ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt divided pre-Nazi German Jewry into pariahs and parvenus. The Jew as outsider is a familiar trope, but as an outsider to his own community a less familiar one. It may well serve as a description of Hannah Arendt's provocative and contentious relationship to the American Jewish community. Pariah is too strong a word to describe Trilling's position. The shaping of self was Trilling's subject, even his doctrine, and he implicitly recalls in the passage quoted above the Greek idea of a humanistic education as a paideia, a shaping and strengthening of the self, an address, in Matthew Arnold's words, to the desire for conduct and the instinct for beauty. Trilling offered was not an escape into art, but art or literature as a paradoxical political activity, subversive of ideological rigidity, responsive in its imaginative capacities to the adversary.
