Video Archives - The Eichmann Trial: A Discussion with Deborah Lipstadt (2012)
11-13-2014Friday, March 2, 2012: The Eichmann Trial: A Discussion with Deborah Lipstadt
Participants:
-- Roger Berkowitz: Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College.
-- Deborah Lipstadt: Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and author of several books, including The Eichmann Trial.
On March 2, 2012, Deborah Lipstadt held a brief conversation with Roger Berkowitz at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs program center in New York City. The topic of their discussion was Arendt’s treatment of the Eichmann trial. As a critic of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Lipstadt believes that Arendt betrays her own ideas—including her fidelity to the act of thinking and her own conception of totalitarianism—by failing to see who Eichmann truly was, that is in Lipstadt’s view, a rabid anti-Semite and not the banal, everyday bureaucrat that Arendt believed he was.
[caption id="attachment_14812" align="alignleft" width="300"]
Deborah Lipstadt (Source: The Morning News)[/caption]
Though she and Arendt share some common ground, including their agreement that the Holocaust and the phenomenon of totalitarianism broke with prior instances of anti-Semitic violence, Lipstadt detects something askew in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Why, she asks, does Arendt not recognize Eichmann as a vicious person rather than merely a passive one? Lipstadt’s completely speculative theory: “Arendt may have been subliminally writing for her teacher and lover” Martin Heidegger, who was a National Socialist Party member. This idea was received by Berkowitz and others with disbelief.
In addition, Lipstadt notes that Arendt seemed to be critical of Israel’s legal apparatus. She highlights Arendt’s feelings of being uncomfortable and “creeped out” by the behavior of the Sephardic police force, whom she describes as men who seem like they would follow any order—no light charge in the context of her book—as well as her condemnation of the presiding judge’s bombastic attitude as evidence of the “ghetto mentality” of a “typical Galician Jew.” Lipstadt goes so far as to cite these episodes as evidence of racism on Arendt’s part.
In response to Lipstadt, Roger Berkowitz makes the point that for Arendt, it is our duty to remember the horror of the Holocaust, including disturbing evidence. Berkowitz understands Arendt’s approach to the trial as one of uncompromising honesty, seeing Arendt as critical of all testimony—even that of the survivors. Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann as a banal man is not a way of accommodating or adapting his words and actions to her already existing theories but rather is a way of seeing him for what he was.
[caption id="attachment_14814" align="alignright" width="300"]
Deborah Lipstadt's The Eichmann Trial (Source: The Jewish Daily Forward)[/caption]
This talk brings home the uniquely personal quality of Arendt’s involvement in the Eichmann trial. Her writing on the subject is some of the least academic and most literary in her oeuvre. It is well worth watching scholars of Arendt discuss her engagement with the trial, for it raises critical issues about how her academic work and her active public engagement relate to one another.
Analysis by Dan Perlman.
(Featured Image: Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt; Source: Die Welt)
You can view the entirety of Lipstadt and Berkowitz's talk below:
Deborah Lipstadt Discusses The Eichmann Trial from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.