A (9:17)

Thursday Night Football is on, and it's only on Prime Video.

B (9:20)

That is unbelievable.

A (9:22)

This week the Bills stampede into Houston to meet the Texans in a showdown under the lights.

B (9:27)

Are you kidding me with this catch?

A (9:29)

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.

C (9:47)

We all love a legendary comeback and Degree Original Cool Rush is back and better than ever. Cool Rush isn't just a scent. It's a movement, a fan favorite that delivers bold, fresh vibes and all day sweat protection. Whether you have a man that spends hours in the gym, heads into the office early, or is just trying to stay fresh on a long day, Cool Rush has their back. Head to your local Walmart or Target and grab Degree Cool Rush, the fan favorite scent from the world's number one antiperspirant brand. Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here who picked up.

B (10:22)

My son from school. Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection.

C (10:30)

You don't understand.

B (10:31)

It was just the five of us.

C (10:33)

So this was all planned. We you going to do?

B (10:35)

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.