The idea that evil could be “banal” still shocks us. It’s much scarier to consider that genocide could be carried out unthinkingly by the most vacuous of bureaucrats and not by intrinsically bad people acting with bad intent. This new moral category was Hannah Arendt’s now infamous reaction to witnessing the 1961 trial of Adolf…
Biopics about philosophers are rare, and they favor activists over ivory-tower thinkers. The life of the mind, unless it directly shapes social action, is not easily captured in film. Hence, Richard Attenborough’s film “Gandhi” exposed the Indian independence leader’s ideas on nonviolent struggle through his political activism, not through his writings. Likewise, Margarethe von Trotta’s…
Two Jewish-themed films fared well at the 2013 German Film Awards, known as the Lolas were handed out April 26 in Berlin. “Hannah Arendt,” famed German director Margarethe von Tratta’s film focusing on four years (1960-1964) in the political theorist’s life, won the Silver Lola for best film. The film deals with the period during…
Crossposted from Batya Reads This year’s New York Jewish Film Festival, starting January 9, is heavy on the Holocaust. Two films, however, stand out in conversation with one another. “Hannah Arendt,” directed by Margarethe von Trotta, is a fictionalization of Arendt’s presence at the Eichmann trial. And a new documentary, “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann,”…
On Wednesday, Deborah Lipstadt wrote about eerie anniversaries. She is the author of the new book “The Eichmann Trial.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: I have spent…
Curt Schleier goes to see “Peep World,” where Jews finally attain the dysfunctional status of WASPs. Philologos noses around with exasperation. Michelle Sieff adjudicates Deborah Lipstadt’s arguments with Hannah Arendt in “The Eichmann Trial.” Katherine Clarke looks into Southeastern Europe’s first Holocaust Museum in Skopje, Macedonia. Raphael Mostel celebrates a renewed interest in the strange…
The friendship between the great kabbalist Gershom Scholem and the political scientist Hannah Arendt famously foundered in the 1960s after a disagreement over Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” an account, of the trial of the Nazi war criminal. Scholem reproached Arendt for a lack of “ahavath Yisrael,” to which Arendt readily concurred that she lacked “ahavath”…
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Many moons ago, when I was a graduate student in Jewish history happily spending my days doing little else but reading, one of the most intriguing books I encountered was not Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed,” or “Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrin” or, for that matter, Hannah Arendt’s “The…
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