima inter pares. Hence the shock when her articles appeared in February and March 1963 and then in the expanded book later that year. Rather than report on the trial as a journalist or observer, Arendt used it as an occasion to expand her theory about totalitarianism—the subject of her most ambitious book.
It was she who had approached William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, and her “coverage” did not appear until a year and a half after the trial had ended. By that time, Eichmann was stale news. What made it newsworthy was Hannah Arendt. She did not exonerate the defendant, as some would accuse her of doing. Instead, she redirected attention away from the evidence, trial, and indictment to her interpretation of the proceedings.
One does not read far in Arendt’s account before noting what provoked the hail of protest. Her opening paragraph assumes authority over the court and finds it wanting:
“Beit Hamishpath”—the House of Justice: these words shouted by the court usher at the top of his voice make us jump to our feet as they announce the arrival of the three judges, who, bareheaded, in black robes, walk into the courtroom from a side entrance to take their seats on the highest tier of the raised platform.…Directly below the judges are the translators, whose services are needed for direct exchanges between the defendant or his counsel and the court; otherwise, the German-speaking accused party, like almost everyone else in the audience, follows the Hebrew proceedings through the simultaneous radio transmission, which is excellent in French, bearable in English, and sheer comedy, frequently incomprehensible, in German. (In view of the scrupulous fairness of all technical arrangements for the trial, it is among the minor mysteries of the new State of Israel that, with its high percentage of German-born people, it was unable to find an adequate translator into the only language the accused and his counsel could understand. For the old prejudice against German Jews, once very pronounced in Israel, is no longer strong enough to account for it. Remains as explication the even older and still very powerful “Vitamin P,” as the Israelis call protection in government circles and the bureaucracy.)
Signaling her command over all the relevant languages—French, English, and German as well as Israeli slang (“Vitamin P”)—Arendt grumbles of unfairness to the defendant: With so many great German speakers available, why wasn’t he served as well as all the others listening to translations, especially as the matter concerned him? Besides disparaging Israel’s prejudices and culture of nepotism, she hears in the usher’s call to stand for the court an echo of militarism, “making us jump to our feet.” The implied parallel between Nazi Germany and Israel is picked up again when the prosecutor remarks that “we [i.e., the court] make no ethnic distinctions.” She is outraged by such a claim in Israel,
where rabbinical law rules the personal status of Jewish citizens, with the result that no Jew can marry a non-Jew; marriages concluded abroad are recognized, but children of mixed marriages are legally bastards (children of Jewish parentage born out of wedlock are legitimate), and if one happens to have a non-Jewish mother he can neither be married nor buried.…Whatever the reasons, there certainly was something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans.
There is indeed something breathtaking about a German-trained philosopher’s equation of Jewish religious practice with Hitler’s racial laws. Judaism’s religious civilization from biblical times to the present places Jews under special obligation to live as a people apart—a responsibility that may be shared by anyone who truly wishes to become a Jew (as did Ruth the Moabite, who became the progenitor of the Royal House of David) but is not binding on anyone else. Likening a people that behaves as the Jews do in history to the regime that intended to erase them is as odious as it is ignorant. At another point, Arendt referred to the German Reform Rabbi Leo Baeck, who accompanied his German community to Theresienstadt, as the Jewish “Fuhrer”—an impropriety that aroused so much indignation that she removed it in the revised edition of her book.1
What strikes one all these years later is Arendt’s rhetorical aggression and overt hostility to the proceedings. Still in the opening pages, Arendt observes that the auditorium being used as a courtroom
is not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnapped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in “the final solution of the Jewish question.” And Ben-Gurion, rightly called the “architect of the state,” remains the invisible stage manager of the proceedings. Not once does he attend a session; in the courtroom he speaks with the voice of Gideon Hausner, the Attorney General, who representing the government, does his best, his very best, to obey his master.
A show trial, the hallmark of Stalinist injustice, is a propaganda charade in which authorities have already determined the guilt of the innocent defendant. Arendt’s use of the term implies that the proceedings were rigged to prove the guilt of the accused. The phrase “invisible stage manager” conveys her sinister view of this trial—and, indeed, of the trial more than of the man on trial. One reviewer wondered what objection Arendt might have raised had Ben-Gurion attended the trial and influenced the outcome by showing up as the head of state. Arendt exempts from her contempt only the three judges. But for the rest, she makes it obvious that while she is persuaded that Eichmann deserves the death penalty, she is more personally invested in pointing out the legal flaws, irrelevance of much of the evidence, backwardness of the country (then only 13 years old), self-importance of the prime minister and prosecutor, and, as we shall see, the behavior of the Jews who were Nazism’s victims. Dyspeptic annoyance is the tone of the book throughout.
For a little perspective, we can compare this treatment with the reporting of the Israeli poet Haim Gouri, who published daily dispatches in a left-labor newspaper that were later collected into a book, Facing the Glass Booth. Gouri deliberately flattens his language to situate himself as a naive member of the press
He entered the glass booth at 8:55 a.m. with no warning. He just went in and sat down. Tall, thin, dressed in a dark suit, a well-pressed white shirt, and a tie. A tight-lipped policeman at either side. That was all.
A silence fell over the packed hall. No one called out. No one shouted. All eyes were fixed on him. People got up, took out notebooks, started to write without looking at what they were writing.
He sat still as a statue. What do we have here, an iron will to remain silent or the obtuseness of a man who does not realize who he is?
All stared at him, as if bewitched: Israelis and Europeans and Americans and Asians and Africans. Among them, many of his own people. Germans.
The silence lasted a full five minutes.
Like Arendt, Gouri is struck by the contrast between Eichmann’s apparent impassivity and the evils he is known to have committed, and, like her, he too later becomes agitated when the witnesses for the prosecution describe Jews herded to their death “like sheep to the slaughter.” But the report tracks his evolution. “Like everyone else present, I felt close to the line separating sanity from madness, but in my case it was for the first time,” he writes. “I felt I was beginning to comprehend the incomprehensible, however wide the gulf separating me from those who were there for even a single day.” Gouri is humbled as he follows the proceedings: “[We] who were outside that circle of death have forgiveness to ask of the numberless dead whom we have judged in our hearts without asking ourselves what right we have.” To state only the obvious, Gouri came to gain understanding, Arendt to impose her understanding on the trial. Gouri’s account follows the sequence of developments. Arendt surmises, synthesizes, and summarizes.
Gouri was writing for a Jewish readership in a Jewish language in a Jewish country, Arendt for the New Yorker. She did her research relating to the trial in Germany and most of the writing as a research scholar at Wellesley College. In her book on the Eichmann trial, the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out that Arendt left Jerusalem on May 10 and missed five weeks of witness testimony; she was also absent for the prosecution’s cross-examination when Eichmann was at his sharpest.
II
There were several kinds of objections to Arendt’s book. Specialists were appalled by her mistakes. These included the jurists Michael Musmanno, who had served as a presiding judge in the U.S. military court at Nuremberg, and Jacob Robinson, adviser to the American prosecutors at Nuremburg and one of the drafters of the 1952 reparations agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany. Musmanno wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the many errors of fact mean that the book “can hardly be accepted as an authoritative historical work.” Robinson, who came to America as a refugee from Lithuania about the same time that Arendt arrived from Germany, undertook to identify each and every one of those errors. Taking his title “And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight” from Isaiah 40, Robinson corrected not only her hundreds of “historical fallacies” but also Arendt’s references, asides, and literary effects.
Miss Arendt objects to calling Eichmann a “monster.” She tells us that the Attorney General charged, “And there sits the monster responsible for all this” (p. 6). In fact, he did not use the expression “monster,” nor did Mr. Hausner ever characterize Eichmann as “the most abnormal monster the world had ever seen” (p. 253). The Attorney General’s phrase (“a cruel and fanatical man, implacable in his enmity, this evil Eichmann”) was a paraphrase from the Book of Esther: “An adversary, an inimical man, this wicked Haman.” But even assuming the word “monster” had been used, it is difficult to accept Miss Arendt’s repudiation of the word as applied to Eichmann, and to believe with her that “Everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster’” (p. 49). How should we describe a man who, with fanatical zeal, tried to catch every last Jewish woman and every single Jewish child so that they might be butchered? The picture is even more horrifying if we accept Miss Arendt’s statement that Eichmann “had been shocked out of his wits” when he actually had to watch the executions in 1941 (p. 85). To have been present at such horrors and then to have seen to it that not a single family should escape the same fate—what word should we use to describe such a man?
Arendt found him banal.
One might have expected Robinson’s 400-page tome, 92 of them footnotes, to destroy Arendt’s standing, if not as a thinker then as a thinker on this subject. Yet far from damaging Arendt’s reputation, the torrent of corrections was interpreted by her defenders as proof that she was important for having provoked dispute where others believed the truth was settled. They considered the genius who dared to question received ideas ever so much greater than the scholarly Robinson who wanted to “help set straight the history of a tragic and difficult period.”
A second array of critics was stunned by Arendt’s moral and political inversion of prosecution and defense. The question of collaboration was everywhere the most distressing aspect of Nazi conquest, whether in France, Norway, Hungary, or in the Jewish ghettoes from which the Germans herded the Jews to the death camps. The most wounding part of Arendt’s report was her view of the Jewish Councils that the Nazis established in the countries they conquered. Marie Syrkin, who had so eagerly anticipated the report, said Arendt had transformed the trial of the Nazi henchman into an indictment of his victims, and she quoted Arendt in her own words to prove her point:
[The] whole truth was that there existed Jewish community organizations and Jewish party and welfare associations on both the local and the international level. Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and these leaders, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between five and six million.
Many others cited this same passage to contradict Arendt’s twice-repeated whole truth. It was pointed out that when the Einsatzgruppen, the SS mobile killing units, invaded Ukraine, they killed a million and a half Jews without the benefit of councils or “Jewish leaders.” In some places, the actual Jewish community leaders were the first to be murdered, and by the last stages of the war, over 80 percent of those installed by the Germans had not been in positions of leadership before the war. The playwright and intellectual Lionel Abel, roused to anger by the charge that Jewish communities had cooperated in their own destruction, wrote, “One might as well accuse the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima for having made their own deaths possible, since they lived in cities, and cities make the best targets.”
Scholars most closely identified with the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe felt personally stung by Arendt’s accusation. Isaiah Trunk, chief archivist of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (the main repository of Eastern European Jewish history), undertook what became the definitive study of the Judenrat, the German term for the Jewish Councils they established. Though Trunk’s book, Judenrat, contains much more damaging details than Arendt even hints at, its account of the varieties of local conditions exposes the crudeness of her generalization. Lucy Dawidowicz had more than Arendt in her sights when she wrote her magnificent 1975 history, The War against the Jews 1933–1945, but she, too, was driven to correct the malignant judgment of what were on the whole uncommonly decent communities. Even during the war, as Dawidowicz shows, diarists and historians had felt responsible for getting their own story out to the world; Arendt’s book demonstrated the urgent need to defend dead Jews from historical defamation.
Critics also zeroed in on the contrast between Arendt’s condemnation of the Jews under Nazism and her moderating impression of Eichmann. It must be said that in its eagerness to represent the entirety of the “Final Solution” in the courtroom, the prosecution had burdened the accused with more than his personal measure of culpability. The enormity of testimony by witnesses from the ghettoes and death camps pertained to more than the solitary individual in the dock. But stripped to its essentials, the trial portrayed an ambitious and able man who in the late 1930s had turned himself into an expert on “the Jewish question” by reading works of Zionism, visiting Palestine, and negotiating with officials in the Jewish community. By January 1942, Eichmann had become one of the key officers at the high-level Wannsee gathering where the extermination of the Jews was officially decided upon, and it was he who coordinated the transportation of the Jews to their places of execution.
Yet in place of this committed and zealous executive, charged with having caused, together with others, the deaths of millions of Jews, Arendt saw a dullard who remembered “only moods and the catch phrases he made up to go with them.” Her Eichmann was the dim-witted product of totalitarian bureaucracy. His admission of damning evidence merely convinced her that he had been too robotic to conceal it. The mass murderer who wanted to persuade the court that he was not the agent of his crimes found an ally in a philosopher who, to make her thesis work, needed to prove he lacked moral agency.
III
The least predictable reaction to Arendt’s book came from the intellectual circle around Partisan Review and Commentary, where she had flourished. During the late 1930s, the cohort that Irving Howe would later dub the “New York Intellectuals” had been conspicuously silent about the fate of European Jews and the embattled yishuv in Palestine, but by 1963, significant numbers of them had come to terms with their Jewishness. Many also looked up to Arendt as their better-schooled German-Jewish intellectual counterpart. They had never studied with, let alone befriended (or slept with) Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, or Karl Jaspers. Her Zionist credentials were likewise far better than theirs. Arendt had spent the years of their indifference involved with the work of Youth Aliyah, helping to get German youngsters to Palestine, out of Hitler’s reach.
One can therefore imagine their shock at her display of the anti-Jewish prejudices they had outgrown and by her contempt for the State of Israel they had come to admire. An article in Dissent by Michael Ezra notes that the group discovered in its ranks a previously unrecognized fault line between some of its Gentiles who defended Arendt and the Jews who criticized her.2 Ezra cites Mary McCarthy’s suspicions—“all too familiar in the context of today’s debates about the demonization of Israel—of a coordinated effort to conflate criticism with anti-Semitism.” What McCarthy actually witnessed in her Jewish colleagues was that they had come to care about being Jews and her friend Hannah had not.
One of the most enduring items in those polemics is the September 1963 Commentary essay “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,” by Norman Podhoretz, then editor of this magazine. It identified a new anti-Semitism igniting in the embers of the old. Podhoretz follows Arendt’s lead by noting exactly what sort of modern mind—namely, her modern mind—might have led to her conclusions:
What she has done…is translate this story for the first time into the kind of terms that can appeal to the sophisticated modern sensibility. Thus, in place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the “banal” Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the “collaboration” of criminal and victim.
Podhoretz draws attention to her technique of inversion by replicating her technique. Arendt said of Eichmann: Don’t think monster, think functionary; don’t think mass murderer, think organization man. Of Arendt, Podhoretz cautions the reader: Don’t think genius, think knee-jerk contrarian; don’t admire her originality, distrust her cleverness. Arendt found the Jerusalem court too parochial to appreciate the human condition. Podhoretz finds her universalistic distaste for the Jewish people perilously close to Nazism’s xenophobic aversion to the Jews. In sum, her report on the banality of evil demonstrated to him “the perversity of [her brand of] brilliance.”
Take Arendt’s claim that Jewish leadership cooperated with the Nazis “to a truly extraordinary degree.” Why consider it extraordinary? The policy of appeasement had been used by Western leaders as a perfectly traditional diplomatic tactic. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s mistake in applying it to the Nazis stemmed from the failure to recognize the “unprecedented and revolutionary nature of the Nazi regime.” Similarly with the role of the Jewish leaders forced to deal with Nazis bent on the destruction of their own people, “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” But no Diaspora Jewish community ever survived without institutions that cooperated with the powers that be, and Jewish communities were organized communities, thus inadvertently facilitating the Nazis’ work, because that is how Jews behave. “Why,” Podhoretz writes in astonishment, “she is saying that if the Jews had not been Jews, the Nazis would not have been able to kill so many of them—which is a difficult proposition to dispute.”
No less contrary was Arendt’s presentation of Eichmann as a novel type of totalitarian man:
[There] could hardly be a more telling example than this section of her book of the intellectual perversity that can result from the pursuit of brilliance by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle. The man around the corner who makes ugly cracks about the Jews is an anti-Semite, but not Adolf Eichmann who sent several million Jews to their death: that would be uninteresting and would tell us nothing about the Nature of Totalitarianism.
Do we not have Eichmann recorded saying, “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of 5 million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction?” Arendt dismisses that as the vice of bragging, which she thinks was Eichmann’s undoing. What about Eichmann’s insistence on carrying on with the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz even against the orders of his higher-up Heinrich Himmler that it be stopped? Arendt says he had become the thoroughgoing “idealist” who had really internalized his machinelike role as a functionary of Hitler’s regime.
No, says Podhoretz. “It finally refuses to wash. Only a vicious anti-Semite and eager murderer could have done what he did.” Later historians with fuller access to Eichmann’s taped interviews would conclude with Richard Wolin that “Eichmann gave the performance of his life, and Hannah Arendt was entirely taken in.”
Intelligence, cleverness, genius—these are the terms that intellectuals value, but Podhoretz is horrified by the corrupting use to which they have been put: “Now, if we are not to lose our own minds in the act of trying to penetrate into the psychology of the Nazi mind, we must be very careful to keep it clear that this item of the Nazi program—the ‘cleansing’ of Europe, and ultimately the whole world, of Jews—was literally insane. It is one thing to hate Jews, but it is quite another to contemplate the wholesale slaughter of Jews; it is one thing to believe that no nation-state can be healthy when it contains ‘alien’ elements, but it is quite another to decide upon the murder of eleven million people…as a means of achieving ethnic homogeneity.”
The more ingeniously Arendt substitutes her theory of dullness for evil and coerced compliance for cruel agency, the more clearly Podhoretz gets back to the categories of right and wrong and the distinctions—not the similarities!—between them.
Arendt’s book alerted these members of the American Jewish intelligentsia to how conservatively they thought by comparison. Lionel Abel emphasized her substitution of aesthetics for politics and morality: “To make moral or political judgments one has to investigate and discuss the actual political and moral alternatives, and this Miss Arendt has not done…” Himself a writer on art and aesthetics, Abel asks, when it comes to the extermination of millions, “does it seem proper that the executioner and his host of victims should be judged in aesthetic rather than in moral or political terms?” Typically, the Americans insisted on maintaining the categories of truth and justice even when there was no possibility of attaining any semblance of justice for the murdered Jews.
Arendt’s report was likewise one of the sparks that drove Saul Bellow to create as the protagonist of his 1969 novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a Jewish Holocaust survivor on New York’s Upper West Side who can speak with an insider’s authority about the war. Artur Sammler, named for the philosopher Schopenhauer, is an intellectual in his own right whose niece is keen to discuss with him Arendt’s thesis about Eichmann. “The idea being, that here is no great spirit of evil. Those people were too insignificant, Uncle,” Sammler’s niece argues. “They were just ordinary lower-class people, administrators, small bureaucrats, or Lumpenproletariat. A mass society does not produce great criminals. It’s because of the division of labor all over society which broke up the whole idea of general responsibility. Piecework did it. It’s like instead of a forest with enormous trees, you have to think of small plants with shallow roots. Modern civilization doesn’t create great individual phenomena any more.”
However reluctant the gentlemanly Mr. Sammler may be to antagonize his relative, he cannot restrain his (or his author’s) anger: “The idea of making the century’s great crime look dull is not banal,” Sammler responds.
Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite? With horrible political insight they found a way to disguise the thing. Intellectuals do not understand. They get their notions about matters like this from literature. They expect a wicked hero like Richard III. But do you think the Nazis didn’t know what murder was? Everybody (except certain bluestockings) knows what murder is. That is very old human knowledge. The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred. To defy that old understanding is not banality. There was a conspiracy against the sacredness of life. Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience. Is such a project trivial? Only if human life is trivial. This woman professor’s enemy is modern civilization itself. She is only using the Germans to attack the 20th century—to denounce it in terms invented by Germans. Making use of a tragic history to promote the foolish ideas of Weimar intellectuals.
Bellow ascribes to Sammler his own disgust with the “woman professor” who had been Bellow’s own academic colleague at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. German intellectuals had stopped recognizing the sanctity of life before Hitler came to power, and independently of his reign. Their and her way of talking about the murder of so many innocent people as a function of the modern totalitarian mentality was itself morally reprehensible because it failed to acknowledge that human beings know the power of taking a human life. Bellow uses Sammler to insist, in American terms, on a moral response to a moral problem.
IV
Hannah Arendt did something impressive in the history of ideas by transforming the Eichmann trial into the “Eichmann polemics” and putting into dispute the verdict of evil about what had been assumed to be the clearest example of evil on record. If Natan Alterman had hoped that the trial “would fill an eerie void that has been hidden somewhere in the soul of the Jewish people” by bringing to trial one of the worst in the long history of antagonists, Arendt came “in the tradition of German philosophy” to reopen the Jewish national wound. When Arendt volunteered to report on the Eichmann trial, it was presumed that she was doing so in her role as a Jew—indeed, there is no question that the New Yorker’s editor, William Shawn, would have been happy to publish an article that portrayed the Jewish state’s conduct in glowing terms.
But Arendt actually traveled to Jerusalem for a deeper purpose—to reclaim Eichmann for German philosophy. She did not exonerate Nazism and in fact excoriated the postwar Adenauer government for not doing enough to punish known Nazi killers, but she rehabilitated the German mind and demonstrated how that could be done by going—not beyond, but around, good and evil. She came to erase Judaism philosophically, to complicate its search for moral clarity, and to unseat a conviction like Bellow’s that “everybody…knows what murder is.”
Arendt was to remain the heroine of postmodernists, deconstructionists, feminists, relativists, and internationalist ideologues who deny the stability of Truth. Not coincidentally, many of them have also disputed the rights of the sovereign Jewish people to its national homeland. Indeed, as anti-Zionism cemented the coalition of leftists, Arabs, and dissident minorities, Arendt herself was conscripted, sometimes unfairly and in ways she might have protested, as an ally in their destabilizing cause. They were enchanted by her “perversity” and were undeterred in their enthusiasm by subsequent revelations, like those of the historian Bernard Wasserstein, who documented Arendt’s scholarly reliance on anti-Semitic sources in her study of totalitarianism, or of revelations about her resumed friendship with Martin Heidegger despite his Nazi associations.
At the same time, however, the Arendt report on the Eichmann trial became one of the catalysts for something no one could have predicted—an intellectual movement that came to be known as neoconservativism. A cohort of writers and thinkers, many of them Jews from immigrant families who had turned to leftism as naturally as calves to their mother’s teats, but who had slowly moved away from the Marxism of their youth during the Stalin years and the Second World War, now spotted corruption and dishonesty and something antithetical to them in some of their very models of the intellectual life. They and their Gentile colleagues had constituted the only European-style intelligentsia to flourish in America. Most of them were only one generation removed from Europe, after all, so what could be more natural than for them to serve as the conduit of European intelligence to America? Arendt’s ingenious twist of the Eichmann trial showed them how Jewish and American they actually were—and how morally clear they aspired to be.
There had never yet been a fully conservative Jewish intellectual tradition in America. It began to crystallize in the 1960s, and Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial helped bring it into being. Perversely.q
1 Raul Hilberg, whose history The Destruction of European Jewry Arendt had used as a main source, wrote, “The Jewish Fuhrer, as one of Eichmann’s people called Rabbi Leo Baeck…” Arendt used the term without ascribing it to its hostile source.
2 Michael Ezra, “The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics,” Democratiya 9 (Summer 2007). Democratiya merged with Dissent.
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The Enduring Outrage of Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’
Must-Reads from Magazine
Ari Fuld and the Truth About Palestinians
Terror is a choice.
Sohrab Ahmari 2018-09-17
Ari Fuld described himself on Twitter as a marketer and social media consultant “when not defending Israel by exposing the lies and strengthening the truth.” On Sunday, a Palestinian terrorist stabbed Fuld at a shopping mall in Gush Etzion, a settlement south of Jerusalem. The Queens-born father of four died from his wounds, but not before he chased down his assailant and neutralized the threat to other civilians. Fuld thus gave the full measure of devotion to the Jewish people he loved. He was 45.
The episode is a grim reminder of the wisdom and essential justice of the Trump administration’s tough stance on the Palestinians.
Start with the Taylor Force Act. The act, named for another U.S. citizen felled by Palestinian terror, stanched the flow of American taxpayer fund to the Palestinian Authority’s civilian programs. Though it is small consolation to Fuld’s family, Americans can breathe a sigh of relief that they are no longer underwriting the PA slush fund used to pay stipends to the family members of dead, imprisoned, or injured terrorists, like the one who murdered Ari Fuld.
No principle of justice or sound statesmanship requires Washington to spend $200 million—the amount of PA aid funding slashed by the Trump administration last month—on an agency that financially induces the Palestinian people to commit acts of terror. The PA’s terrorism-incentive budget—“pay-to-slay,” as Douglas Feith called it—ranges from $50 million to $350 million annually. Footing even a fraction of that bill is tantamount to the American government subsidizing terrorism against its citizens.
If we don’t pay the Palestinians, the main line of reasoning runs, frustration will lead them to commit still more and bloodier acts of terror. But U.S. assistance to the PA dates to the PA’s founding in the Oslo Accords, and Palestinian terrorists have shed American and Israeli blood through all the years since then. What does it say about Palestinian leaders that they would unleash more terror unless we cross their palms with silver?
President Trump likewise deserves praise for booting Palestinian diplomats from U.S. soil. This past weekend, the State Department revoked a visa for Husam Zomlot, the highest-ranking Palestinian official in Washington. The State Department cited the Palestinians’ years-long refusal to sit down for peace talks with Israel. The better reason for expelling them is that the label “envoy” sits uneasily next to the names of Palestinian officials, given the links between the Palestine Liberation Organization, President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, and various armed terrorist groups.
Fatah, for example, praised the Fuld murder. As the Jerusalem Post reported, the “al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the military wing of Fatah . . . welcomed the attack, stressing the necessity of resistance ‘against settlements, Judaization of the land, and occupation crimes.’” It is up to Palestinian leaders to decide whether they want to be terrorists or statesmen. Pretending that they can be both at once was the height of Western folly, as Ari Fuld no doubt recognized.
May his memory be a blessing.
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John Kerry Gives the Iranian Theocrats Hope
The end of the water's edge.
Noah Rothman 2018-09-17
It was the blatant subversion of the president’s sole authority to conduct American foreign policy, and the political class received it with fury. It was called “mutinous,” and the conspirators were deemed “traitors” to the Republic. Those who thought “sedition” went too far were still incensed over the breach of protocol and the reckless way in which the president’s mandate was undermined. Yes, times have certainly changed since 2015, when a series of Republican senators signed a letter warning Iran’s theocratic government that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka, the Iran nuclear deal) was built on a foundation of sand.
The outrage that was heaped upon Senate Republicans for freelancing on foreign policy in the final years of Barack Obama’s administration has not been visited upon former Secretary of State John Kerry, though he arguably deserves it. In the publicity tour for his recently published memoir, Kerry confessed to conducting meetings with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif “three or four times” as a private citizen. When asked by Fox News Channel’s Dana Perino if Kerry had advised his Iranian interlocutor to “wait out” the Trump administration to get a better set of terms from the president’s successor, Kerry did not deny the charge. “I think everybody in the world is sitting around talking about waiting out President Trump,” he said.
Think about that. This is a former secretary of state who all but confirmed that he is actively conducting what the Boston Globe described in May as “shadow diplomacy” designed to preserve not just the Iran deal but all the associated economic relief and security guarantees it provided Tehran. The abrogation of that deal has put new pressure on the Iranians to liberalize domestically, withdraw their support for terrorism, and abandon their provocative weapons development programs—pressures that the deal’s proponents once supported.
“We’ve got Iran on the ropes now,” said former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, “and a meeting between John Kerry and the Iranian foreign minister really sends a message to them that somebody in America who’s important may be trying to revive them and let them wait and be stronger against what the administration is trying to do.” This is absolutely correct because the threat Iran poses to American national security and geopolitical stability is not limited to its nuclear program. The Iranian threat will not be neutralized until it abandons its support for terror and the repression of its people, and that will not end until the Iranian regime is no more.
While Kerry’s decision to hold a variety of meetings with a representative of a nation hostile to U.S. interests is surely careless and unhelpful, it is not uncommon. During his 1984 campaign for the presidency, Jesse Jackson visited the Soviet Union and Cuba to raise his own public profile and lend credence to Democratic claims that Ronald Reagan’s confrontational foreign policy was unproductive. House Speaker Jim Wright’s trip to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandinista government was a direct repudiation of the Reagan administration’s support for the country’s anti-Communist rebels. In 2007, as Bashar al-Assad’s government was providing material support for the insurgency in Iraq, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sojourned to Damascus to shower the genocidal dictator in good publicity. “The road to Damascus is a road to peace,” Pelosi insisted. “Unfortunately,” replied George W. Bush’s national security council spokesman, “that road is lined with the victims of Hamas and Hezbollah, the victims of terrorists who cross from Syria into Iraq.”
Honest observers must reluctantly conclude that the adage is wrong. American politics does not, in fact, stop at the water’s edge. It never has, and maybe it shouldn’t. Though it may be commonplace, American political actors who contradict the president in the conduct of their own foreign policy should be judged on the policies they are advocating. In the case of Iran, those who seek to convince the mullahs and their representatives that repressive theocracy and a terroristic foreign policy are dead-ends are advancing the interests not just of the United States but all mankind. Those who provide this hopelessly backward autocracy with the hope that America’s resolve is fleeting are, as John Kerry might say, on “the wrong side of history.”
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Resistance Porn
Media Commentary
Matthew Continetti 2018-09-17
Michael Wolff is its Marquis de Sade. Released on January 5, 2018, Wolff’s Fire and Fury became a template for authors eager to satiate the growing demand for unverified stories of Trump at his worst. Wolff filled his pages with tales of the president’s ignorant rants, his raging emotions, his television addiction, his fast-food diet, his unfamiliarity with and contempt for Beltway conventions and manners. Wolff made shocking insinuations about Trump’s mental state, not to mention his relationship with UN ambassador Nikki Haley. Wolff’s Trump is nothing more than a knave, dunce, and commedia dell’arte villain. The hero of his saga is, bizarrely, Steve Bannon, who in Wolff’s telling recognized Trump’s inadequacies, manipulated him to advance a nationalist-populist agenda, and tried to block his worst impulses.
Wolff’s sources are anonymous. That did not slow down the press from calling his accusations “mind-blowing” (Mashable.com), “wild” (Variety), and “bizarre” (Entertainment Weekly). Unlike most pornographers, he had a lesson in mind. He wanted to demonstrate Trump’s unfitness for office. “The story that I’ve told seems to present this presidency in such a way that it says that he can’t do this job, the emperor has no clothes,” Wolff told the BBC. “And suddenly everywhere people are going, ‘Oh, my God, it’s true—he has no clothes.’ That’s the background to the perception and the understanding that will finally end this, that will end this presidency.”
Nothing excites the Resistance more than the prospect of Trump leaving office before the end of his term. Hence the most stirring examples of Resistance Porn take the president’s all-too-real weaknesses and eccentricities and imbue them with apocalyptic significance. In what would become the standard response to accusations of Trumpian perfidy, reviewers of Fire and Fury were less interested in the truth of Wolff’s assertions than in the fact that his argument confirmed their preexisting biases.
Saying he agreed with President Trump that the book is “fiction,” the Guardian’s critic didn’t “doubt its overall veracity.” It was, he said, “what Mailer and Capote once called a nonfiction novel.” Writing in the Atlantic, Adam Kirsch asked: “No wonder, then, Wolff has written a self-conscious, untrustworthy, postmodern White House book. How else, he might argue, can you write about a group as self-conscious, untrustworthy, and postmodern as this crew?” Complaining in the New Yorker, Masha Gessen said Wolff broke no new ground: “Everybody” knew that the “president of the United States is a deranged liar who surrounded himself with sycophants. He is also functionally illiterate and intellectually unsound.” Remind me never to get on Gessen’s bad side.
What Fire and Fury lacked in journalistic ethics, it made up in receipts. By the third week of its release, Wolff’s book had sold more than 1.7 million copies. His talent for spinning second- and third-hand accounts of the president’s oddity and depravity into bestselling prose was unmistakable. Imitators were sure to follow, especially after Wolff alienated himself from the mainstream media by defending his innuendos about Haley.
It was during the first week of September that Resistance Porn became a competitive industry. On the afternoon of September 4, the first tidbits from Bob Woodward’s Fear appeared in the Washington Post, along with a recording of an 11-minute phone call between Trump and the white knight of Watergate. The opposition began panting soon after. Woodward, who like Wolff relies on anonymous sources, “paints a harrowing portrait” of the Trump White House, reported the Post.
No one looks good in Woodward’s telling other than former economics adviser Gary Cohn and—again bizarrely—the former White House staff secretary who was forced to resign after his two ex-wives accused him of domestic violence. The depiction of chaos, backstabbing, and mutual contempt between the president and high-level advisers who don’t much care for either his agenda or his personality was not so different from Wolff’s. What gave it added heft was Woodward’s status, his inviolable reputation.
“Nothing in Bob Woodward’s sober and grainy new book…is especially surprising,” wrote Dwight Garner at the New York Times. That was the point. The audience for Wolff and Woodward does not want to be surprised. Fear is not a book that will change minds. Nor is it intended to be. “Bob Woodward’s peek behind the Trump curtain is 100 percent as terrifying as we feared,” read a CNN headline. “President Trump is unfit for office. Bob Woodward’s ‘Fear’ confirms it,” read an op-ed headline in the Post. “There’s Always a New Low for the Trump White House,” said the Atlantic. “Amazingly,” wrote Susan Glasser in the New Yorker, “it is no longer big news when the occupant of the Oval Office is shown to be callous, ignorant, nasty, and untruthful.” How could it be, when the press has emphasized nothing but these aspects of Trump for the last three years?
The popular fixation with Trump the man, and with the turbulence, mania, frenzy, confusion, silliness, and unpredictability that have surrounded him for decades, serves two functions. It inoculates the press from having to engage in serious research into the causes of Trump’s success in business, entertainment, and politics, and into the crises of borders, opioids, stagnation, and conformity of opinion that occasioned his rise. Resistance Porn also endows Trump’s critics, both external and internal, with world-historical importance. No longer are they merely journalists, wonks, pundits, and activists sniping at a most unlikely president. They are politically correct versions of Charles Martel, the last line of defense preventing Trump the barbarian from enacting the policies on which he campaigned and was elected.
How closely their sensational claims and inflated self-conceptions track with reality is largely beside the point. When the New York Times published the op-ed “I am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” by an anonymous “senior official” on September 5, few readers bothered to care that the piece contained no original material. The author turned policy disagreements over trade and national security into a psychiatric diagnosis. In what can only be described as a journalistic innovation, the author dispensed with middlemen such as Wolff and Woodward, providing the Times the longest background quote in American history. That the author’s identity remains a secret only adds to its prurient appeal.
“The bigger concern,” the author wrote, “is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us.” Speak for yourself, bud. What President Trump has done to the Resistance is driven it batty. He’s made an untold number of people willing to entertain conspiracy theories, and to believe rumor is fact, hyperbole is truth, self-interested portrayals are incontrovertible evidence, credulity is virtue, and betrayal is fidelity—so long as all of this is done to stop that man in the White House.
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By a Captain, He’s No Captain
Review of 'Stanley Kubrick' By Nathan Abrams
Frederic Raphael 2018-09-17
Except for Stanley Donen, every director I have worked with has been prone to the idea, first propounded in the 1950s by François Truffaut and his tendentious chums in Cahiers du Cinéma, that directors alone are authors, screenwriters merely contingent. In singular cases—Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Woody Allen, Kubrick himself—the claim can be valid, though all of them had recourse, regular or occasional, to helping hands to spice their confections.
Kubrick’s variety of topics, themes, and periods testifies both to his curiosity and to his determination to “make it new.” Because his grades were not high enough (except in physics), this son of a Bronx doctor could not get into colleges crammed with returning GIs. The nearest he came to higher education was when he slipped into accessible lectures at Columbia. He told me, when discussing the possibility of a movie about Julius Caesar, that the great classicist Moses Hadas made a particularly strong impression.
While others were studying for degrees, solitary Stanley was out shooting photographs (sometimes with a hidden camera) for Look magazine. As a movie director, he often insisted on take after take. This gave him choices of the kind available on the still photographer’s contact sheets. Only Peter Sellers and Jack Nicholson had the nerve, and irreplaceable talent, to tell him, ahead of shooting, that they could not do a particular scene more than two or three times. The energy to electrify “Mein Führer, I can walk” and “Here’s Johnny!” could not recur indefinitely. For everyone else, “Can you do it again?” was the exhausting demand, and it could come close to being sadistic.
The same method could be applied to writers. Kubrick might recognize what he wanted when it was served up to him, but he could never articulate, ahead of time, even roughly what it was. Picking and choosing was very much his style. Cogitation and opportunism went together: The story goes that he attached Strauss’s Blue Danube to the opening sequence of 2001 because it happened to be playing in the sound studio when he came to dub the music. Genius puts chance to work.
Until academics intruded lofty criteria into cinema/film, the better to dignify their speciality, Alfred Hitchcock’s attitude covered most cases: When Ingrid Bergman asked for her motivation in walking to the window, Hitch replied, fatly, “Your salary.” On another occasion, told that some scene was not plausible, Hitch said, “It’s only a movie.” He did not take himself seriously until the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd elected to make him iconic. At dinner, I once asked Marcello Mastroianni why he was so willing to play losers or clowns. Marcello said, “Beh, cinema non e gran’ cosa” (cinema is no big deal). Orson Welles called movie-making the ultimate model-train set.
That was then; now we have “film studies.” After they moved in, academics were determined that their subject be a very big deal indeed. Comedy became no laughing matter. In his monotonous new book, the film scholar Nathan Abrams would have it that Stanley Kubrick was, in essence, a “New York Jewish intellectual.” Abrams affects to unlock what Stanley was “really” dealing with, in all his movies, never mind their apparent diversity. It is declared to be, yes, Yiddishkeit, and in particular, the Holocaust. This ground has been tilled before by Geoffrey Cocks, when he argued that the room numbers in the empty Overlook Hotel in The Shining encrypted references to the Final Solution. Abrams would have it that even Barry Lyndon is really all about the outsider seeking, and failing, to make his awkward way in (Gentile) Society. On this reading, Ryan O’Neal is seen as Hannah Arendt’s pariah in 18th-century drag. The movie’s other characters are all engaged in the enjoyment of “goyim-naches,” an expression—like menschlichkayit—he repeats ad nauseam, lest we fail to get the stretched point.
Theory is all when it comes to the apotheosis of our Jew-ridden Übermensch. So what if, in order to make a topic his own, Kubrick found it useful to translate its logic into terms familiar to him from his New York youth? In Abrams’s scheme, other mundane biographical facts count for little. No mention is made of Stanley’s displeasure when his 14-year-old daughter took a fancy to O’Neal. The latter was punished, some sources say, by having Barry’s voiceover converted from first person so that Michael Hordern would displace the star as narrator. By lending dispassionate irony to the narrative, it proved a pettish fluke of genius.
While conning Abrams’s volume, I discovered, not greatly to my chagrin, that I am the sole villain of the piece. Abrams calls me “self-serving” and “unreliable” in my accounts of my working and personal relationship with Stanley. He insinuates that I had less to do with Eyes Wide Shut than I pretend and that Stanley regretted my involvement. It is hard for him to deny (but convenient to omit) that, after trying for some 30 years to get a succession of writers to “crack” how to do Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, Kubrick greeted my first draft with “I’m absolutely thrilled.” A source whose anonymity I respect told me that he had never seen Stanley so happy since the day he received his first royalty check (for $5 million) for 2001. No matter.
Were Abrams (the author also of a book as hostile to Commentary as this one is to me) able to put aside his waxed wrath, he might have quoted what I reported in my memoir Eyes Wide Open to support his Jewish-intellectual thesis. One day, Stanley asked me what a couple of hospital doctors, walking away with their backs to the camera, would be talking about. We were never going to hear or care what it was, but Stanley—at that early stage of development—said he wanted to know everything. I said, “Women, golf, the stock market, you know…”
“Couple of Gentiles, right?”
“That’s what you said you wanted them to be.”
“Those people, how do we ever know what they’re talking about when they’re alone together?”
“Come on, Stanley, haven’t you overheard them in trains and planes and places?”
Kubrick said, “Sure, but…they always know you’re there.”
If he was even halfway serious, Abrams’s banal thesis that, despite decades of living in England, Stanley never escaped the Old Country, might have been given some ballast.
Now, as for Stanley Kubrick’s being an “intellectual.” If this implies membership in some literary or quasi-philosophical elite, there’s a Jewish joke to dispense with it. It’s the one about the man who makes a fortune, buys himself a fancy yacht, and invites his mother to come and see it. He greets her on the gangway in full nautical rig. She says, “What’s with the gold braid already?”
“Mama, you have to realize, I’m a captain now.”
She says, “By you, you’re a captain, by me, you’re a captain, but by a captain, are you a captain?”
As New York intellectuals all used to know, Karl Popper’s definition of bad science, and bad faith, involves positing a theory and then selecting only whatever data help to furnish its validity. The honest scholar makes it a matter of principle to seek out elements that might render his thesis questionable.
Abrams seeks to enroll Lolita in his obsessive Jewish-intellectual scheme by referring to Peter Arno, a New Yorker cartoonist whom Kubrick photographed in 1949. The caption attached to Kubrick’s photograph in Look asserted that Arno liked to date “fresh, unspoiled girls,” and Abrams says this “hint[s] at Humbert Humbert in Lolita.” Ah, but Lolita was published, in Paris, in 1955, six years later. And how likely is it, in any case, that Kubrick wrote the caption?
The film of Lolita is unusual for its garrulity. Abrams’s insistence on the sinister Semitic aspect of both Clare Quilty and Humbert Humbert supposedly drawing Kubrick like moth to flame is a ridiculous camouflage of the commercial opportunism that led Stanley to seek to film the most notorious novel of the day, while fudging its scandalous eroticism.
That said, in my view, The Killing, Paths of Glory, Barry Lyndon, and Clockwork Orange were and are sans pareil. The great French poet Paul Valéry wrote of “the profundity of the surface” of a work of art. Add D.H. Lawrence’s “never trust the teller, trust the tale,” and you have two authoritative reasons for looking at or reading original works of art yourself and not relying on academic exegetes—especially when they write in the solemn, sometimes ungrammatical style of Professor Abrams, who takes time out to tell those of us at the back of his class that padre “is derived from the Latin pater.”
Abrams writes that I “claim” that I was told to exclude all overt reference to Jews in my Eyes Wide Shut screenplay, with the fatuous implication that I am lying. I am again accused of “claiming” to have given the name Ziegler to the character played by Sidney Pollack, because I once had a (quite famous) Hollywood agent called Evarts Ziegler. So I did. The principal reason for Abrams to doubt my veracity is that my having chosen the name renders irrelevant his subsequent fanciful digression on the deep, deep meanings of the name Ziegler in Jewish lore; hence he wishes to assign the naming to Kubrick. Pop goes another wished-for proof of Stanley’s deep and scholarly obsession with Yiddishkeit.
Abrams would be a more formidable enemy if he could turn a single witty phrase or even abstain from what Karl Kraus called mauscheln, the giveaway jargon of Jewish journalists straining to pass for sophisticates at home in Gentile circles. If you choose, you can apply, on line, for screenwriting lessons from Nathan Abrams, who does not have a single cinematic credit to his name. It would be cheaper, and wiser, to look again, and then again, at Kubrick’s masterpieces.
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The Fat Lady Is Singing
Is American opera in terminal condition?
Terry Teachout 2018-09-17
At the Met, distinguished singers and conductors, mostly born and trained in Europe, appeared in theatrically conservative big-budget productions of the popular operas of the 19th century, with a sprinkling of pre-romantic and modern works thrown in to leaven the loaf. City Opera, by contrast, presented younger artists—many, like Beverly Sills, born in this country—in a wider-ranging, more adventurously staged repertoire that often included new operas, some of them written by American composers, to which the public was admitted at what were then called “popular prices.”
Between them, the companies represented a feast for culture-consuming New Yorkers, though complaints were already being heard that their new theaters were too big. Moreover, neither the Met nor City Opera was having any luck at commissioning memorable new operas and thereby expanding and refreshing the operatic repertoire, to which only a handful of significant new works—none of them, then or since, premiered by either company—had been added since World War I.
A half-century later, the feast has turned to famine. In 2011, New York City Opera left Lincoln Center, declaring bankruptcy. It closed its doors forever two years later. The Met has weathered a nearly uninterrupted string of crises that climaxed earlier this year with the firing of James Levine, the company’s once-celebrated music director emeritus. He was accused in 2017 of molesting teenage musicians and was dismissed from all of his conducting posts in New York and elsewhere. Today the Met is in dire financial straits that threaten its long-term survival.
And while newer opera companies in such other American cities as Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Seattle now offer alternative models of leadership, none has established itself as a potential successor either to the Met or the now-defunct NYCO.1
Is American opera as a whole in a terminal condition? Or are the collapse of the New York City Opera and the Met’s ongoing struggle to survive purely local matters of no relevance elsewhere? Heidi Waleson addresses these questions in Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America.2 Waleson draws on her experience as the opera critic of the Wall Street Journal to speculate on the prospects for an art form that has never quite managed to set down firm roots in American culture.
In this richly informative chronicle of NYCO’s decline and fall, Waleson persuasively argues that what happened to City Opera (and, by extension, the Met) could happen to other opera companies as well. The days in which an ambitious community sought successfully to elevate itself into the first rank of world cities by building and manning an opera house are long past, and Mad Scenes and Exit Arias helps us understand why.
As Waleson reminds us, it was Fiorello LaGuardia, the New York mayor who played a central role in the creation of the NYCO, who dubbed the company “the people’s opera” when it was founded in 1943. According to LaGuardia, NYCO existed to perform popular operas at popular prices for a mass audience. In later years, it moved away from that goal, but the slogan stuck. Indeed, no opera company has ever formulated a clearer statement of its institutional mission.Even after it moved to Lincoln Center in 1966, NYCO had an equally coherent and similarly appealing purpose: It was where you went to see the opera stars of tomorrow, foremost among them Sills and Plácido Domingo, in inexpensively but imaginatively staged productions of the classics. The company went out of its way to present modern operas, too, but it never did so at the expense of its central repertoire—and tickets to its performances cost half of what the Met charged. Well into the 21st century, City Opera stuck more or less closely to its redefined mission. Under Paul Kellogg, the general and artistic director from 1996 to 2007, it did so with consistent artistic success. But revenues declined throughout the latter part of Kellogg’s tenure, in part because younger New Yorkers were unwilling to become subscribers.
In those days, the Metropolitan Opera, NYCO’s next-door neighbor, was still one of the world’s most conservative opera houses. That changed when Peter Gelb became its general manager in 2006. Gelb was resolved to modernize the Met’s productions and, to a lesser extent, its repertoire, and he simultaneously sought to heighten its national profile by digitally simulcasting live performances into movie theaters throughout America.
Kellogg was frustrated by the chronic acoustic inadequacies of the New York State Theater and sought in vain to move City Opera to a three-theater complex that was to be built (but never was) on the World Trade Center site. He retired soon after Gelb came to the Met. Kellogg was succeeded by Gérard Mortier, a European impresario who was accustomed to working in state-subsidized theaters. Mortier made a pair of fateful decisions. First, he canceled City Opera’s entire 2008–2009 season while the interior of the State Theater underwent much-needed renovations. Then he announced a follow-up season of 20th-century operas that lacked audience appeal.
That follow-up season never happened, because Mortier resigned in 2008 and fled New York. He was replaced by George Steel, who had previously served for just three months as general manager of the Dallas Opera. Under Steel, NYCO slashed its schedule to ribbons in a futile attempt to get back on its financial feet after Mortier’s financially ruinous year-long hiatus. Then he mounted a series of productions of nonstandard repertory that received mixed reviews and flopped at the box office.
The combined effect of Gelb’s innovations and the inept leadership of Mortier and Steel all but obliterated City Opera’s reason for existing. Under Gelb, the Met’s repertory ranged from such warhorses as Rigoletto and Tosca to 20th-century masterpieces like Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, and tickets could be bought for as little as $20. With the Met performing a more interesting repertoire under a wider range of directors, and in part at “people’s prices,” City Opera no longer did anything that the Met wasn’t already doing on a far larger and better-financed scale. What, then, was its mission now? The truth was that it had none, and when the company went under in 2013, few mourned its passing.
As it happened, Gelb’s own innovations were a mere artistic Band-aid, for he was unwilling or unable to trim the Met’s bloated budget to any meaningful extent. He made no serious attempt to cut the company’s labor costs until a budget crisis in 2014 forced him to confront its unions, which he did with limited success. In addition, his new productions of the standard-repertory operas on which the Met relied to draw and hold older subscribers were felt by many to be trashily trendy.
The Met had particular difficulty managing the reduced circumstances of the 21st century when it came to opera. Its 3,800-seat theater has an 80-foot-deep stage with a proscenium opening that measures 54 feet on each side. (Bayreuth, by contrast, seats 1,925, La Scala 2,030, and the Vienna State Opera 2,200.) As a result, it is all but impossible to mount low-to-medium-budget shows in the Metropolitan Opera House, even as the company finds it is no longer able to fill its increasingly empty house. Two decades ago, the Met earned 90 percent of its potential box-office revenue. That figure plummeted to 66 percent by 2015, forcing Gelb to raise ticket prices to an average of $158.50 per head. On Broadway, the average price of a ticket that season was $103.86.
Above all, Gelb was swimming against the cultural tide. Asked about the effects on audience development of the Met simulcasts, he admitted that three-quarters of the people who attended them were “over 65, and 30 percent of them are over 75.” As he explained: “Grand opera is in itself a kind of a dinosaur of an art form…. The question is not whether I think I’m doing a good job or not in trying to keep the [Metropolitan Opera] alive. It’s whether I’m doing a good job or not in the face of a cultural and social rejection of opera as an art form. And what I’m doing is fighting an uphill battle to try and maintain an audience in a very difficult time.”
Was that statement buck-passing defeatism, or a fair appraisal of the state of American opera? Other opera executives distanced themselves from Gelb’s remarks, and it was true—and still is—that smaller American companies have done a somewhat better job of attracting younger audiences than the top-heavy Met. But according to the National Endowment for the Arts, the percentage of U.S. adults who attend at least one operatic performance each year declined from 3.2 percent in 2002 to 2.1 percent in 2012. This problem, of course, is not limited to opera. As I wrote in these pages in 2010, the disappearance of secondary-school arts education and the rise of digital media may well be leading to “not merely a decline in public interest in the fine arts but the death of the live audience as a cultural phenomenon.”3
D oes American opera have a future in an era of what Heidi Waleson succinctly describes as “flat ticket income and rising expenses”? In the last chapter of Mad Scenes and Exit Arias, she chronicles the activities of a group of innovative smaller troupes that are “rethinking what an opera company is, what it does, and who it serves.” Yet in the same breath, she acknowledges the possibility that “filling a giant theater for multiple productions of grand operas [is] no longer an achievable goal.”If that is so, then it may be worth asking a different question: Did American opera ever have a past? It is true that opera in America has had a great and glorious history, but virtually the whole of that history consisted of American productions of 18th- and 19th-century European operas. By contrast, no opera by an American classical composer has ever entered the international major-house repertoire. Indeed, while new American operas are still commissioned and premiered at an impressive rate, few things are so rare as a second production of any of these works.
While a handful continue to be performed—John Adams’s Nixon in China (1987), André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1995), Mark Adamo’s Little Women (1998), and Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (2000)—their success is a tribute to the familiarity of their subject matter and source material, not their musico-theatrical quality. As for the rest, the hard but inescapable truth is that with the exception of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), virtually all large-scale American operas have been purpose-written novelties that were shelved and forgotten immediately after their premieres.
The success of Porgy and Bess, which received its premiere not in an opera house but on Broadway, reminds us that American musical comedy, unlike American opera, is deeply rooted in our national culture, in much the same way that grand opera is no less deeply rooted in the national cultures of Germany and Italy, where it is still genuinely popular (if less so today than a half-century ago). By comparison with Porgy, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, or My Fair Lady, American opera as a homegrown form simply does not exist: It is merely an obscure offshoot of its European counterpart. Aaron Copland, America’s greatest composer, was not really joking when he wittily described opera as “la forme fatale,” and his own failed attempts to compose an audience-friendly opera that would be as successful as his folk-flavored ballet scores say much about the difficulties facing any composer who seeks to follow in his footsteps.
It is not that grand opera is incapable of appealing to American theatergoers. Even now, there are many Americans who love it passionately, just as there are regional companies such as Chicago’s Lyric Opera and San Francisco Opera that have avoided making the mistakes that closed City Opera’s doors. Yet the crises from which the Metropolitan Opera has so far failed to extricate itself suggest that in the absence of the generous state subsidies that keep European opera houses in business, large-house grand opera in America may simply be too expensive to thrive—or, ultimately, to survive. At its best, no art form is more thrilling or seductive. But none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction.
1 The “New York City Opera” founded in 2016 that now mounts operas in various New York theaters on an ad hoc basis is a brand-new enterprise that has no connection with its predecessor.
2 Metropolitan Books, 304 pages
3 See my “The Decline of the Audience” (Commentary, April 2010).
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