As is well-known, Habermas and others issued a statement of “solidarity” with Israel about a month after the October 7 atrocities by Hamas. This was, no doubt, borne of his long efforts to resist any attempts to whitewash the Nazi atrocities, which brought the state of Israel into being. And a month after the October 7 atrocities, this statement certainly made sense. What Israel did subsequently, as we all know, forfeited any claim to lawful defense or the moral high ground Israel had in the immediate wake of October 7: the Israeli atrocities have dwarfed those of Hamas.

But none of that warrants this bizarre and philosophically illiterate attack on Habermas by a Columbia comparative literature professor published shortly after Habermas’s death. The comparison of Habermas to Heidegger is particularly obscene, but indicative of the moral depravity of some critics of Israel and defenders of the Palestinians. Heidegger was a literal Nazi, a reactionary Catholic peasant at heart (as Walter Kaufmann was one of the few to note, correctly), who genuinely hated Jews (and would have hated Palestinians as much if they mattered to his parochial prejudices). Habermas was, for all his faults, a man of the Enlightenment, trying to atone for the world-historical failings of his country. He believed in universal human rights, in reason, in democracy, unlike Heidegger in every respect. His failure was not the statement one month after October 7 but the failure to condemn the Israeli terror in Gaza as it evolved. Someone who can’t distinguish that failure from Heidegger’s is truly beyond reason.

CORRECTION: This essay appeared in early 2024, but was sent to me after Habermas’s death.