Arendt's Biographer Corrects a 22-Year-Old Mistake Linking the Philosopher to a Jewish Terrorist Group By SCOTT MCLEMEE
In the newly reissued paperback edition of her acclaimed biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl says she made only one significant mistake in the original, published by Yale University Press more than two decades ago. But it was a doozy. And the repercussions are bound to echo much louder now, thanks to the correction.
In 1982, Ms. Young-Bruehl, then an associate professor of letters at Wesleyan University, wrote that Arendt made donations to the Jewish Defense League, a terrorist group, in 1967 and 1973. Actually, the biographer now says, the donations were to the United Jewish Appeal, a philanthropic organization. Ms. Young-Bruehl also says that Edward Said repeated the misinformation, then ignored her effort to set the record straight.
The correction, along with a complaint about Said, is tucked away in a footnote to the preface to the book's second edition, published this month by Yale. Interest in Arendt's work on political philosophy has grown around the world since her death, in 1975. Part of the German-Jewish exodus of the 1930s, she arrived in 1941 in the United States, where she wrote one of the landmark works of 20th-century political thought, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
Also international in influence was Edward Said, both for his literary scholarship and his advocacy of the Palestinian cause. Said, who died in 2003, was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where Ms. Young-Bruehl is now on the faculty of the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
Add the Jewish Defense League -- a violent organization that emerged in New York during the late 1960s and later became a controversial factor in Israeli politics -- and Ms. Young-Bruehl's inconspicuous footnote begins to look like a global incident.
A Cut-and-Paste Mistake
"In 1973, when Egypt and Syria invaded Israeli territory on Yom Kippur," wrote Ms. Young-Bruehl in the first edition of her book, "Arendt made a contribution to the Jewish Defense League, as she had in 1967," the year of the Six-Day War. The biographer offers no documentation for the claim and never again mentions the organization.
The reference is all the more surprising because it is so perfunctory. One would never suspect from Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World that a prominent Jewish organization, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, had denounced the "racism, violence, and political extremism" of the Jewish Defense League, which over the years committed dozens of assaults, bombings, and other acts of terror.
So why did Ms. Young-Bruehl not mention that? "The short answer," she said last week, "is that I didn't know." She described working, in those precomputer days, with an enormous typewritten manuscript having "quite a lot of places with pieces of paper taped onto it for revisions." Her mistake was a matter of cut-and-paste, in the most literal sense.
In any case, Arendt could not have made a donation to the Jewish Defense League in 1967, if only because the group, commonly known as the JDL, was not formed until the following year.
Ms. Young-Bruehl said no one who reviewed the manuscript or the galley proofs expressed any alarm at the group's mention. How could the biographer herself have missed the slip? "I had probably read about the JDL and vaguely knew this or that about it," she said. "But I did not have it pegged in my mind as an extremist group. It did not jump out at me as an error."
The mistake came to her attention only when a colleague sent her the autumn 1985 issue of Critical Inquiry, a journal of literary theory, which contained an essay by Edward Said called "An Ideology of Difference." Criticizing the attitudes of American and Israeli intellectuals toward the Palestinians, Said expressed particular consternation at the case of Arendt.
"Although she worked for the emigration of Jews to Palestine before the war," wrote Said, "she was always critical of mainstream Zionism. ... Yet in 1967, she donated money to the Jewish Defense League and did so again in 1973. This information -- presented by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in her biography of Arendt without any awareness of the contradictions at work here -- is remarkable for someone otherwise so compassionate and reflective on the subject of what Zionism did to Palestinians."
Said's essay appeared at a time when the founder of the JDL, Meir Kahane, was emerging as a force in Israeli politics, calling for the eviction of all Arabs from the country. Meanwhile, his supporters in New York were denouncing Said, who, according to The New York Times, was said to be on a JDL "hit list."
Upon reading Said's essay, said Ms. Young-Bruehl, her response was, "Oh, my God, what have I done? I had to go get the manuscript out of the bottom of a closet to figure out what had happened." She said she wrote to Said in 1985, explaining what had happened and expressing regret.
"I asked him, if he ever reprinted the article, if he would add a footnote with my apology for the error, or correct it himself, or do whatever he felt it fit to do," she said. "I told him, 'You can say whatever you want about me -- mea culpa. But please don't continue to circulate that about Arendt.'"
She said the Columbia professor never responded to her letter. "An Ideology of Difference" was reprinted, without any change, in "Race," Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1986.
Paul A. Bové, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh who edited a Festschrift for Said in 2000, was surprised to learn of the situation. In an e-mail message this week, he wrote: "Edward was a stickler for getting things right, to protect himself from hostile attacks and because of his own commitment to intellectual rigor. ... It also seems unlike Edward not to have acknowledged a colleague's note. I never knew him to modify his best understanding of the truth for partisan purposes."
In the footnote appearing in the new edition of her book, Ms. Young-Bruehl wrote that Said's refusal to acknowledge the mistake meant that "the misinformation spread." However, it does not appear that Said himself repeated the claim of a link between Arendt and the Jewish Defense League in his later writings or interviews.
"He chose not to correct himself," said Ms. Young-Bruehl, "but I think he took note of it and didn't promulgate it further."
For her part, the biographer, who is also a practicing psychoanalyst, sounds as if she is answering the demands of her scholarly superego. "It's caused me a lot of bad conscience over the years," she said. "I thought it was important for readers to observe a biographer saying, in print, 'I made this mistake.'"