This chapter will describe Arendt’s central claims in Eichmann in Jerusalem and the very public controversy that the book spurred, noting the emphasis that Arendt herself placed on her ironic tone in the work, rather than the specific claims, as the true source of the tempest. To do so, we will first discuss the famous private, later public, exchange between Arendt and Gershom Scholem, a massively influential scholar of Jewish philosophy and major figure of the Israeli academy and commentator on its politics and culture, as well as Arendt’s friend for over twenty-five years. We will then contextualize Arendt’s main argument in Eichmann by examining related claims she makes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which we will discuss in this chapter and then again more deeply in Chapters 8 and 9, and some of the key essays collected in Between Past and Future concerning the chilling similarities between political communication and the erosion of individual responsibility in public life under conditions of totalitarianism and mass democracy. In concluding, we comment on Judith Butler’s recent return to Arendt’s thinking about Zionism and the modern State of Israel in these works, noting the remarkable similarities between the controversy surrounding Butler’s being honored with the Adorno Prize in 2012 and the controversy around Arendt’s publication of Eichmann almost exactly fifty years earlier.

Before diving into the controversy surrounding Arendt’s book, a few words are in order about (a) Adolf Eichmann the man; (b) his capture, kidnapping, and secret extradition from Argentina to Israel by agents of the Israeli intelligence service; and (c) his subsequent trial in Jerusalem and how it came to pass that Arendt was there to report on the trial. Most briefly, and following the account Tuija Parvikko (2021) provides in the Prologue to her discussion of Arendt, Eichmann, and the politics of the past, we can stipulate the following as basic orienting facts about the place of Eichmann and his trial in Arendt’s thinking politics. First, that what makes Eichmann remarkable, both for Arendt and for discussions about German guilt and individual and collective responsibility for the crimes committed under National Socialism more generally, is that, as Parvikko (2021: ix) puts it, he was like Heinrich Himmler “a good pater familias, with all the outer signs of respectability,” with the shocking consequence that “a good family man had become the greatest criminal of the century.”