JUDENRAT Big Help to Germans Arendt Clarified MacDonald

Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts, by Dwight MacDonald. 1974

Hannah Arendt Clarified on Jewish Nazi Collaboration. Polish Historian Ewa Kurek is Correct, Notably on Some Jews Turned Over, By Jewish Leaders, for Death

This is an anthology of essays by Dwight Macdonald, and I focus exclusively on his analysis of Hannah Arendt.

HANNAH ARENDT: THE JUDENRAETE BECAME THE GERMAN TOOLS OF EXTERMINATION

Macdonald writes, “These fifteen pages criticize not, as the critics imply, the Jewish MASSES but the Jewish LEADERSHIP. ‘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 4,500,000 and 6,000,000 people.’ Why is this sentence so universally shocking? That more Jews would have escaped if their leaders, thinking they could bargain with the Nazis, had not formed Jewish Councils to organize them for transport to the death camps—this seems a reasonable speculation, if only because a leaderless flock is harder to round up. (Also, it’s hard to see how the catastrophe could have been GREATER).” (p. 313. Emphasis in original).

HANNAH ARENDT: THE JUDENRAETE HAD NO BUSINESS DECIDING WHICH JEWS TO SENT TO DEATH AND WHICH TO SPARE (ECHOED BY KUREK)

Macdonald continues, “Miss Arendt also makes a moral criticism of the Jewish leadership: she says they should have refused to do the Nazis’ dirty work for them and that there is no moral arithmetic which X lives can be sacrificed to save Y lives, because nobody has the right to decide who should be saved at the expense of whom. I agree but even if I didn’t, I would think this is a perfectly respectable and familiar, position.” (p. 313).