Arno J. Mayer
Arno Joseph Mayer (June 19, 1926 – December 17, 2023) was an American historian who specialized in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust. He was the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University.
Arno J. Mayer
June 19, 1926
December 17, 2023 (aged 97)
American
2
Early life and academic career[edit]
Mayer was born into a middle-class family in Luxembourg City on June 19, 1926.[1] His father was a wholesaler who had studied at the University of Heidelberg and had strong social democratic and Zionist beliefs. Mayer described his family as "fully emancipated and largely acculturated Luxembourgian Jews".[2]
The Mayer family fled into France amid the German invasion on 10 May 1940 and reached the France–Spain border by Autumn 1940 but were turned back by Spanish border guards and were in the Vichy-controlled "Free Zone" after the Fall of France. The family succeeded in boarding a ship to Oran in French Algeria on 18 October 1940 but were prevented from entering Morocco because they lacked a visa and were house arrested for several weeks in Oudja. They secured visas for the United States on 22 November 1940 and arrived in New York during January 1941. His maternal grandparents, who had refused to leave Luxembourg, were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto where his grandfather died in December 1943.[3]
Mayer became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944 and enlisted in the United States Army. During his time in the Army, he was trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland and was recognized as one of the Ritchie Boys. He served as an intelligence officer and eventually became a morale officer for high-ranking German prisoners of war. He was discharged in 1946. He received his education at the City College of New York, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and Yale University.[4] He was professor at Wesleyan University (1952–53), Brandeis University (1954–58) and Harvard University (1958–61). He taught at Princeton University beginning in 1961.[5]
2001–2023[edit]
Mayer was very critical of the policies of the United States government. When interviewed for a 2003 documentary, he described the Roman Empire as a "tea party" in comparison to its American counterpart.[35]
Mayer's book, Plowshares into Swords (2008) is an anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian account of Israeli history, tracing what Mayer regards as the degradation of Jewry in general and Zionism in particular with respect to what Mayer considers as Israeli colonial aggression against the Palestinians. In a largely favorable review, the British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft termed Plowshares into Swords an enlightening account of Israeli history that traces such people as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Yeshayahu Leibowitz and, perhaps unexpectedly, Vladimir Jabotinsky and critiques the "chauvinistic and brutalising tendencies of Zionism".[36] In a negative review of the book, British literary scholar Simon Goldhill,[37] an authority on Greek tragedy, said it was of little value as history and criticized Mayer for his political bias, arguing that Mayer ignored Arab acts and media rhetoric against Jewish settlers and Israelis, falsely portrayed the Six-Day War in 1967 as a "calculated imperialist plot", claimed that all Western criticism of the Islamic world for human rights issues is nothing more than self-interested, and described Arab feeling toward Jews buying property in Palestine in the 1920s as "righteous anger".[38]