Corey Robin's Blog, page 39

Upcoming Gigs

Despite my sense that I’m been saying no to any and all speaking and interview invitations, I somehow find myself in the upcoming weeks with quite a few gigs.

Friday, October 14, 4 pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 4406: “Public Intellectuals in the Digital Age”

Monday, October 17, 12 pm, University of Chicago, Political Theory Workshop: “Black State, White Market: The Capitalism of Clarence Thomas”

Monday, October 17, 4:15, University of Chicago, Swift Hall, Room 106: A panel on graduate student unions.

Wednesday, October 19, 7 pm, Brooklyn Commons, 388 Atlantic Avenue: “Katie Halper Show Live,” talking about the 2016 election; broadcast live on WBAI

Tuesday, October 25, 12:30 pm, NYU: Roundtable on the election with Donna Murch, Cristina Beltrán, and Tom Sugrue

Stop by if you’re around.

 

 

 

 

My Colin Kaepernick Moment: On not standing for the State of Israel in shul

With every passing year, the Israeli propaganda machine whirs more vigorously at shul. Israel gets praised more, soldiers get mentioned more, and Israelis in the congregation get featured more. Occupation becomes an abstraction, Palestinians an absence, oppression a metaphor.

At Yom Kippur services today, Avinu Shebashamayim, the prayer for the State of Israel that is recited every week, took on a weird liturgical fervor, the kind I usually associate with the medieval piyyutim and prayers we recite. Avinu Shebashamayim features lines like these:

Guide its leaders and advisors with Your light and Your truth. Help them with Your good counsel. Strengthen the hands of those who defend our Holy Land. Deliver them: crown their efforts with triumph.

Pretty profane stuff. Yet in the way the prayer was orchestrated today—led by an Israeli at the bima, surrounded by younger Israelis and children, chanted with the lachrymose intonation of Eastern European Jewry—it had all the intensity of Hineni, another, more sacred, prayer, one more traditionally associated with the lyric and music of the High Holidays.

Ordinarily, I walk out during Avinu Shebashamayim. But as my friend Diane Simon pointed out a while ago, shul isn’t like church: at services, people are always in and out, coming and going, so walking out registers all the force of a trip to the bathroom. So now I sit down during this prayer. My Colin Kaepernick moment.

Meanwhile, for the Haftorah today, we read from Isaiah 58:

Is such the fast I desire,

a day for people to starve their bodies?

Is it bowing the head like a bulrush

and lying in sackcloth and ashes?

Do you call that a fast,

a day when Adonai is favorable?

No, this is the fast I desire:…

to…untie the cords of the yoke

to let the oppressed go free;

to break off every yoke.

Shanah Tovah.

 

 

Trump is the ringmaster and the liberal media his unwitting clowns

Back in July, I wrote a post about the amnesia of the Vox generation of journalism.

This was about the time when young journalists were claiming that no presidential candidate in modern American history ever posed the kind of threat to American democracy that Donald Trump did. I went through the specific claims, and cited example after example of comparable threats. I concluded thus:

So many of them seem to lack the most basic gut impulse of any historically minded person: if you think something is unprecedented, it’s probably not. Check your amnesia, dude.

…

I know this is nothing deep or fancy, but it does make me wonder if today’s generation of commentators, raised as so many are on the assumption that the biological sciences and social sciences—with neuroscience as the master mediator—are the source and model of all knowledge, are somehow at a deficit.

By amnesia, I was thinking of these journalists’ failure to remember events from the Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan campaigns.

Little did I expect that only three months later they’d be forgetting events from…the Trump campaign.

At last night’s debate, Trump and Clinton had the following exchange:

TRUMP: And I tell you what, I didn’t think I would say this, but I’m going to and I hate to say it. But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. Because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it. And we’re gonna have a special prosecutor.

CLINTON: Everything he just said is absolutely false, but I’m not surprised….Last time at the first debate ,we had millions of people fact checking so I expect we will have millions more fact checking because, you know, it’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

TRUMP: Because you would be in jail.

Ezra Klein immediately responded:

This is one of the most shocking moments in my history of covering American politics. I don’t know how to convey just how serious and dangerous it was.

It was an odd response.

Hadn’t Klein, like the rest of us, just witnessed the shit show that was the Republican National Convention this past July? Where speaker after speaker called, not from the crowd but from the podium, for Hillary Clinton to be put in jail. Where Chris Christie—the governor of New Jersey and, for a time, a candidate for the Republican nomination—led a call-and-response of “guilty” or “not guilty” to which the crowd replied “Lock her up”?

Hadn’t Klein read his own website?

It’s pretty disturbing to hear a large crowd at a major party convention repeatedly call for the jailing of the leader of the other major party.

…

To me, all this seemed like a new crossing of a line and an ugly degradation of a norm in American politics.

…

Now, I can’t really believe I have to say this, but here goes: In a democratic society, it’s really disturbing for a political party’s leadership to basically endorse the idea that its main political rival should be jailed.

(I guess if the jailing is of a leader of a less major party, it’s okay.)

Under other circumstances, one might make allowances for the difference between such calls emanating from the base and such statements being uttered by the party’s nominee. But this, as liberal journalists have been telling us for months, is Donald Trump, the man who turned ego into id, who made red meat into elite material, who looked at the racist garbage of the ultra-right and saw the poetry of his platform. One would think, to hear these journalists talk, that the window of surprise had been closed some time ago.

As it turns out, Klein wasn’t the only one at Vox shocked by Trump’s comments last night; Zack Beauchamp was, too:

This is so far beyond normal that it’s hard to even know where to start.

Yet start he did—

In democracies, we respect people’s rights to disagree with each other. When one candidate wins a presidential election, the loser returns to private life or another government position. In some cases, former rivals become close friends. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who defeated Bush in the 1992 election, travel together and have spent decades jointly raising money to aid the victims of natural disasters.

They don’t get sent to jail, because we believe that political disagreement should be legal.

—and this is where he ended up:

That’s what is done by tin-pot dictators spanning the globe from North Korea to Zimbabwe. That’s what happens in countries where peaceful transitions of power are the exception, not the rule.

Donald Trump just threatened to bring that to America.

Like Klein, with nary a mention of the RNC, as if this were all unheard of in the United States of 2016.

It’s hard to take seriously all this shock and awe, this sudden Sturm und Drang over the completely unexpected, when this is just a sample of what journalists and pundits were saying, not in 1916, not in 1980, but in July of 2016.

Chris Matthews:

It seems third world, by the way. Somebody pointed out earlier, when you start talking about locking up your opponent, that is banana republic.

David Corn:

This is actually dangerous. #RNCinCle delegates chanting, “Lock her up.”

Ryan Lizza:

Not a healthy sign in a democracy when the case against your opponent is that she should be imprisoned.

Washington Post:

The Trump campaign’s descent from standard red-meat partisanship to unprecedented accusations of criminality displays contempt for the rule of law and a startling disinterest in fact and reason.

Nick Kristof:

Look, people always engage in hyperbole about people they disagree with, but this Republican convention has taken it further than I’ve ever seen…In democracies, it’s natural to denounce opponents. But it’s in tin-pot dictatorships that opponents are locked up. When you’ve covered autocracies in countries where politicians are actually locked up after losing power struggles, you really don’t aspire for that in your own country.

What’s doubly odd about all this shock over Trump’s comments last night is that it’s not as if we’ve been wanting, these past few days, for incidents that are truly shocking. For months, I’ve been beating the drum of the non-novelty of Donald Trump, but try as I might, even I can’t remember a presidential candidate caught on tape bragging about assaulting women and grabbing pussy.

The liberal media likes to oppose itself to Trump, but with breathless commentary like this, where everything’s always new under the sun, it’s hard not to conclude that in the circus that is this election, Trump is the ringmaster and the liberal media his unwitting clowns, the side show that stumbles up and down the aisles, ginning up the crowd.

CUNY, All Too CUNY: Or, What Happens When Higher-Ed Hoodlums Aren’t Brought to Heel?

In August, I blogged about a New York Times story on a corruption investigation of City College President Lisa Coico. On Friday, the Times reported that Coico abruptly resigned. Today, the Times has a long piece on the corruption and potential criminality that led to Coico’s resignation (upon threat of firing).

On the one hand, the piece paints a portrait of a college president so fantastically corrupt, it’s almost comical.

Ms. Coico, who had an annual salary of $400,000 at that point [2011], was using the college’s main fund-raising vehicle, the 21st Century Foundation, to pay tens of thousands of dollars for housekeeping, furniture, seasonal fruits and organic maple-glazed nuts, among other items….By August 2011, according to an email between two school officials, the college had begun to itemize more than $155,000 of her spending in three categories — “college,” “personal” and “iffy.”

On the other hand, it’s just one blood-boiling outrage after another, where the criminality flows, like lava, from the mountain of largesse that Coico was legally allowed in the first place.

The Times also questioned whether Ms. Coico had repaid a $20,000 security deposit for a rental home, or kept the money for herself….Ms. Coico had a housing allowance of $5,000 per month when she was hired, which was increased to $7,500 per month in July 2010.

We have adjuncts at CUNY who can’t pay their rent. Mostly because the pay is so low, but sometimes, as occurred at Brooklyn College last month, because CUNY can’t be bothered to get its act together so that people are paid on time. Yet a college president, who’s already earning a $400,000 salary (and remember that was in 2011; God knows what she was raking in upon her resignation) plus a housing allowance of $7500, gets additional help to put down a $20,000 security deposit on a rental home in Westchester?

On top of it all, the article makes plain that CUNY officials have been nervous about and watchful of Coico’s spending since her first year at the college:

Behind the scenes, there were also questions about her personal spending going back to the middle of 2011, roughly a year after her appointment….Anxious about the amount she was spending, especially given the fact that many of City College’s students come from low-income families and struggle to pay even its modest tuition, some began “questioning its appropriateness, since the president had a substantial housing allowance meant for such things,” said one longtime official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being entangled in the investigation.

…

She was later ordered by Frederick P. Schaffer, CUNY’s general counsel, to repay the college $51,000, or roughly one-third of the expenses in question, because she had not received prior approval for moving and other expenses. She fulfilled that obligation by January 2016.

Ms. Coico was also informed that any furniture bought with foundation funds — including $50,000 worth for a rental home in Larchmont, N.Y. — belonged to City College. Moreover, she was asked to return a $20,000 security deposit at the end of her lease in Larchmont.

Ms. Coico and her husband bought another home in Westchester County in April 2013, property records show. When asked if she repaid the $20,000 deposit, the college declined to comment.

…

But this summer, The Times took a closer look at her expenses, andreported that CUNY’s Research Foundation, which manages research funds for the entire system, had ultimately covered Ms. Coico’s personal expenses from her early years as president. Using Research Foundation funds that way raised concerns because they could include money from federal grants, which are typically earmarked for research-related expenses, such as staff and equipment, and have strict guidelines about how they are used.

…Two weeks after the Times report was published, a subpoena was issued by the office of Robert L. Capers, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

…

The memo in question is just one paragraph long and is bureaucratic in nature.

Addressed to an employee at the provost’s office named Luisa Hassan, and dated Sept. 15, 2011, it begins, “As we have discussed,” and is attributed to Ron Woodford, a manager at the college’s 21st Century Foundation. It goes on to say that some of Ms. Coico’s expenses “were inadvertently paid” by that foundation, when they should have been paid by CUNY’s Research Foundation. The memo then asks Ms. Hassan to process an invoice for $155,176 to “rectify the funding source,” for what it calls “start-up expenses associated with the appointment of the new president.”

…

Were the memo proved to be backdated or manufactured, the responsible parties could be open to charges such as obstruction of justice, legal experts said.

Given all of this, why has it taken CUNY so long—to the point of a federal investigation being launched—to demand Coico’s resignation?

The whole story, in my experience, is CUNY, all too CUNY. Not just the opéra bouffe of corruption but also the creaking machinery of self-correction.

Here you have a garden-variety miscreant, thieving one piece of the pie after another from an institution that has so little to begin with. Even the things Coico did that weren’t criminal should have been enough to get her fired. On ethical grounds alone.

But what did CUNY do? Lots of whispering emails, lots of back and forth between cowed and ineffective administrators, culminating each time, it seems, with a polite—and sometimes unheeded—request to Coico that she correct the problem. As if it were all a simple misunderstanding or oversight.

Indeed, in the one instance when CUNY seemed more determined to take action, an extensive internal investigation of just one of Coico’s questionable moves led to her being exonerated by the institution. Whether she was in that instance correct in her actions, surely her track record might have raised enough red flags to lead to a much wider investigation rather than a declaration, with much fanfare, of her innocence.

Not once, it seems, until the very last minute—the Times reported on Friday that it was a smoking-gun email from the newspaper that led to the abrupt resignation of Coico, leaving City College with no replacement, save the acting provost, who was herself replacing someone else; all suggesting that Coico’s being pushed out was unplanned, unrehearsed, and unprepared for—did CUNY execute a plan to get rid of Coico. From what I can tell (and in my experience, as I said, this is how CUNY often operates), the institution allowed this higher-ed hoodlum to happily continue in her position, secure in the knowledge that if she ever did anything too egregious or got caught, that she’d get a mild entreaty to fix the error.

If there is one potential bit of good news in this story, it’s this:

And over the weekend, speculation intensified among staff and faculty members as to whether people close to the president would also be implicated, and whether the federal investigation would spread to other parts of CUNY, the largest public urban university in the country.

One can only hope that that speculation turns out to be true.

Trump and Tomasky: Where Liberalism and Conservatism Meet

Donald Trump in last night’s debate:

And we have to be sure that Muslims come in and report when they see something going on. When they see hatred going on, they have to report it. As an example, in San Bernardino, many people saw the bombs all over the apartment of the two people that killed 14 and wounded many, many people. Horribly wounded. They’ll never be the same. Muslims have to report the problems when they see them.

Michael Tomasky, liberal columnist for The Daily Beast and editor of the liberal journal Democracy, in December, after the San Bernadino killings:

…the rights you [Muslims] have as Americans have to be earned, fought for….If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then you have to make that happen.

 

 

Sex, Dice, and the Trump Tapes

Yesterday, the Washington Post revealed that it had obtained a videotape featuring Donald Trump bragging, in the most graphic and ugly terms, about women he’s groped, harassed, demeaned, and more. Within 24 hours, the tape seems to have transformed the political landscape, with legions of Republican leaders now calling on Trump to step down from the ticket.

1.

Across social media, people are wondering why this particular story has proven so explosive for Trump. Given that everyone already knew the vileness of his views on women and the viciousness of his behavior toward them—not to mention Muslims and Mexicans—what’s so different about this story?

I suspect it’s the profanity. People forget this, but one of the things that most hurt Richard Nixon during Watergate was the release of the White House tapes. The transcripts were laced with what was politely called in the media “expletive deleted,” and even though some of the expletives were rather mild, it made Middle America sick to think that their straight-laced president might be slinging “fuck” and “shit” with all the abandon of an unwashed hippie.

But I also think it matters, a lot, that the New York Times, rather than relying on coy evasion, went all in and actually quoted Trump, in its article, using words like “fuck” (“I did try and fuck her. She was married”), “tits” (“She’s now got the big phony tits and everything”) and “pussy” (“grab them by the pussy…You can do anything”).

Thinking back on Watergate, remember when Carl Bernstein woke Attorney General John Mitchell in the middle of the night to tell him that the Washington Post was going to run a story the next morning saying that Mitchell was the head of a secret slush fund to spy on the Democrats? Mitchell warned Bernstein that Post publisher “Katie Graham’s going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” In the movie version, Ben Bradlee, played by Jason Robards, tells Bernstein not to include that quote. “This is a family paper,” he says.

Not anymore.

2.

In the end, I don’t think the tape is going to be the nail in Trump’s coffin.

I’ve been saying for months that Clinton is going to destroy Trump. Back in March, I wrote, “There is a silent majority in this country. And it hates Trump.” But if this latest revelation has any effect on the election, it won’t be the tape; it’ll be the apology, which Trump issued last night.

Misogyny is not an issue for Trump’s base. And it may be that profanity isn’t either. But weakness is, as Jodi Dean taught us in a memorable post from August of last year. With this apology, Trump will be thought of as a wimp, a weakling who caved into the forces of feminized political correctness.

Of all the commentators on the RNC Convention this past summer, only Lauren Berlant caught the full tenor of anti-PC ideology among the ranks of Trump’s supporters. This tape was Trump’s moment, to borrow Berlant’s terminology, to demonstrate just how a free man he is. But with that apology, he only shows that he, too, has been captured and tamed by the forces of PC.

3.

That said, it’d be a shame if the tape were used merely to delegitimate Trump. After all, Trump really has nothing to answer for here; we’ve known all along that he speaks and acts like this. The real crew that needs to answer for this tape is the Christian Right.

Throughout the campaign, white evangelicals have overwhelmingly supported Trump—often with higher majorities than Romney got from them. Despite Trump’s obvious flouting of the sexual puritanism they claim as their brand. And as of last night, their leadership was still firmly behind Trump.

Rather than discredit Trump, this tape should destroy that movement, its leaders, and the cottage industry of enabling journalists and academics who’ve told us for decades that we need to take “people of faith”—by which they mean white evangelicals—more seriously.

4.

But tonight the story is whether the tape will force Trump to step down.

I have my doubts. To put it more pointedly: it’ll never happen.

This is a party whose leadership was incapable throughout the primary of keeping Trump off the ticket. Now that he’s demonstrated that he’s the party’s top vote-getter, and has been crowned as its leaders, how will they force him to step down?

And why would Trump, for his part, voluntarily agree to do it? He’s never been accountable to the party leadership. He won, despite their opposition to his candidacy. He doesn’t owe them a damn thing. And in the world he comes from—not real estate, remember, but reality TV—this kind of shit show is just a good night of sky-high ratings.

Even if he did step down, I don’t see how it would change the outcome of the election.

It might actually be a disaster for the GOP if Trump stepped down. It would only confirm that the party is the three-ring circus it has seemed to be, completely incapable of selecting a responsible leader.

Frankly, I think Clinton’s margin of victory would be even higher if Trump did step down. Trump’s voters, his fervent base of support, would be absolutely devastated. And what kind of mass constituency does Pence have? Half the time, I can’t even remember his name and have to look it up.

But if it did happen—and it won’t—it would be an even bigger confirmation of my “Trump is the George McGovern of the Republican Party” thesis.

After all, the McGovern campaign also saw a head of the ticket forced to step down after a public controversy. Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton had been McGovern’s VP candidate, until it was exposed in the media that he had been hospitalized for depression, and McGovern removed him from the ticket. The result was the same as what I described above with respect to Trump: it only confirmed people’s sense that this was a campaign, and a party, that was not in control of itself.

5.

The only thing that’s interesting about all this maneuvering to get Trump off the ticket is how legalistic, almost quasi-constitutional, it is.

The presidency, as any high school civics student can tell you, is supposed to be the agent of constitutional efficacy, the one institution in the American firmament, as Hamilton understood (“energy…unity…duration”), that truly could act on behalf of the whole.

Yet here we are, less than 20 years after Bush v. Gore, confronting yet another massive political, quasi-constitutional, crisis, centered around…the presidency.

Presidents may not be Green Lanterns, but, damn, do they generate a considerable amount of constitutional chaos.

6.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note here the panic among Clinton supporters that all this talk of Trump’s possible stepping down has provoked.

On Facebook, quite a few people seem genuinely unnerved by the possibility that Trump would step down, leaving Pence or some other improbable figure (John Kasich?) to rally the Republicans to victory. With just five weeks to go until the election.

Here’s a message for my Clinton-supporting friends: You can’t scream for months that Donald Trump is a unique threat to humanity, different from all other Republican threats we’ve seen, going back Goldwater, and then, when it seems like we might finally and happily be spared this unique fascist threat, panic. Just because you fear that it would mean your candidate won’t win. That kind of response undermines everything you’ve been saying these last few months.

When I pointed this out on Facebook and Twitter, several intrepid souls tried to counter that though Trump was a unique threat, he offered the Democrats the possibility of not merely winning an election but destroying the GOP along with him.

Now I’ve been on the record as saying that if the Democrats had played their cards right, this could have been a realignment election, in which the GOP was thoroughly repudiated.

Even so, wanting Trump to remain on the ticket, just on the off chance that it might destroy the GOP, seems like an awfully big risk, an awfully dangerous rolling of the dice, for Clinton supporters to take. After all that they have said about Trump being a fascist.

It makes them sound like none other than Ernst Thälmann, the German Communist they love to invoke (as a cautionary tale against the left), who famously said, “After Hitler, our turn.”

A Good Time for Revolution: On Strikes and the Harvard Man

Once upon a time, a Harvard Man knew how to handle a strike.

In 1919, two hundred students answered Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell’s call to break the policemen’s strike. They patrolled the streets of Boston, barricaded Harvard Yard against thieves and thugs, and heaped antisemitic abuse on a young pro-strike instructor by the name of Harold Laski. The students, including all of the football team, made up 15% of the city’s strike breakers. “To hell with football,” said the coach, “if the men are needed.”

What a difference a century makes.

Unfamiliar with the bloody battles of yesteryear, less adept in matters of primitive accumulation, today’s ruling class is no longer repelled by strikes. It’s confused by them.

So when Harvard’s dining hall workers go out on strike, the students respond like this:

“I don’t get why they have to protest directly outside of the Houses. You’re basically hurting the students who went out and endorsed you—the Undergraduate Council endorsed the strike—and you’re waking them up in the middle of midterms.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for people’s protests, but when it gets in the way of my academics it kinda irks me a bit.”
Walking through picket lines on the way to a midterm is “a really weird experience.”

Not all the students share this view; some support the dining hall workers.

Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that it’s not your daddy’s ruling class anymore.

Seems like a good time for revolution.

 

 

Harvard, In Theory and Practice

Harvard in Theory:

“Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are…to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged….an excessive rate of saving must on balance mitigate the burden of those bearing this hardship.” (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, § 46)

Harvard in Practice:

When dining hall workers ask a university with a $36 billion endowment to pay them $35,000 a year plus health benefits, they’re forced out on strike.

Bowling in Bratislava: Remembrance, Rosh Hashanah, Eichmann, and Arendt

In synagogue over the last two days of Rosh Hashanah, I was struck by a passage that I never really noticed in previous years. It’s from Zikhronot, the prayers or verses of remembrance in the Musaf Amidah that we recite on the holiday:

You remember the deeds of the world and You are mindful of Your creatures since the beginning of time.

Before You stands revealed all that is hidden, and every mystery from the moment of creation.

Nothing is forgotten in Your awe-inspiring presence, nothing concealed from Your gaze;

You remember every deed, and nothing in creation can be hidden from You.

Everything is revealed and known to You, Adonai our God; You see to the end of time.

It is You who established a rite of remembrance, to take account of every being, every soul, to recall the multitude of deeds, and call to mind countless creations.

That image a God that remembers every being that has ever lived—and every deed that’s ever been done—since the beginning of time, reminded me of two passages in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which serve as bookends of the text.

The first has to do with Eichmann. One of Arendt’s most puzzling complaints throughout the book is that Eichmann repeatedly forgot or got wrong critical facts about his involvement in the Holocaust. She keeps coming back to his faulty memory, almost as if his forgetfulness were of equal stature with his other crimes, a crime unto itself.

She seems weirdly puzzled and even more weirdly outraged by his lapses of memory. The lapses, after all, seem perfectly explicable as convenient stories Eichmann told in order to save his life. And regardless of their explanation, don’t they pale in comparison to the mounting detail of his involvement in the mass murder of the Jews? Why is Arendt so fixated on them?

As she narrates Eichmann’s slow ascension in the Nazi chain of command, her animus for his terrible memory reaches a climax, when she recounts in chapter five his testimony to Israeli interrogators about a trip he made to Bratislava in 1942:

What he remembered was that he was there as the guest of Sano Mach, Minister of the Interior in the German-established Slovakian puppet government….Eichmann remembered this because it was unusual for him to receive social invitations from members of governments; it was an honor. Mach, as Eichmann recalled, was a nice, easygoing fellow who invited him to bowl with him. Did he really have no other business in Bratislava in the middle of the war than to go bowling with the Minister of the Interior? No, absolutely no other business; he remembered it all very well, how they bowled, and how drinks were served just before the news of the attempt on Heydrich’s life arrived. Four months and fifty-five tapes later, Captain Less, the Israeli examiner, came back to this point, and Eichmann told the same story in nearly identical words, adding that this day had been “unforgettable,” because his “superior had been assassinated.” This time, however, he was confronted with a document that said he had been sent to Bratislava to talk over “the current evacuation action against Jews from Slovakia.” He admitted his error at once: “Clear, clear, that was an order from Berlin, they did not send me there to go bowling.” Had he lied twice, with great consistency? Hardly. To evacuate and deport Jews had become routine business; what stuck in his mind was bowling…

The second passage occurs near the end of the book, in Arendt’s discussion of a German sergeant, Anton Schmidt, who gave Jewish partisans in Poland forged papers and military trucks. For five months in late 1941 and early 1942, Schmidt helped save Jews, expecting and receiving nothing in return, until he was arrested and killed by the Nazis.

Reflecting upon the power of Schmidt’s actions, Arendt points out that a critical weapon of the Nazis was to deny their opponents—and their victims—a heroic or even individual death. Where the God of the Jews remembers every being and every deed, the Nazis sought to make their victims and opponents—and all they had done during their time on earth—”disappear in silent anonymity.” Hence, the industrialized murder, followed by a near total erasure of the crimes.

But while the Nazis tried “to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear,” the Schmidt testimony revealed that “the holes of oblivion do not exist.”

Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing [including Schmidt’s good deeds] can ever be “practically useless,” at least, not in the long run.

We have here two tales: one of forgetfulness, which is an adjutant to the most heinous of crimes, if not a crime in its own right; one of recall, which is often the only helpmate goodness in this world can have. The first is the servant of evil; the second of, not godliness, but goodness. Reporting on the testimony of Schmidt’s deeds in the Jerusalem courtroom, Arendt writes:

During the few minutes it took Kovner [the witness] to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question—how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.

And here we come back to Zikhronot. The God that remembers every person that ever existed, and every deed that was ever committed, is a God who makes goodness possible by ensuring these holes of oblivion do not exist. Arendt was no believer, but she was, I’ve argued, a deeply Jewish thinker, and in a trial in a courtroom, she found not the God of the Jews but an imperfect entity that might serve the same function: “a rite of remembrance, to take account of every being, every soul, to recall the multitude of deeds, and call to mind countless creations.”

*  *  *  *

On an unrelated note, I couldn’t help noticing a marginal note in the mazhor. In a discussion of the Aleinu, the prayer we recite at the conclusion of every service, the editors make note of an interpretation of the prayer that first arose in the 19th century. It was then, apparently, that rabbis began to argue that a passage that previously had been understood to refer to the establishment of God’s sovereignty across the earth should now be understood to refer to the injunction to repair the world. Men and women, in other words, must work to establish righteousness and justice throughout the world. Whether and how that injunction was connected to the establishment of God’s sovereignty across the earth wasn’t made clear, at least not to me. But what was clear, extraordinarily and powerfully clear, is the editors’ conclusion:

Even earlier [than during the nineteenth century], Maimonides (12th century) had argued that the single most important characteristic of God’s sovereignty would be an end to one people dominating another.

Indeed.

Shana Tova.

When a Worker Freezes to Death in a Walk-In Freezer at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Downtown Atlanta

Last March, Carolyn Mangham, a worker at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in downtown Atlanta, froze to death after being trapped 13 hours in the hotel’s walk-in freezer with a temperature of below minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The autopsy report read: “Found in freezer; malfunctioning exit release button.”

Just a couple of notes on this ghastly story, straight out of The Shining.

Hotel workers and their union would like hotels to install emergency devices in large freezers that, much like an alarm that could be pulled, would notify security if they are trapped inside. They’d also like to carry panic-button devices in case they should need help, wherever they are.


Hotels routinely install unwanted surveillance devices throughout the workplace and on workers—like the notorious  that would follow maids throughout the hotel, tracking their every move, monitoring how long they spend cleaning each room—but they can’t provide workers with desired devices that would prevent them from freezing to death?


OSHA wants to fine the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel a whopping $12,500. That’s how much the life of Carolyn Mangham is worth. $12,500. It may be that the union’s proposed safety measures would cost more. In which case the fine is a bargain for the hotel.


After Mangham was killed, the hotel claimed they ran a series of tests on the door to the freezer, and claimed everything worked fine. But when an OSHA inspector came the following month to test the doors, the inspector and an employee found themselves trapped in the freezer and had to pound on the door to alert other employees and get out.


OSHA has proposed a series of “voluntary” safety measures, none of which approach those proposed in #1. Those safety measures would not be for the entire industry. Nor would they apply to the Westin hotel company or its parent company. They’re simply for the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in downtown Atlanta.


Despite its limited application, the hotel is fighting OSHA proposal: “The OSHA report is part of an ongoing process and we are planning to contest their findings and recommendations,” Carrie Bloom, a Starwood spokeswoman, said.