A New Play Reveals the Thread Connecting Fascism, Moral Relativism, and Post-Modern Intellectual Decadence

Jonathan Leaf’s Deconstruction centers on the story of Paul de Man, a native of Antwerp who came to America after World War II, told everyone he met that he had served in the Belgian resistance, launched himself on a dazzling academic career as a literary theorist—eventually landing a professorship at Yale—and became a leading figure in the “deconstructionist” approach to literature. It focuses on de Man’s rumored romance with the novelist Mary McCarthy, who had given him his entrée into academic and literary circles, and his relationship with her friend Hannah Arendt, who was among the first to doubt his story about his wartime activities. In an appreciative review, Thomas McArdle writes:

In Leaf’s telling, McCarthy would eventually find herself expecting de Man’s child, [allowing] her third and current husband to think the child was his. After her miscarriage it would be her husband, not de Man, at her side. De Man would by this time be busy with a twenty-one-year-old Bard College student whom he had also impregnated.

But this is the tip of the iceberg. No, de Man had not fought in the resistance. In fact, he had served the Nazis. Some four years after de Man’s 1983 death, a Belgian scholar would discover more than 100 pro-Nazi articles de Man had published under his own byline in occupied Belgium during the war in the country’s leading newspaper, Le Soir. In one, he recommended a forced exodus of the Jews, remarking that Europe “would lose, in all, a few personalities of mediocre value” and then continue in greatness. De Man’s legion of deconstruction disciples would proclaim the revelations overblown. . . . .

[In the play, faced with Arendt’s accusation about his wartime activities, de Man replies], “As a student of Heidegger, you of all people should know that the notion of objective truth is a philosophical concept. An abstraction. Neither more, nor less.” De Man was taunting Arendt, aware that she’d once been both Heidegger’s student and his lover. (Heidegger’s blatant, public support for the Nazis even after the war has since dimmed his intellectual star a little.)

If there is no real truth, then why be good? Or, as de Man earlier asked McCarthy, “If we cannot prove God’s existence or the moral laws taken from antiquity, then what place is there for traditional morality? You do see the logic at least?” The logic she sees—indeed keenly feels—is the soul-destroying vacuum of love and beauty that de Man leaves in his wake. . . . [W]riting on Rousseau, de Man had [once] claimed we can never distinguish between “fictional discourse and empirical event,” which “makes it possible to excuse the bleakest of crimes.”

Read more at Stream

More about: Arts & Culture, Deconstructionism, Hannah Arendt, Literary criticism, Mary McCarthy, Nazism, Theater

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society