We are building a list of readings and links to sites that are relevant to the conference and the Center for the Humanities’ semester theme, “Justice and Judgment.”
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem
Wikipedia article on Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Helpful for introductory purposes.
Adolf Eichmann File at The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Comprehensive collection of documents about Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, including trial documents, correspondences, and reviews.
Transcript of Arendt’s lecture on the Eichmann trial at Wesleyan’s John Wesley Club, January 11, 1962 (courtesy of The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress)
Recent work on Eichmann in Jerusalem
Judging Eichmann: History, Judgment, and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Fred Brandfon’s essay from the September/October 2013 issue of The American Poetry Review.
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann Controversy as Destabilizing Transatlantic Text. Adam J. Sacks’s in April 2013 issue of AJS Review.
The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt. Amos Elon’s brief essay on the controversy surrounding Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Judgment in Extremis. Conference inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, held May 16 and 17, 2013, at The Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, organized in co-operation with ECLA of Bard and The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Video footage includes lectures by Jay Bernstein, Seyla Benhabib, Roger Berkowitz, Kerry Bystrom, Andreas Nachama, Gerd Hankel, and Christoph Menke.
Essays and articles by conference speakers
Seyla Benhabib, “Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Article from The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 65-85.
Roger Berkowitz, “Misreading Eichmann in Jerusalem.“ Online commentary in The New York Times’ “The Stone,” July 7, 2013.
Richard Bernstein, “From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil: From Superfluousness to Thoughtlessness.” Chapter seven of Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1996), pp. 137-153.
Leora Bilsky, “The Eichmann Trial and the Legacy of Jurisdiction.” Article from Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2010), pp. 198-218.
Shoshana Felman, “A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law.” Chapter four of The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2002)
Peter Gordon, “The Guilty.” Review of Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial, The New Republic, September 29, 2011.
Jerome Kohn, “Arendt’s Eichmann: Murderer, Idealist, Clown.” A different version of this lecture has been published in the inaugural issue of HA, the annual journal of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.
Berel Lang, “Primo Levi, Philosopher.” Excerpt from Berel Lang’s new book, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (Yale University Press, 2013).
Susan Neiman, “Theodicy in Jerusalem.” Article from Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 65-90.
Dana Villa, “The Banality of Philosophy: Arendt on Heidegger and Eichmann.” Article from Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 179-196.
Dana Villa, “Conscience, the Banality of Evil, and the Idea of a Representative Perpetrator.” Chapter two of Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 39-60.
Adolf Eichmann and the trial
Here is a link to the extensive YouTube documents concerning the Eichmann trial. The YouTube tapes are pre-broadcast versions of the ampex tapes flown to CBS and they seem to cover every bit of the proceedings: Eichmann Trial Tapes
Full text of the judgment issued by the Jerusalem District Court that tried Eichmann and sentenced him to death.
Recent Amnesty International publication on the abiding significance of the Eichmann judgment for matter of international justice.
Yad Vashem’s online trial resources.
Eichmann’s German. Blog entry by Sal Robinson about the role of simultaneous, multilingual court room translation during the trial.
Other works by Hannah Arendt
Truth and Politics, lecture by Arendt at Wesleyan’s Memorial Chapel on November 20, 1965. Arendt spoke in the Assembly lecture series organized by Delta Tau Delta (Courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, Wesleyan University).
Zur Person, television interview with Günter Gaus, October 28, 1964, in German with English subtitles. Arendt responds to the Eichmann controversy beginning at 0:46:40.
Hannah Arendt resources
Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Invaluable resource for digital reproductions of book drafts, lecture notes, correspondences, and much more.
Hannah Arendt Center at the New School for Social Research. The New School is one of three sites that provide full access to Arendt’s digitized paper.
Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The website contains information about the Center’s annual conference and about Hannah Arendt and the Arendt Library at Bard, as well as a frequently updated blog on contemporary issues analyzed through an Arendtian lens.
HannahArendt.net. Online journal for political thought.