The pseudonymous author Spengler, sends another note for posting on the First Things blog:

“Anti-Semitism wasn’t getting anywhere until the Jews got behind it,” Paul Johnson quotes a nineteenth-century Viennese joke in his History of the Jews. New Left Review’s December issue is life imitating humor, in which one Jew makes an anti-Zionist prophet out of another Jew with a scandalous ambivalence towards Nazism.

UCLA Professor Gabriel Piterberg, hailing Hannah Arendt as “Zion’s Rebel Daughter,” reviews the recent Arendt collection, The Jewish Writings. Nowhere does Piterberg mention Arendt’s youthful love affair and lifelong apologies for the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who, while rector of the University of Freiburg during the 1930s, fervently supported Hitler, and who never repudiated Nazism.

Piterberg writes that Arendt’s

report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, won her . . . virtual excommunication in Israel, and demonstrated the intellectual courage she showed throughout her life.

What has been largely hidden hitherto, however, is her body of work on antisemitism, Jewish politics and the Zionist project, mainly written during the 1930s and 40s, long before Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared. The publication of The Jewish Writings now allows the reader to reconstruct in detail the historical development of her ideas on Zionism; it is probably the best single bloc of writing—the most concrete, level-headed, powerful and prophetic—that Arendt produced.

Although sympathetic to Zionism in her youth, Arendt turned hostile to the Zionist movement during the 1940s, as Piterberg reports:

Arendt continued to hold to the view that Zionism’s merit was to see through the self-deceptions of assimilation: Jewish identities could not, and should not, just be dissolved into the surrounding citizenries of the various European nation-states. But the policies formulated on the basis of its own opposite premise—the ‘utterly unhistorical’ theory of an unalterable Jewish essence—had proved disastrous. In ‘Antisemitism’ she had roundly denounced Zionism as a ‘betrayal of the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe’ and a ‘vassal of British imperialism’, expressing the bankruptcy of a ‘petite bourgeoisie pursued by pogroms and reduced to poverty in the East and of a highly imperiled bourgeoisie in the West’. In a 1941 Aufbau piece she savaged Chaim Weizmann’s statement that the answer to antisemitism was to build up the Yishuv as ‘dangerous lunacy’.

Her alternative? As Piterberg approvingly notes, Arendt suggested employing the nationalities policy of the Soviet Union. “The Russian Revolution,” she wrote, “found an entirely new and—as far as we can see today—an entirely just way to deal with nationality or minorities.” Otherwise, Arendt suggested, “Palestine could form part of a Mediterranean federation, including Italy, France and Spain and their North African extensions, and eventually other European countries and the rest of the Near East, bringing the Arabs into union with the Europeans.”

The “Mediterranean federation” idea was a fantasy, but conceivably the Jews might have been absorbed into the Soviet Union, although Piterberg does not indicate what they would have done once the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1944, she railed against Zionist hopes for American support:

Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign power is certainly worse . . . the Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean peoples and watch out only for the big faraway powers, will appear only as their tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that such a state of affairs will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred; the antisemitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of the foreign big powers in that region but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences.

Commentary magazine rejected the essay because “it smacked of anti-Semitism,” Piterberg allows.

Arendt’s relationship to Heidegger has been the subject of several books and considerable controversy in recent years. The facts are indisputable that Heidegger to his death refused to repudiate Nazism, and that Arendt to her death defended Heidegger. Whatever her motives, these circumstances make Arendt a curious choice for a Jewish authority on the subject of Zionism. But that is no more curious than Piterberg himself, who believes that Israel’s War of Independence was an exercise in ethnic cleansing. According to the website www.uclaprofs.com, Piterberg has campaigned for divestment in Israel and equated Israeli pilots with suicide bombers. Heidegger, at least, would have been pleased.

A friend runs an interesting website called “Right Wing Bob”—a never-ending discussion of Bob Dylan’s work by a political and theological conservative. He’s posted today an interview with me about the influence of Dylan’s music, which may interest some of our readers. Kind of.

Mostly I sound like a blithering idiot. But I do try to make the linguistic and rhetorical case for God in Dylan—a thesis about the American language that someday I’d like to pursue:

I don’t know what Dylan’s religion is. But I know what the songs are about. And what Dylan reaches down into is the deep stuff of America. Down linguisically into that soil. And he pulls up these threads, these roots, and weaves them together into a song. . . .

I don’t believe we have ever had a singer in America, a composer, a songwriter in America, who’s reached more deeply into that soil. Whatever it is that Pa Carter did — he had a kind of talent for just mixing those roots together. “Gold Watch and Chain,” and so on. But Dylan’s there and deeper. . . .

Woody Guthrie followed another slightly different path down, and Dylan followed that path and went deeper. And Irving Berlin followed another path, and Dylan knows that one too, and African-American gospel follows another path, and Dylan knows that one too. In all of them, I think, Dylan has reached deeper into the soil, into the root stock of American rhetoric, these tropes and this language.

It’s for that reason that his gospel songs—I don’t even want to call them gospel songs—his songs about God are extraordinarily American. And he’s led there by the language itself. American language itself wants to talk about God. And if you are poet enough and songwriter enough to feel where the language wants to go, the language will take you there inevitably.

Within the past couple weeks, Doubleday has released two new books by First Things board members. You might want to give them a read.

In Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action, George Weigel offers a succinct statement of where the war on jihadism stands today, what we’ve done wrong in the past, and what we need to get right to win the future.

The Southern Baptist theologian Albert Mohler reviews the book here, and NRO’s John Miller has an audio interview with Weigel here.

Meanwhile, in Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen produce a tour de force for the pro-life cause. Working through the embryology, philosophy, and ethics, George and Tollefsen have written the definitive tome, a tome that anyone in favor of embryo destruction will be forced to wrestle with again and again.

The new issue of National Review features a review of the book by Wesley J. Smith (subscription required), and NRO’s John Miller has an audio interview with George here.

Since the Smith review is for subscriber’s only, here’s a taste:

This book is bigger than the sum of its parts. The pro-life apologist and Princeton professor Robert P. George and his co-author, University of South Carolina philosopher Christopher Tollefsen, don’t just make a compelling and rational case — no religious arguments here — for the biological humanity and personhood of embryos. They also demonstrate convincingly that human life matters morally at every stage of existence, simply because it is human. And despite the high academic credentials of both authors, Embryo is no scholarly tome. Instead, while George and Tollefsen write very intelligently and mount their case with impeccable logical precision, the book is highly readable and their argument readily accessible to the average reader. …

Having demonstrated forcefully that the human embryo is biologically a human being from the moment of conception, and having strongly argued that every human being is ipso facto a person, the authors draw some important conclusions: All innocent human beings have a right to life; destructive embryonic-stem-cell research and human cloning are wrong, because they violate the bodily integrity and right to life of the nascent human person. Even though these biotechnological techniques could lead to scientific advancement and potential medical treatments, the authors assert (quoting Kant) that each of us must always be considered an end, never a means. …

Powerful forces seek to knock human life off of the pedestal of exceptionalism. Many who stand against the resulting cultural riptide have too often struggled to mount a scientifically valid, entirely secular, and philosophically coherent rebuttal. This important task just became much easier with the publication of George and Tollefsen’s Embryo, an important and powerful contribution in “defense of human life.”

I’ve read both of these books already (I offered some minor assistance in the production of Embryo), and they’re definitely worth checking out.

In case you missed it, the WSJ had an interesting item recently on China’s continuing enforcement of their one-child policy. It seems that many Chinese elite have been flouting it and the government has cracked down, revoking the scofflaws’ Communist Party membership. Don’t be dazzled by the pre-Olympic hoopla; this is modern China:

“More party members, celebrities and well-off people are violating the policies in recent years, which has undermined social equality,” Yang Youwang, director of the Hubei family-planning commission, told the official Xinhua news agency, which reported the penalty yesterday.

Officials in Hubei province found that 93,084 people, including 1,678 officials or party members, had additional children, in violation of the policy, according to the Xinhua report. As China’s economy booms and incomes surge, especially in urban areas, the Communist leadership has become concerned that special treatment of the rich and powerful could aggravate mounting social tensions and shake its grip on power. . . .

“There is a concern on the part of [the government] that things are out of control, that rich people and powerful people are violating this: The rich people, they just pay the fines [for breaking the rule] and get away with it,” says Kate Zhou, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii who has studied the policy.

Prof. Zhou found through her research that for those who can’t afford the fines, the government may still force women to undergo sterilization surgery in addition to confiscating whatever assets they can. “They take your pigs, your water buffalo. They take everything so you have nothing,” she says.

Reports still surface of family-planning officials, who are often under intense government pressure to ensure that births in their districts don’t exceed certain quotas, forcing women to have abortions.

Without discussing the morality of the one-child rule, it’s worth reflecting on the enormity of its consequences. Nothing on this scale has been attempted in human history and the societal effects of eliminating the extended family–overnight–are likely to be bigger and more far-reaching than we can imagine.

Consider: A relatively traditional society that, in the course of 40 years, completely atomizes the individual by fiat. There are, literally, no brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles. People will forget what those relationships even mean. The population, after expanding for hundreds of years, will collapse in size. Each worker will be forced to support two pensioners. The one-child policy is the great under-reported story of our time.

For those interested in getting their arms around the subject, Nick Eberstadt’s 2004 essay “Power and Population in Asia” is an excellent start.

I’m not the resident math-guru here at First Things. So I’ll be interested in what Amanda (with her CUA math and English double-major background) might have to say about this review by Jim Holt of John Allen Paulos’s Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up.

On the Mirror of Justice blog, Rick Garnett points to one particularly egregious passage in the review, and asks: “What on earth would make Mr. Holt write–after a few sentences about Platonism–that two features of religious believers, which mathematicians ‘of course’ do not share, are (a) a propensity to ‘drag’ beliefs where (presumably) they don’t belong and (b) a propensity to fly planes into buildings.”

Yet the review isn’t totally out in left field. Sure, the reviewer (like the author) is clearly contemptuous of religion–and shows little indication that academically rigorous debates are still going on about the merits of the traditional philosophical proofs for God’s existence (see, for example, John Haldane’s book-length exchange with J.C.C. Smart in Atheism and Theism). Nevertheless, Holt is brutally critical of Paulos’s lack of intellectual seriousness:

Just when the going ought to get good, intellectually speaking, he [Paulos] bales out with a jokey allusion to self-fellating yogis. He has a similarly glib way with the other classic arguments for God’s existence. The ontological argument — which, in its most up-to-date version, involves a subtle analysis of how existence might be built into the very definition of being like a god — is “logical abracadabra.” The argument from design is a “creationist Ponzi scheme” that “quickly leads to metaphysical bankruptcy.” You wonder how such transparently silly arguments could have engaged serious thinkers from Descartes, Leibniz and Hegel to the present day.

Clearly, Paulos is innocent of theology, which he dismisses as a “verbal magic show.” Like other neo-atheist authors, his tone tends to the sophomoric, with references to flatulent dogs and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Ann Coulter crops up in the index, but one looks in vain for the name of a great religious thinker like Karl Barth, who saw theology as an effort to understand what faith has given, not a quest for logical proof.

It’s nice to see a reviewer in the New York Times characterize the neo-atheists in these terms, even if, as Garnett points out, he commits the same intellectual errors in process.