On Arendt and Jewish Collaboration with the Nazis

Here’s another interesting factoid that I just learned from Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial.

For all the abuse heaped on Arendt for what she wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem about the issue of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis—leading some to claim that she put the Jews and the Nazis on the same level, a charge that Lipstadt unfortunately indulges*—there’s an irony to the trial that few have noticed.

In the words of Lipstadt:

The law under which Eichmann had been tried, the 1950 Nazis and Their Collaborators Law, was instituted in response to grassroots pressure from survivors, not to punish Nazis, but to punish Jews. The Knesset did not adopt the law in anticipation of the arrival of Nazi war criminals in Israel. The intent of the law was to ensure that Jewish survivors who had “collaborated” with the Nazis by serving as Kapos or the like were punished.

* “She [Arendt] saw symmetry between the Nazis and their victims where there was none.” (175)