In the early 1960s, Hannah Arendt was sent to Israel by The New Yorker to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the German Nazi SS leader, who was accused of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Her report, Eichmann in Jerusalem, immediately became one of the most controversial texts of the twentieth century. Both condemned for ‘victim blaming’ and praised for breaking new grounds in our understanding of the Holocaust, this work continues to provoke intense emotional and intellectual reactions to this day.
This lecture is dedicated to Arendt’s criticism of the trial, her understanding of the Holocaust, totalitarianism and ‘the banality of evil’, and tries to understand why this book remains so controversial almost six decades after its publication.
Dr. Daniel M. Herskowitz is the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. He was previously a Career Research Fellow in Jewish Studies at Wolfson College, University of Oxford and a postdoctoral fellow at the Religion Department, Columbia University. He is the author of over twenty studies on modern Jewish thought, Jewish-Christian exchanges, political theology, secularization, and nationalism. His first book, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2021) was awarded the 2021 Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Young Scholars Award for Scholarly Excellence.
JW3 is delighted to be partnering with the Oxford Centre for Jewish and Hebrew Studies and hosting this series showcasing the Fellows of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
