By Nate Bloom
Contributing Columnist
The American Masters PBS program premieres a biographical film about HANNAH ARENDT on June 27. Repeat showings later in the week.
Arendt (1906-1975) is usually referred to as a political scholar or political thinker. It is hard to briefly summarize who Arendt was. She wrote very deeply on wide-ranging subjects, and her life was event-filled.
Here is as good a summary as one can find. It is in the PBS web page on the film: “Hannah Arendt came of age in Germany as Hitler rose to power, before escaping to the United States as a Jewish refugee. Through her unflinching capacity to demand attention to facts and reality, Arendt’s time as a political prisoner, refugee and survivor in Europe informed her groundbreaking insights in the human condition, the refugee crisis and totalitarianism.”
I am pretty sure the film will show her origins (well off, educated, secular Jewish parents). I know the film will cover the two biggest controversies in her life: (1) she was a student of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and, soon after meeting him, she was his mistress for several years. Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933. His Nazi membership cleared the way for him to take the top post at a prestigious college. There are many public and private clues that he often had some sympathy for the Nazi party. Arendt knew his hands weren’t clean, but she defended him in a post-war denazification hearing — and (2), her articles and books on the Eichmann trial. There was her controversial take on the thinking of bureaucrats like Eichmann, and her opinion that some Jews acted badly when they cooperated with Nazis. They were wrong, in her view, even if they were trying to save their loved ones.
Many scholars, and others, disagreed so much with Arendt’s views that they cut her off entirely.
“Stranger Things,” the hit fantasy/sci-fi Netflix series will end fairly soon. The fifth season will probably end with the release of three episodes in November and December, 2025 — and that’s the series finale, too.
Seven episodes of the fourth season were released on May 27, and the release of (last) two episodes will be on July 1 (next Tuesday).
It isn’t exactly a major controversy, but I learned that in the land of “Stranger Things,” many say that NOAH SCHNAPP, 20, has been in some hot water. Schnapp was just 12 when he became a recurring actor in the first season of the series. He has been a regular cast member in the subsequent seasons. He plays Will Byers, the son of Joyce Byers (a star of the series.) Joyce is played by WINONA RYDER, 53.
In November 2023 (a month after the Hamas attack), he wrote on social media: You either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism. (He has 32 million social media followers.)
He got a lot of push-back, sometimes polite, but some replies were threatening. He has tried to calm the waters with statements and with a social media video. He said in the video: “I only want peace and safety and security for all innocent people affected by this conflict. I’ve had many open conversations with friends with a Palestinian background, and I think they are very important conversations to have and I’ve learned a lot.”
I should have alerted you sooner to a new American Masters documentary about singer, songwriter and poet JANIS IAN, 74. The documentary premiered on PBS on June 20. There was a date mistake claiming the release was on June 29 in an online source I looked at weeks ago.
The good news — the program will be free on the PBS app for about a month. For a mere $5 monthly donation to your PBS station you can get a “Passport” and see the documentary, anytime, online, or on your TV with devices like Amazon Fire or Roku. It may be on social media for free in the near future. I will alert you of that.
Ian was born Janis Fink. She grew-up in New Jersey. Her parents were secular Jews. She was only 14(!) when she wrote and played her first big hit. It was “Society’s Child” (1965). In the song, she says that she is trying to have a romantic relationship with a black man her age, but everyone around her says she has to stop seeing him.
The song finally took off in 1967 when it was played in a TV program hosted by LEONARD BERNSTEIN. It sold 600,000 records. In 1974, Ian had another big hit (“At Seventeen”). In the following years, her records have had a fairly big audience. She was also one of the first celebrities to be a publicly out lesbian woman (1983).