Hannah Arendt's Disruptive Truth Telling

October 7, 2013 by Susan Neiman, Tina Rosenberg

Beth Hamishpath – the House of Justice: These words shouted by the court usher at the top of his voice make us jump to our feet as they announce the arrival of the three judges, who, bareheaded, in black robes, walk into the courtroom from a side room to take their seats on the highest tier of the raised platform.”

So begins Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book originally published in 1963 as a series of articles in The New Yorker magazine, centered on Adolph Eichman’s war crimes trial for his role in the Holocaust. At a standing room-only event in the World Room at Columbia Journalism School last week, Dart Center Executive Director Bruce Shapiro read those lines, calling the book “a still controversial and potent thesis about the banality of evil and complicity, and how large scale evil happens.”

On the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, the Dart Center hosted a lively forum with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and human rights journalist, Tina Rosenberg, and moral philosopher and Einstein Forum director, Susan Neiman. The discussion ranged from journalistic lessons derived from Arendt’s work to debate about the moral and philosophical questions posed by the book, which Arendt subtitled with the chilling phrase, “the banality of evil.”

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Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher with an interest in exploring the persistence of Enlightenment thought and reinterpreting past thinkers for contemporary contexts. She is Director of the Einstein Forum, having previously taught at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. The Wall Street Journal called her 2008 Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists "an argument for re-engaging with the moral vocabulary of the country." Her 2002 work, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, explains philosophy's quest, touching on Kant, among others, as one perpetually in search of a perfect understanding of evil. Born in Atlanta, Neiman received her doctorate degree from Harvard University.

Tina Rosenberg is co-writer of the New York Times Fixes column and author, most recently, of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World. For ten years she was a member of the New York Times editorial board writing editorials on foreign affairs. She is a contributing writer to the Times Sunday magazine. She has written two other books: Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America, and The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Bruce Shapiro is the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, encouraging innovative reporting on violence, conflict and tragedy worldwide from the Center's headquarters at Columbia University in New York City. An award-winning reporter on human rights, criminal justice and politics, Shapiro is a contributing editor at The Nation and U.S. correspondent for Late Night Live on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio Nation.
As an investigative journalist and commentator Shapiro has covered terrain ranging from inner-city neighborhoods to the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court for The Nation, BBC, CNN, Fox News and NPR. Beginning in the mid-1990s Shapiro began extensive reporting on crime victims and American society, and documented the intersection of politics and violence on issues ranging from capital punishment to combat trauma. He was national correspondent for Salon.com, and wrote for the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian and numerous other publications worldwide.