This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

What a meaningful coincidence this week – the release of a new film on the ever controversial Hannah Arendt and the awarding of an honorary Doctorate to the newly controversial Judith Butler.

The media is having a field day with both. They’re certainly worth the attention.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Arendt’s reporting on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. According to the reviews, the film focuses on her reporting and its aftermath. I’ve been writing about Arendt for decades and know her vilification by the Jewish establishment well. It wasn’t pretty.

What Arendt was accused of then is more or less what Butler is accused of today.

With Arendt, it was her analysis of Eichmann and the Holocaust. She downplayed Eichmann as a faceless bureaucrat rather than a vicious Jew-hater. Arendt had a word or two as well about the Jewish Councils of Europe’s ghettoized Jewish communities. She thought they were compliant enablers of the destruction of Europe’s Jews.

With Butler, it is about her recent book on Israel. Butler exposes Israel’s misbehavior and imagines a future beyond a Jewish state. Butler’s pioneering feminism rode a wave of freedom consciousness. On Israel, she’s flying against strong headwinds.

Those who predict the demise of Jewish dissent – the end of the Jewish prophetic – should think again. Fifty years apart, Arendt and Butler represent the flowering of the Jewish prophetic in our time.

There’s another connection, though evidently downplayed in the movie’s interpretation of Arendt’s life. Arendt’s troubles with the Jewish establishment didn’t begin with her reporting on the Eichmann trial in 1963. They began earlier in 1948, when she opposed the creation of Israel as a Jewish state.

It’s amazing to read the commentary on both Arendt and Butler fifty years apart. Both are accused of wanting to destroy Israel. Both are considered self-hating Jews. The vitriol hasn’t changed. The Jewish establishment is still out for blood.

Arendt and Butler stand as bookends to the post-Holocaust Jewish drama. Arendt predicted that Israel, formed as a Jewish state, would become a modern day Sparta. Dissent about Israel would be forbidden.

Butler’s book confirms that Arendt’s predictions have come true – on both counts.

Little has changed in the last fifty years – except everything. The Eichmann trial galvanized support for Israel in Europe and America via the Holocaust. The experience of Sparta Israel has shattered Israel’s claim as a redemptive response to the Holocaust.

The idea of Israel as representing hope in a difficult world is now absent even from those who vilified Arendt then and vilify Butler today.

Arendt predicted the darkness to come. Butler is a shining a light in darkness arrived.