Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
6
result(s) for
"War crime trials Jerusalem History 20th century."
Sort by:
Visualizing Atrocity
Visualizing Atrocitytakes Hannah Arendt's provocative and polarizing account of the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann as its point of departure for reassessing some of the serviceable myths that have come to shape and limit our understanding both of the Nazi genocide and totalitarianism's broader, constitutive, and recurrent features. These myths are inextricably tied to and reinforced viscerally by the atrocity imagery that emerged with the liberation of the concentration camps at the war's end and played an especially important, evidentiary role in the postwar trials of perpetrators. At the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, particular practices of looking and seeing were first established with respect to these images that were later reinforced and institutionalized through Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem as simply part of the fabric of historical fact. They have come to constitute a certain visual rhetoric that now circumscribes the moral and political fields and powerfully assists in contemporary mythmaking about how we know genocide and what is permitted to count as such. In contrast, Arendt's claims about the banality of evil work to disrupt this visual rhetoric. More significantly still, they direct our attention well beyond the figure of Eichmann to a world organized now as then by practices and processes that while designed to sustain and even enhance life work as well to efface it.
eBook
A State on Trial: Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel
It is noteworthy that the Israel of the early 1960s, when the trial was held in Jerusalem-still under the spell of the authoritarian rule of Ben-Gurion and with the prevailing cult of national unity and unanimity she had dreaded since the inception of statehood-represented for her the potential danger of sliding down the slope toward a totalitarian regime.3 JUDGING ISRAEL The challenging and judging of the state of Israel while it was implementing the highly symbolic act of putting on trial the Nazi archcriminal was performed by Arendt in a series of public acts: first as the figure-or in the disguise-of the observer that she took upon herself throughout the trial itself, then as the writer of the report of the trial, and finally as an active participant in the controversy her report raised. In doing so she consciously acted as the Jewish pariah who embodied the conscious outcast qualities.4 With regard to the trial and the prosecuting body-Israel-she acted as an analyst as well as a survivor of Jewish history, and as a feminine and perpetual refugee figure within the context of the nation-state's patriarchal-masculine self-image and public display of sovereignty, authority, and control.5 Surely, she came to Jerusalem not to submerge herself into the unified, embracing togetherness that the trial melted out of the pell-mell of diasporas, cultures, languages, and political faiths that comprised the Israeli society; neither was she inclined to assimilate herself into the hegemonic discourse of power that the spokespersons of the trial yielded.
Journal Article
The Banality of the Document: Charles Reznikoff's \Holocaust\ and Ineloquent Empathy
This essay argues that Charles Reznikoff's \"Holocaust\" is a response to the controversy that broke out among Jewish intellectuals in the wake of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. I demonstrate that Reznikoff's documentary poems, drawn from transcripts of the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials, work to undercut the politicization of survivor testimony in the Israeli prosecution's case against Eichmann. Reznikoff implicitly sides with Hannah Arendt against the sentimental Zionist cause for which his wife Marie Syrkin and Attorney General Gideon Hausner fought. My central claim is that \"Holocaust\" appropriates survivors' language in order to demonstrate the limits and political dangers of appropriating emotion. As such, Reznikoff's objectivist approach offers an alternative to recent work on historical trauma, models that often call on us to identify with survivors in order to understand the Holocaust.
Journal Article