On two historians ....

I always preferred Howard Zinn's approach to a critical analysis of the US compared to Noam Chomsky's.  There was way more hubris in Chomsky, and a lot more softness in Zinn.  Well, at least, from the outside.  The demise of Zinn is a great loss to academia and public policy discussions.

Meanwhile, Irving Horowitz, who is the Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus at Rutgers, is mighty pissed at the harsh criticisms leveled at Hannah Arendt.  In the opener, he has one of the best sentences that I have come across recently:

Reputations are too frequently made when pygmies stand on the shoulders of giants and when iconic and sometimes heroic figures are symbolically cut down to size.

A wonderful sentence, eh!  Horowitz writes:

What afflicted Jews on all sides was no easy moral battle. It was a battle fought in home and hearth, in each family. The victims were the Jewish people as a whole—believers and nonbelievers, nationalists and internationalists, conservatives and liberals. To use these facts to level charges against Arendt is a simplistic way to blame the author while exonerating the victim. In such circumstances, the choice between remaining in opposition, in somber silence, or leaving shattered families and dreams to migrate to foreign lands was not inviting. It was itself a challenge. Few people fared better in the intellectual life of the democratic West than Arendt. But to expect perfect creatures to emerge unscathed from such wrenching decisions is simply implausible. All human beings face contradictions and sharp differences within their souls, but few have the conflicts in their souls put on display as a national tragedy no less than a personal contradiction. ....
there are few people who, in their writings and their persons, could face with such clear determination the heights and the depths of European civilization in the last century. Hannah Arendt’s work serves as a metaphor for all of that. Even if she would be uncomfortable with such symbolic meaning, she is entitled to the respect of the countless others who have faced similar problems of migration and wandering and those who might once again be faced with similar macroscopic challenges. That it should be the Jews who, uniquely, are subjected by the self-righteous to such charges of “blaming the victim” is perhaps the price of so much migration and so little appreciation of the Jews’ dangerous situation. This is the consequence of confronting the tyrants of this world and the world’s torrent of critics from within.