Chelsea Clinton Image by Getty

By Aiden Pink July 30, 2017

Think about how much worse life would be without the internet. We wouldn’t have video chats on Skype. We wouldn’t have baby pandas sneezing on YouTube. And we wouldn’t have Chelsea Clinton getting into an argument over philosophy and Nazism on Twitter.

It started when the former first daughter tweeted a Washington Post article on Friday about an arson attack at a Phoenix LGBT center, along with the message “The banality of evil” — a phrase coined by 20th-century Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt in her classic book “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”

Brooklyn College political science professor Corey Robin thought that Clinton had misunderstood the phrase. “This is what happens when you know something as a cliche or slogan rather than as an idea,” he tweeted at her. “Totally the opposite of what Arendt meant. Sidwell Friends, Stanford, Oxford, Columbia: all that money for fancy schools, and nowhere did you learn the meaning of this phrase?”

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

But to Robin’s surprise, Clinton responded, asking whether Robin had actually read the Post article and noting that she was “thankful to have read Arendt at Sidwell & Stanford.”

The two continued to go back and forth about who best understood the notoriously misunderstood philosopher. The whole exchange, along with Robin’s more detailed argument of why he is right and Clinton is wrong, is available on his blog, complete with Arendt quotes and a surprise Twitter cameo from an Academy Award nominee.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re near the end of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Make a Passover Gift Today!

$90 $180

$360

Other amount