A ZOOM DISCUSSION OF HANNAH ARENDT, the story of the life of the influential and controversial German Jewish philosopher and political theorist. Arendt’s reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann in The New Yorker was controversial for her now famous concept of the “banality of evil.” Rather than taking exception to Eichmann’s, “I was only taking orders” confessional, Arendt, a former German Jew who had fled to America from Nazi tyranny, argued that, far from being maniacal sociopaths with ungodly desires, the Nazis were mainly a bunch of pen-pushing bureaucrats, intent on furthering their careers rather than being devoted to some sort of supreme, fanatical ideal. As such, the atrocities committed against European Jews during the war took on a far more horrific, and universal, meaning: appropriately motivated, all humans were capable of inhuman acts.

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