Jerome Kohn, who devoted his career to decoding, defending and disseminating the work of Hannah Arendt, the provocative philosopher who diagnosed the roots of 20th-century totalitarianism and controvertibly wrote that the convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann embodied “the banality of evil,” died on Nov. 8 in Bay Shore, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 93.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his sister, Mary Kohn Lazarus.
As the founder of the Hannah Arendt Center at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and as the literary executor and trustee since 2001 of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust, Mr. Kohn was the gatekeeper for a political theorist who was difficult to pigeonhole ideologically and whose writings some considered opaque.
He edited five of Ms. Arendt’s books and made her vast oeuvre available to researchers. He was also a rich source of personal reminiscences about a friendship that lasted from 1967, when he first audited her courses at the New School, until her death in 1975.
“Jerome Kohn’s main concern was to keep Hannah Arendt’s thoughts and words in circulation,” said Prof. Thomas Wild, the research director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., which Mr. Kohn was instrumental in founding and where he served on the board of directors.
”He would, of course, argue against claims or accusations about things that Arendt never wrote or did,” Professor Wild said in an email. “But he would never want to control how people (in good faith) interpreted Arendt’s work.”
The life and work of Ms. Arendt, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, were, Mr. Kohl wrote, largely defined by two events: the rise of totalitarianism, in the form of Nazism and Stalinism, and Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961.
“What really makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other kind of dictatorship to rule is that the people are not informed,” Ms. Arendt said in a 1973 interview. “If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore.” That, she said, robs people of their ability to act and of their “capacity to think and to judge,” and allows governments to rescind the sacred right of citizenship.
Her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1963), which was serialized in The New Yorker, created an outcry because of its suggestion that European Jews could have defended themselves more aggressively and her verdict that while Eichmann deserved to be hanged, his crimes against humanity exemplified what she called “the banality of evil” — a claim that some readers inferred as absolution.
In his introduction to “Thinking Without a Banister,” a collection of Ms. Arendt’s essays published in 2018, Mr. Kohl wrote that she judged Eichmann as a man who could not separate fact from fiction and “could not see the world from anyone else’s point of view, noticeably not of those Jews he admired and worked with.” This, he argued, “is banal, and (this is the hardest part) the banality of the extreme evil for which as a human being, not a monster, he was responsible.”
Much that was said about Ms. Arendt “was indeed preposterous,” Mr. Kohn wrote in his introduction to “Responsibility and Judgment” (2003). “For example, that she attempted to exonerate Eichmann when she had done exactly the opposite; or that she was morally insensitive in asking why Jews had not fought back, a question raised by the prosecutor but never by Arendt, who understood that the processes of dehumanization precluded rebellion.”
Rochelle Gurstein, a historian and essayist, observed in an interview that, for a literary trustee, Mr. Kohn was unusually magnanimous — and that he brought a special dimension to his role.
“My own intellectual life was already profoundly shaped by Arendt’s ideas when I first met Jerry,” she said. “And over the course of the many years of our conversations, it was an unexpected gift to learn so much about her sensibility and humor — things I could not have gleaned from her writing.”
Jerome Hartman Kohn Jr. was born on June 28, 1931, in Hartford, Conn., to Jerome Kohn, a philanthropist who owned a tobacco company, and Alice (Bussy) Kohn.
The poet Wallace Stevens was a neighbor, and one of several intellectual figures — including W.H. Auden, Mary McCarthy and James Baldwin — with whom Mr. Kohn would be associated.
After graduating from the Loomis School in Windsor, Conn., Mr. Kohn earned a bachelor’s degree in literature from Harvard. He went on to study philosophy at Columbia, but gravitated to the New School, where he became Ms. Arendt’s teaching assistant and acolyte.
“Kohn’s life changed when he read two essays by Hannah Arendt in The New Yorker: one on Bertolt Brecht and ‘Truth and Politics,’” published in 1966 and 1967, said Prof. Roger Berkowitz, the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard, when Mr. Kohn was awarded an honorary degree there in 2022.
Mr. Kohn delivered a eulogy at Ms. Arendt’s funeral and became the keeper of her flame. Among the other anthologies of her works he edited were “Essays in Understanding” (1994), “The Promise of Politics” (2005) and, with Ron H. Feldman, “The Jewish Writings” (2007).
“These essays, with his editing and curation, along with his excellent introductions, brought Arendt to a wider audience, broadened our understanding of the scope of her political and cultural interests, and very much amplified her impact and reputation,” Professor Berkowitz said.
Mr. Kohn himself, Professor Berkowitz said, argued that “the original American democratic reality of citizens freely exercising power has been eclipsed by an ‘encroaching social totalism’ and the dominance of bureaucratic rule.”
Mr. Kohn collaborated with Ms. McCarthy in editing a posthumous edition of Ms. Arendt’s “The Life of the Mind” (1978). He facilitated the formation of an Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and directed the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at the New School from 1980 to 1985. In the 1980s, he taught art and philosophy at the Cooper Union with the art critic Dore Ashton.
In addition to his sister, he is survived by his partner, Gerard Hoolahan. They lived in Cutchogue, N.Y.
So keen was Mr. Kohn on spreading Ms. Arendt’s message that public debate and individual action were vital to sustaining a democracy that he licensed Gucci to reproduce, on T-shirts, her etymological analysis of a word and a phrase that were elemental to a productive political life.
The word was “persona,” which she wrote, “originally referred to the actor’s mask that covered his individual ‘personal’ face and indicated to the spectator the role and the part of the actor in the play.” The phrase was “the human condition,” which she analogized to birth, concluding that “speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals.”
The post Jerome Kohn, Keeper of Hannah Arendt’s Flame, Dies at 93 appeared first on New York Times.
