[In the following essay, Howe denounces the New Yorker's refusal to print rebuttals to Arendt's arguments in Eichmann in Jerusalem, which made its debut in the magazine as a controversial series of articles.]

Some months ago, shortly after James Baldwin published in the New Yorker his now famous article about the Negroes, there appeared a mildly satiric comment upon it in the New Republic. The author of this comment elaborated upon the incongruity between Baldwin's passionate outcry and the sumptuous advertisements surrounding it. At the time I found this mildly irritating, for it seemed very much the sort of thing that highbrows—include me, too—might say without reflection, a kind of pat and automatic criticism based on a pat and automatic opposition to mass culture. After all, Baldwin had reached far more people than if his article had appeared in some little magazine; he had been paid far better than any of these magazines could possibly pay him; and the New Yorker, I was convinced, had not tried to censor his views. Why then complain? Wasn't it another instance of highbrow sour grapes? What if Baldwin's cri de coeur was flanked by ads for sleek minks and noiseless racing cars? Intellectual intransigence, I lectured myself, can too easily decline into mere snobbism and self-righteousness.

Etc.

Then, a few months later, when Hannah Arendt published in the New Yorker her equally famous articles about the Eichmann case, I found myself troubled once more, and this time with far greater urgency than after the Baldwin article. But I could not locate the source of my trouble: was it merely the reflex of a highbrow at seeing the New Yorker venture upon one of its regular expeditions into The Serious? Or could it be a not very admirable envy at seeing a respected intellectual break into the prosperity and publicity the New Yorker brought with it?

Miss Arendt's articles roused in me such strong sentiments of disagreement that for the moment I put aside the problem of their appearance in the New Yorker. Time went by, and most of what had to be said in criticism of her articles was said by Marie Syrkin, Lionel Abel, and Norman Podhoretz; so that, in my mind, I could turn back to the feeling of resentment I had had upon first seeing them in the pages of the New Yorker.

The solution to my problem was first suggested by Marie Syrkin. How many New Yorker readers, she burst out in a conversation, had ever before cared to read anything of the vast literature about Jewish resistance, martyrdom, and survival during World War II? How many would ever read anything about it again? And how many—she continued—would ever know that a notable Jewish historian, Dr. Jacob Robinson, had discovered a large number of factual errors in those articles?

For the New Yorker does not print polemics, rebuttals, or qualifying comments. I gather that a number of communications were sent to it concerning the errors in Miss Arendt's articles, but that only one brief correction was printed. The New Yorker speaks out, ex cathedra, upon occasion: it recognizes the presence of History: and that, one gathers, is that. Hiroshima—John Hersey. Negroes—James Baldwin. Jews—Hannah Arendt. The magazine secures what it takes to be the leading authority or the most interesting writer (but alas, the two are not always the same) to work up a subject; and there it stops. Precisely why it will not print rebuttals or running exchanges I don't know; but I imagine that the answer would be something like this: "Polemics, arguments, that's the sort of thing little magazines do, it's incestuous, you know, what Abel said about Rosenberg's article as qualified by Hook—you know, it's all sort of grubby…."

No doubt; often enough it is grubby. Replies and counter-replies; charges and refutations. Thesefill the intellectual journals, and who does not become impatient with them? Who doesn't sooner or later throw up his hands and say, "Let them bash each other's heads in…."

But who stops to think what our intellectual life would be without precisely these exchanges?

Let me cite an example, which concerns an article less likely to rouse passion than that of Miss Arendt. There recently appeared in Partisan Review an essay by Lionel Trilling, "The Fate of Pleasure," which I take to be a full-scale attack on the modernist outlook in thought and literature. As such, it rouses in me an urge to argument and reply; and I know that if I were to write a reasonably competent answer to Mr. Trilling, Partisan Review would print it and invite Mr. Trilling to rebut. Probably I won't get down to writing this reply, since other obligations will distract me, and in any case I suspect that someone else, similarly aroused by the essay, may at the very moment be preparing to attack it. As an experienced hand, Mr. Trilling must surely expect something of the kind to happen, and I am sure he would join me in saying that this is precisely the way things should be. It is part of what we mean by a free and sustained intellectual life.

Now let's return to Hannah Arendt and the New Yorker. Her articles raised issues of the utmost gravity, for they contained charges against the European Jews, their institutions and leaders, which are certain to rouse the deepest emotions among those of us who—Jews who by an accident of geography—survive. These articles reached a mass audience almost certainly unequipped to judge them critically, a mass audience that would never see Lionel Abel's devastating critique or even hear that Dr. Robinson had prepared a point-by-point refutation. For the New Yorker, as for the whole cultural style it represents, the publication of Miss Arendt's articles disposed, in effect, of the issue: there was nothing more for it to say or allow to be said in its columns, except to defend Miss Arendt in a lugubrious editorial against those who had presumed to notice that she wrote with insufficient scholarship or humane sympathies. One suspects that, for the New Yorker, it would have been tiresome to keep returning to "the same old thing."

But returning to "the same old thing" is the essence of the intellectual life.

Now one can hardly blame the New Yorker for not opening its pages to debate on this or any other issue. It has never claimed to be a serious intellectual journal; only a few of its intellectual friends have made that claim. Nor am I concerned here with the propriety of Miss Arendt publishing her articles in its pages. I am concerned with something far more important: the social meaning, the objective consequences, of their appearance in the New Yorker.

Hundreds of thousands of good middle-class Americans will have learned from those articles that the Jewish leadership in Europe was cowardly, inept, and even collaborationist; that the Jewish community helped the Nazis achieve their goal of racial genocide; and that if the Jews had not "cooperated" with the Nazis, fewer than five to six million Jews would have been killed. No small matter: and you will forgive some of us if we react strongly to this charge. But the New Yorker will not accept in its columns the refutations of highly responsible and scholarly opponents of Miss Arendt. These, it might be remembered, are scholars who have worked their way through—as itis not clear that Miss Arendt has—the primary sources in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew. As far as the New Yorker is concerned, Miss Arendt has the first, the last, the only word. One would surmise that its editors regard Miss Arendt's articles as "literature," quite as they might regard Baldwin's article. A terrific piece, a great story: you don't argue with literature.

What we face here, then, is a difficult problem: a problem in social controls, in the nature of modern journalism and the peculiar powers it enjoys, in the new forms of mass culture that flourish in our sophisticated age.