Doggerel Bites Woman

The following, a clerihew, was inspired by Ruth Wisse's superb essay about Hannah Arendt in Commentary. Arendt, an obsession of mine, was a highly assimilated German Jew, and an insufferable intellectual snob, who had inculcated German antipathy toward "inferior" Jewry. That antipathy was on full display in Eichmann In Jerusalem, her poison pen letter to the upstart--the parvenu--Jewish state that had the temerity to capture a Nazi and put him on trial. Anyway, here's my poem:

Hannah Arendt
Felt the need to vendt.
By harping on Eichmann's so-called "banality"
She tried--and failed--to fudge Germany's moral crimes in their totality.