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Rated M for Mature.
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to Recall this book where we invite scholars and writers from different disciplines to make sense of contemporary issues, problems and events. I'm John Plotz of the Brandeis English Department, flying extremely solo today, as I will explain. As you probably know, Hannah Arendt has been on my mind a lot lately. You may have heard her crop up and discussion of Israeli and Indian ethno nationalism with Ajanta Subramanian and Lori Allen, and in Sonali Takar's discussion of the founding UN and UNESCO debates over conceptions of plasticity and race in the re Education of Race, which recently grabbed headlines in public books where we proudly and alliteratively partner and our conversations often see the light of day. And as you may have heard, you may also have heard my recent argument that her 1971 article Lying in Politics offers us a valuable corrective to anticipatory despair when American governments, be they led by Nixon or by Trump, seem on the way to gathering every reign of power into their hot little hands. Today I want to share with you another piece on a Rent, which was published earlier this month by our proud partner and linked always with rel relevant footnotes in our show notes and also available on public books itself. So episode 160, like episode 153, which downloads suggest you may actually have enjoyed, is simply an experiment akin to books in dark times, and recall this story and recall this B side in soliloquy. So reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many or simply another one off. Okay, if you're ready, then away we go. Public Books, November 5, 2025 Arendt's Refugee Politics by John Plotz in an age of rising authoritarianism, it is no shock that Hannah Arendt should be returning to syllabi and bestseller lists. A ruthless critic of ethnic nationalism and all the evils that follow from it, Arendt argues in the origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, and elsewhere that the racism that fueled European imperialisms overseas outrages logically precedes the enormities of the Holocaust. First deploy the pseudo category of races to divide people, then use that difference as a way of justifying inequality and oppression, then go for the kill. There is a puzzle, though Arendt's straightforward Enlightenment universalism may seem hard to reconcile with her reflections on the deceptiveness or even the impossibility of devour disavowing one's ethnic or religious origins. However, when Eichmann in Jerusalem proposes that the Holocaust, a crime against humanity, was also a crime perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people, it offers a hint of Arendt's approach to that enduring puzzle. In her biting wartime essay we refugees, 1943, Arendt is always put at is already putting together some of the key pieces in her vision of a universalism that is nonetheless cautious about assimilation as shapeshifting. Fairly recently arrived in America herself, Arendt warns Jewish refugees against becoming, quote, social parvenus, willing to sweep their own identity under the rug so as to rise in a society that scorns Jews. In her Origins of Totalitarianism, Benjamin Disraeli is the exemplary parvenail. Instead, she praises conscious pariahs defined a year later in the Jew as Pariah, as, quote, those bold spirits who tried to make of the emancipation of the Jews that which it really should have been an admission of the Jews as Jews to the ranks of humanity. Faced with an American society that, for all its political freedom, still rejects social nonconformity, she urges refugees to be conscious of pariahs, not Disraeli, like infiltrators. Beat them, don't join them. In much later essays such as Lying in Politics and Truth and Politics, 1967, Arendt consistently argued that each of us has an ethical duty to understand others by making our quote, mind go visiting, end quote, Arendt praises such boundary free multi perspectivalism as an indispensable intellectual tool in the battle against fixed categories of ethnic or racial or religious identity, which she saw mid 20th century ruling elites weaponizing to justify oppression, exploitation, and worse. And yet this commitment to shared humanity is accompanied by the recognition of meaningful and often profound differences between individuals. Her early unpacking of the power of the conscious pariah underpins many ideas in Arendt that may initially seem internally contradictory. The natality that brings each thinking being into the world with a different outlook from that of any other being is what makes protecting the rights of each so indispensable. Although Arendt never, as far as I know, extends this account of personhood beyond the human, it is totally consistent with her account to do so. If humans discern in other species a capacity to feel and know and think about the world in ways that differ from ours. We are connected and require one another, not despite but because we differ from one another. As she puts it in the Human Condition, 1958, plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live. All over the world, those in power rush to justify their own acts of oppression by citing past enormities visited against their own group. A rant by aligning the body of the Jewish people with other targets of crime against humanity, urges readers to imagine themselves as potential objects of such oppression and persecution. Whomever they came for first tomorrow it could easily be you. We Refugees lays out what Arendt thinks follows from the fact that each of us is tossed into the world with certain attributes which we deny or conceal not only at our own peril but also with the result of making the world unsafe for others. Why should our decision to conceal or ignore aspects of our identity, in her terms, to act the parvenu endanger others because crimes against humanity are always perpetrated on some set of bodies that has been singled out from the rest. We ignore such differences, latent or activated at our peril. We refugees appeared in English in the tiny journal Menorah, just as German refugees in America were learning the news of of concentration camp confinements and murders on an unprecedented scale and before the fact registered or was accepted in America at large. There's also another salient context, as Elizabeth Young Bruhl shows in Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World, Arendt was repelled by both moderate and radical Zionist positions laid out in the May 1942 Biltmore Conference. Her objections to the Biltmore declaration inspired her during the same months she was at work on We Refug to formulate a vision of a future Palestine that repudiated not only the concept of a, quote, Jewish commonwealth, but also the sectarian division implied by any notion of minority and majority rights within the unitary state. Both contexts are crucial. She was thinking about Jews as victims of an unfolding genocide, and about Zionists who aspire to dominate other residents of their intended future homeland.
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Thursday Night Football is on, and it's only on Prime Video.
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That is unbelievable.
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This week the Bills stampede into Houston to meet the Texans in a showdown under the lights.
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Are you kidding me with this catch?
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Coverage begins at 7pm Eastern with Football's Best Party TNF tonight presented by Verizon. Not a Prime member, not a problem. Simply sign up for a 30 day free trial. It's the Bills and the Texans Thursday at 7pm Eastern, only on Prime Video. Restrictions apply. See Amazon.com amazonprime for details.
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My son from school. Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection.
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You don't understand.
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It was just the five of us.
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So this was all planned. We you going to do?
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I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All her fault. A new series streaming now only on Peacock. Both frames illuminate the ways that We Refugees unpacks the logic of Arendt's frequently cited response to Nazi Nazi anti Semitism. When one is attacked as a Jew, one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew. In that spirit, We Refugees is surprisingly caustic about German Jews who pretend that all along they've spoken and indeed preferred English. The Parvenu pretends that history and all its messy concomitants do not exist. Lacking the courage to fight for a change of our social and legal status. We have decided instead so many of us to try a change of identity, and this curious behavior makes matters much worse. We Refugees depicts the would be assimilator in almost Maurice Sendak terms. A nice little fairy tale has been invented to describe our behavior. A forlorn emigre dachshund in his grief begins to speak once when I was a Saint Bernard entering a new nation, confronting an unwelcome flow of refugees, Arendt thinks it is a terrible idea, unethical and ultimately unhelpful, simply to try to blend in. In effect, her denunciation of parvenu politics is a warning about the good immigrant rhetoric that has proved such a noxious force in building Trump's surprising appeal to newly minted Americans. The logic of We Refugees helps us understand an open letter. Judith Butler parsed it eloquently back in 2007 that Arendt wrote to Gershom Sholem after his attack on her 1961 Eichmann in Jerusalem I do not love the Jews, nor do I believe in them. I merely belong to them as a matter of course. Beyond dispute or argument, Arendt grants, as Sartre seemingly declines to do in his influential 1946 Anti Semite and Jew, that there is more to Jewishness than its significance. In the eyes of the anti Semite, however, individual identity need not translate into complex political points about group belonging to just as I think people should not hate me or kill me for being Jewish, so they should not love me for it. Arendt's refusal of love for the Jewish people is a certainly radical and highly potent response to the ethno nationalism that in 2025 comes in both anti Semitic and philo Semitic flavors, which sometimes blend together with surprising ease. Arendt's praise of pariah politics and criticism of parva news and faux assimilation are part of her case, disavowing or attempting to disguise the shameful attributes that may make any one of us a stigmatized object of prejudice. This is a far cry from lending the ethical blessing of post pariah status to a new national identity. Rather, she wants those who come into power to remember what it was like to be outside it. Don't go telling people you've always been a Saint Bernard, or you may come to believe it. Her caution to the German Jews offended by the 1930s race laws quote, is it conceivable that none of them asked himself how many of his own group would have done that same if only they had been allowed to? Is of a piece with her indictment of Israeli bars against intermarriage at the time of the Eichmann trial. Pariahs should not become hypocrites a generation later. We need not imagine what Arendt would have had to say about Israel's crimes against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Gazan people, because we already know that she denounced the ethnic bigotry practiced in 1960s Idria Israel, a milder, premonitory version of the current horrors being visited upon Gazans and other Palestinians under Israeli jurisdiction. One of Arendt's most surprising insights is that professing love for the X people may be a way to foreclose on freedom and on humanity just as effectively as professing hatred for the Y people. So what has happened to that opening puzzle about squaring Arendt's universalism with her warnings about chameleonic assimilation? On the one hand, Arendt's vision of humanity that is at its most vulnerable when wedges are driven between different groups understood as innately distinct. On the other, her criticism of parvenus who arrive in America as refugees and seek to deny their Jewish origin. The solution lies in realizing that Arendt is critiquing those who attempt seamless integration into the new group, as if love for the Jewish people could be corrected by turning it into love for the American people instead. Jews who arrived in America were understandably eager to establish their credentials simply as nouveau Americans. After all, as Arendt puts it, nobody likes to listen to all that. To what, exactly? To the fact, hard to bear in 1943, that the Nazi regime was demonstrating that, quote, hell is no longer a religious belief or a fantasy, but something as real as houses and stones and trees. History has created a new kind of human beings, the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends. In place of thinking like a parvenu, Arendt argues for rejecting camp logic on all counts. This is what it means to take up pariah politics in the terrible new world, which in which people can be classed not simply as emigres or as aliens, but as refugees. Switching sides does not remove the crime against humanity implied by the original decision to draw that that line and to barbed wire it. Since her day, many writers have recognized and struggled to make sense of the category of the refugee distinct from the migrants and exiles of earlier eras. Like her, they consider the pressure that this seeming, that this new category of potentially permanent displacement puts on the seeming comforts of group identity. As Edward Said puts it in Reflections on Exile. How then, does one surmount the loneliness of exile without falling into the encompassing and thumping language of national pride, collective sentiments, group passions. That so many writers on refugees and on their rights, cf. Naimu have turned to a rent for inspiration is one reason to excavate her case for a new kind of national belonging constituted neither by long standing tradition nor by shared love between members. Discussing Arendt's enthusiasm for the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Lindsay Stonebridge's recent We Are Free to Change the World argues that Arendt was surprisingly fond of the ancient Greek concept of isonomia. This politics of respect for others autonomy coupled with insistence on one's own freedom of thought and deed has gone by many names. Kropotkin called it mutual aid, Bakunin anarchism in public books. I argued that Ursula Le Guin thought of it as solitary solidarity. Perhaps isonomia is also a hopeful way of capturing what Arendt values in pariah politics. The parvenu responds to the new hell on earth found in concentration camp and internment camps by seeking shelter inside another thicket of rules and orders, no matter how shaped by bias those rules may be expelled from one state and its laws, though pariahs are refugees disinclined to pledge their allegiance to another. Throughout her career Arendt wondered what gives certain people the courage to reject any time tested creed and choose instead to, quote, think without a banister, a famous Arentian ideal. Even under a totalitarian regime there always remain a few people capable of evading the pressure to go and get along. How those who keep their heads even in extremity cannot be relying on what's generally accepted and taken as obvious in dark times 1943 and possibly 2025, with its profoundly tainted public and social media, faulty or spurious claims may seem to circulate with just as much authority as reliable reasoning. In We Refugees, Arendt says sympathetically that, quote, very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely confused. She might have added, though, that those who do survive the loss of social, political and legal status, and who furthermore resist the temptation to define themselves anew by some other identity label, have found a way to live in truth. In Trump's America, too many have already found themselves refugees, detained or expelled. The rest of us, the not yet captive, can learn something from their fate and also their example. We ought not play the parvenu, which in this context means not bending the knee to the false comforts of conformity, to a bold, bigoted political regime that bolsters ethnonationalism and crimes against humanity elsewhere, and is grossly indifferent to its weakest citizens and subjects at home. By embracing pariah politics instead, we can draw sustenance, as Arendt puts it, in the human condition not from what we are, but from who we are. Recall, this book is the creation of John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferry, sound editing is by Kamiyah Bagla, and music comes from a song by Eric Chaslow and Barbara Cassidy. We gratefully acknowledge support from Brandeis University and its Mandel center for the Humanities. We always want to hear from you with your comments, criticisms, or suggestions for future episodes. Finally, if you enjoyed today's show, please forward it to five people or write a review and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. Sam.