Without Lifting A Finger

Always figured I'd get around to it. Saw the movie. The phrase, which she apparently regretted, stuck: The Banality of Evil. Anyway, padding off to bed (inspired by News & News), I thought: The timing seems right. Kindle had it, so now I do. The "clips below are from the intro: Introduction THE EXCOMMUNICATION OF HANNAH ARENDT In December 1966, Isaiah Berlin, the prominent philosopher and historian of ideas, was the guest of his friend, Edmund Wilson, the well-known American man of letters. An entry in Wilson’s diary mentions an argument between the two men. Berlin “gets violent, sometimes irrational prejudice against people,” Wilson noted, “for example [against] Hannah Arendt, although he has never read her book about Eichmann.” In a memoir in the Yale Review in 1987, Berlin made exactly the same charge against Wilson and elaborated upon this in a 1991 interview with the editor of Wilson’s diary.1 We don’t know the outcome of this quarrel. One thing we do know: mor...

Zionism ( Hebrew : ציונות ‎, Tsiyonut ; Arabic : صهيونية ‎, Ṣahyūniyya ) is the national movement of Jews and Jewish culture that supports the creation of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the Land of Israel . [ 1 ] A religious variety of Zionism supports Jews upholding their Jewish identity, opposes the assimilation of Jews into other societies and has advocated the return of Jews to Israel as a means for Jews to be a majority in their own nation, and to be liberated from antisemitic discrimination, exclusion, and persecution that had historically occurred in the diaspora . [ 1 ] Zionism emerged in the late 19th century in central and eastern Europe as a national revival movement, and soon after this most leaders of the movement associated the main goal with creating the desired state in Palestine , then an area controlled by the Ottoman Empire . [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] Since the establishment of the State of Israel , the Zionist movement continues primarily to advoca...