The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or email.

Title: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Author: Hannah Arendt Description: Only a fool, or a Ph.d, would even attempt to name a short list of essential “Jewish” books (maybe I’m just bitter; it’s been several centuries and I’m still working on my masters thesis). In any case, I’m already in big trouble, because I’m one of those sad cases who has trouble reading anything written before 1955. Especially if it is over 300 pages. So even though reading Jewish books is essential to my wellbeing, I’ve somehow managed to narrow my own field by approximately 2,950 years. What can I say, except that these books have been essential to me? (Meantime, for info about those approximately 2,950 missing years, go to Zachary Baker’s bibliography a couple years ago of the 1000 best Jewish books; or The Schoken Guide to Jewish Boggs, edited by Barry W. Holtz (1992). Arendt’s meditation is perhaps the best example we have of a brilliant, self-hating Jew at the top of their game. The Holocaust was much the fault of the Jews, Arendt seemed to be saying, ever so smartly. She has forever been accused of a witless genius, and not just because she was lovers with Martin Heiddeigger, philosopher, Nazi, and official “Fuehrer” of Heidelberg University. The New York Times Book Review nailed this essential, but evil, book’s problem with, “If, in recalling the period, one could shut one's eyes to the scenes of brutal massacre and stop one's ears to the screams of horror-stricken women and terrorized children as they saw the tornado of death sweeping toward them, one could almost assume that in some parts of the book the author is being whimsical.” Recommended By: Neal Karlen is a long-time contributor to The New York Times. He was an Associate Editor at Newsweek and Contributing Editor for Rolling Stone. He has authored many books, including the recently published The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews (William Morrow, 2008).

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or tips. For more New Jew Canon recommendations, visit Jewcy's New Jew Canon Listmania.

I have always been a fan of Hannah Arendt.

I have not always, however, been a fan of the "banality of evil" argument. I get it--we are all capable of evil. I agree with that. But when applied to the "logic" of the Holocaust, I think the argument becomes problematic and potentially even transgressive. By saying that anyone could have been capable of the atrocities committed by Nazis and their sympathizers during World War II, we also, whether we intend it or not, minimize the extent to which each individual is responsible for his or her own behavior. We cut the perpetrators a bit of slack by implicitly suggesting that they only did what anyone else would've been equally capable of.

My point: okay, yeah, maybe it could've been anybody, but it wasn't. Each person who contributed in any way to the destruction of Jews and others during the Holocaust is individually responsible. The "it could have been anybody" argument is dangerous because it lessens the degree to which we are all responsible for our actions. And this goes for any genocide or act of violence--not just the Holocaust.Just Another Beautiful Day: In Auschwitz.

But then . . . there are times when I want to re-think this position.

Today there's a piece in the NYT about a letter received by a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The letter, written by a former US Army Intelligence officer, contained photographs of Auschwitz he had found 60 years ago in Germany.

It's not uncommon for someone to send old photos from the Holocaust to the museum, but these particular pictures depict something that is not often seen.

. . . a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz's senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Hocker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordianist, Hocker lighting the camp's Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break. . . . The album also contains photos of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selections of arriving prisoners and cruel medical experiments. These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz . . .

Museum curators have avoided describing the album as something like "monsters at play" or "killers at their leisure." Ms. Cohen said the photos were instructive in that they showed the murderers were, in some sense, people who also behaved as ordinary human beings. "In their self-image, they were good men, good comrades, even civilized," she said.

I still don't like the "banality of evil" argument, but needless to say, these kinds of pictures give it a lot more credibility.

I highly suggest watching the slideshow here (turn your speakers on for the audio) -- it's only around two minutes long.

Regarding Leo Strauss, there is something particularly bizarre in the fact that the discussion always turns to politics. Not Politics in the Aristotelean sense, but everyday politics; the transient concerns and resentments of the current moment. Strauss, who thought in terms of the entirety of Western civilization, would likely have found this quite bizarre.

The truth beyond the debate over whether Strauss is the neo-con devil incarnate or simply misunderstood is that Strauss probably would not have cared one way or the other. His primary concern was, in fact, the role of the philosopher in society; both in historical and theoretical terms.

Strauss, like other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany such as Hannah Arendt, struggled throughout his career with the question of what, exactly, had gone so horribly wrong in Germany and in the West as a whole. He was, in other words, trying to wrap his head around the fact of Auschwitz; and the sense that Auschwitz was not some horrifying aberration from the Western tradition but the fulfillment of something dark and terrible at the heart of that tradition.

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Given the ease with which the term "banality of evil" is tossed around today, one would think that intellectual history never had a problem with Miss Hannah Arendt. So pervasive is her legacy as a preeminent political theorist and diagnostician of the totalitarian psychosis that we forget how polarizing a figure she once was. Friendships were ended over opinions on Eichmann in Jersualem when this landmark work appeared in 1963. Arguing that the Nazi architect of Judeocide was little more than a workaday drone, morally illiterate in the language of his extraordinary task, and that Jewish Council leaders were complicit in their own people's extermination, Arendt herself became doused in obloquy. Everyone from Lionel Abel to Irving Howe was disgusted by her thesis. Unconveniently, her defenders almost all neatly fell into the Gentile camp (notable exceptions being Raul Hilberg, Alfred Kazin and Bruno Bettelheim), while her critics were mostly Jews. Make of that what you will, and bonus points if you can avoid attributing the obvious motives of anti-Semitism and chauvinism.

Michael Ezra has a helpful essay compiling the loudest and nastiest voices in l'affaire Arendt in the latest issue of Democratiya:

It was in Partisan Review that the most widely discussed debate by the 'New York intellectuals' took place. The literary critic Lionel Abel was invited to open up the discussion, and – as the editors conceded - his article was submitted as a 'frank polemic.' Abel launched an outright and full frontal assault on the book. The review was so hostile that William Phillips, the editor, who was a friend of Arendt, sent her a copy with a covering letter that betrayed his embarrassment.

The following is a modified excerpt from Is it Good for the Jews: The Crisis of America's Israel Lobby, published by Random House, Inc. It has been adapted for Jewcy by author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz. He was seventeen, sensitive, with brooding eyes, and wept easily; little more than five feet tall, slender and dark, but handsome. He felt alone, angry, and confused, and outrage overwhelmed him.He was a Jew. And he had a gun.Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was born in Hannover, Germany, but held Polish nationality. By 1938, he had lived through three years of chaos. The Nazis were in power, and he was not allowed to become an apprentice nor otherwise gain employment. He wanted to go to Palestine but found no way to get there. Finally, he went to Belgium, then crossed the border to France without authorization.He was a refugee, an illegal immigrant, ...