What follows are some memorable passages from my father’s work, some famous, some notorious, some just extraordinarily interesting—the product of an endlessly inquiring and restless mind. – JP
1963
“Two ideas puzzled me deeply as a child growing up in Brooklyn in the 1930s in what would today be called an integrated neighborhood. One of them was that all Jews were rich; the other was that all Negroes were persecuted. Those ideas had appeared in print; therefore they must be true. My own experience and the evidence of my senses told me they were not true, but that only confirmed what a daydreaming boy from the provinces—for the lower-class neighborhoods of New York belong as surely to the provinces as any rural town in North Dakota—discovers very early: his experience is unreal and therefore not to be trusted. Yet even a boy with a head full of fantasies incongruously synthesized out of Hollywood movies and English novels cannot altogether deny the reality of his own experience—especially when there is so much deprivation in that experience. Nor can he absolutely gainsay the evidence of his own senses—especially such evidence of the senses that comes from being repeatedly beaten up, robbed, and in general hated, terrorized, and humiliated.”
1963
“This habit of judging the Jews by one standard and everyone else by another is a habit Miss Arendt shares with many of her fellow Jews, emphatically including those who think that the main defect of her version of the story is her failure to dwell on all the heroism and all the virtue that the six million displayed among them. But the truth is—must be—that the Jews under Hitler acted as men will act when they are set upon by murderers, no better and no worse: the Final Solution reveals nothing about the victims except that they were mortal beings and helplessly vulnerable in their powerlessness….The Nazis destroyed a third of the Jewish people. In the name of all that is humane, will the remnant never let up on itself?”
–“Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance”
1967
“One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan—or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan. I have made that journey, but it is not from the experience of having made it that I know how very great the distance is, for I started on the road many years before I realized what I was doing, and by the time I did realize it I was for all practical purposes already there. At so imperceptible a pace did I travel, and with so little awareness, that I never felt footsore or out of breath or weary at the thought of how far I still had to go. Yet whenever anyone who has remained back there where I started—remained not physically but socially and culturally, for the neighborhood is now a Negro ghetto and the Jews who have ‘remained’ in it mostly reside in the less affluent areas of Long Island—whenever anyone like that happens into the world in which I now live with such perfect ease, I can see that in his eyes I have become a fully acculturated citizen of a country as foreign to him as China and infinitely more frightening. That country is sometimes called the upper middle class; and indeed I am a member of that class, less by virtue of my income than by virtue of the way my speech is accented, the way I dress, the way I furnish my home, the way I entertain and am entertained, the way I educate my children—the way, quite simply, I look and I live. It appalls me to think what an immense transformation I had to work on myself in order to become what I have become: if I had known what I was doing I would surely not have been able to do it, I would surely not have wanted to. No wonder the choice had to be blind; there was a kind of treason in it: treason toward my family, treason toward my friends. In choosing the road I chose, I was pronouncing a judgment upon them, and the fact that they themselves concurred in the judgment makes the whole thing sadder but no less cruel.”
–from Making It
1979
“I still have trouble finding a positive political label for myself. The label I usually use when I am forced to use one at all is ‘centrist’ or ‘centrist liberal’; the label almost everyone else uses in describing me or the general point of view I hold is ‘neoconservative.’ But whatever its most appropriate name, my present position is very hard to describe in terms of abstract propositions or doctrines.”
–from Breaking Ranks
1982
“The purpose of Israel was to normalize the Jewish people, not to perfect them. The Jewish state was to create not a utopia but a refuge from persecutions and a haven of security in which Jews who chose or were forced to settle there could live a peaceful and normal life. Thanks to the refusal of the Arab world to agree to this, the Jews of Israel have instead had to live in a constant state of siege. It would have been fully understandable if under these conditions Israel had become a garrison state or a military dictatorship. Yet no such development occurred. Founded as a democracy, it has remained a democracy, a particularly vital variant of the species—the only one in the Middle East and one of the few on the face of the earth. In reminding ourselves of that enormous and wondrous fact, we come to the greatest irony of this entire debate….Israel has become a light unto the nations.”
–“J’Accuse”
1982
“If [George Orwell] were alive today, he would find the very ideas and attitudes against which he so fearlessly argued more influential than ever in left-wing centers of opinion (and not in them alone): that the freedoms of the West are relatively unimportant as compared with other values; that war is the greatest of all evils; that nothing is worth fighting or dying for; and that the Soviet Union is basically defensive and peaceful. It is impossible to imagine that he would have joined in parroting the latest expressions of this orthodoxy if he had lived to see it return in even fuller and more dangerous force.”
1997
“[In 1961,] I agreed to join [a] group of distinguished writers and critics in traveling to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to testify on behalf of a local bookseller. For stocking a novel by Hubert Selby Jr. entitled Last Exit to Brooklyn, which was notorious for the graphic description it contained of a gang rape, this bookseller had been put on trial for violating the local law against the dissemination of obscene materials.…I did not much like or admire Selby’s unrelievedly grim novel, but there was no doubt that it was a serious piece of work by a talented writer. Hence I had no problem with testifying to its literary merit when I was put on the stand. But then the judge, a local magistrate who had been scowling at all these interlopers from New York throughout the presentation of the case for the defense and who seemed to take an especially sour view of my testimony, suddenly decided to cross-examine me himself. ‘Do you have any children?’ he demanded. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Any of them girls?’ ‘Three,’ I replied. He grinned malevolently. ‘Well, how would you like it if they read books like this?’ The question took me by surprise, and I hesitated a few seconds before coming up with an answer: ‘Your honor, there are hundreds and hundreds of books in my apartment. I don’t forbid my daughters to read any of them, and I don’t’ keep track of the ones they do.’ To which his honor snorted: ‘I’ll bet.’
“Strictly speaking, I was telling the truth, but it was not the whole truth and nothing but the truth, given that the few specimens of hard-core pornography I owned were deliberately kept out of reach of our kids by being placed on the top shelf of a very tall bookcase.”
–“Lolita, My Mother-in-Law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flynt”
1999
“How can I suggest that Bach was really Jewish? There is no evidence that Bach himself or any of his ancestors was Jewish. I do not for a moment entertain any such fantasy. What am I talking about then? The answer lies in the nature of Bach’s music and the fundamental principle it embodies, which is strict adherence to the established rules of art in his day. So law-abiding was Bach, so joyously did he shoulder the yoke of the musical laws which had been handed down to him, that he fell out of fashion as other composers came along, including some of his own sons. The music critic Samuel Lipman once described the rebellion against their father by his two most talented offspring as tantamount to saying, ‘Let’s just listen to the pretty tunes now.’ Pretty tunes abounded in their father’s huge output. To cite just one example, the aria ‘Erbarme dich’ from the St. Matthew Passion is arguably the most beautiful melody in the history of Western music. Yet it was embedded in so traditional a composition that for a very long time, no one could bother to listen to it.
Moreover, not even the fact that the St. Matthew Passion, as a whole, may be the single greatest piece of music ever written could save it from oblivion. It was lost for almost a century until Felix Mendelssohn rediscovered it. Mendelssohn was a Protestant, but he descended from a Jewish family (his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, was an eminent Jewish scholar), and he remained attached to his roots. I have always wondered whether it was the connection he maintained with Judaism that opened Mendelssohn’s ears to the greatness of the St. Matthew Passion, whose words were the words of the New Testament, but whose music, in its strict fidelity to the laws governing the art, was the music of the Old.”
2002
“[The] story [of the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible] is, at bottom, the story of a war—among the most consequential in all of human history, and to my mind one of the most exciting. These men were the heroes of that war, but in waging it, the lethal instruments they wielded were not swords or lances. No, their weapons were words: words that in their own way could bring death as surely as swords and lances, but that could also do something beyond the power of swords and lances, which was to bring life and balm and healing, often to the wounds they themselves had made….[The] incandescent beauty and awful power [of the words] ultimately vanquished an enemy as insidious and seductive as he was cruel and evil: the enemy they knew as idolatry. Yet I will conclude by arguing that this enemy keeps coming back under different names and in mutated forms that are not always easy to recognize as his. And I will ask, finally, whether the weapons that defeated him over 2,000 years ago, and that are ready to hand in the Bible, may still be sharp enough to cut him down again today.”
–from The Prophets
2007
“Like Hitler, [Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism. Like Hitler, too, he is entirely open about his intentions, although—again like Hitler—he sometimes pretends that he wants nothing more than his country’s just due. In the case of Hitler in 1938, this pretense took the form of claiming that no further demands would be made if sovereignty over the Sudetenland were transferred from Czechoslovakia to Germany. In the case of Ahmadinejad, the pretense takes the form of claiming that Iran is building nuclear facilities only for peaceful purposes and not for the production of bombs.
But here we come upon an interesting difference between then and now. Whereas in the late 1930s almost everyone believed, or talked himself into believing, that Hitler was telling the truth when he said he had no further demands to make after Munich, no one believes that Ahmadinejad is telling the truth when he says that Iran has no wish to develop a nuclear arsenal. In addition, virtually everyone agrees that it would be best if he were stopped, only not, God forbid, with military force—not now, and not ever.
But if military force is ruled out, what is supposed to do the job?”
2013
“Given [many] disagreements with my younger self, why have I permitted ‘My Negro Problem—and Ours’ to be reprinted so many times without revision? The answer is that I have always been proud of it for the boldness it exhibited in grappling with what was then, and still is, the most difficult subject for any American to discuss without hiding behind the usual clichés and pieties and without taking refuge in cant. But to be as recklessly candid about this question as I was about race in the essay itself, I also have to admit that looking at it through the eyes of the literary critic I used to be, I cannot help seeing it as a fully realized piece of writing. It is in the nature of such a work that it achieves an existence independent of its author, and so it is with ‘My Negro Problem—and Ours.’ Almost from the day it was published, I have felt that it no longer belonged to me and that I had no right to tamper with it, let alone to kill it off. All the more is this the case now that it has survived to the ripe old age of 50.”
–“My Negro Problem—and Ours at 50”
FINALLY, BACK TO
1964
“We all inhabit the same world; it is the only world there is to inhabit. Those of us who write, if we are doing anything, are trying to make sense of that world, and our ways of trying are not nearly so different as we have been led to assume: in one form or another, we are all testing our beliefs and acting out our attitudes in public.”
–from Doings and Undoings
Illustration by John Kascht
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