| Sixty years ago this month, The New Yorker began publishing one of the landmark series in its history, “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Three years earlier, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, had travelled to Argentina and captured Adolf Eichmann, a principal figure in Germany’s planning and execution of the Holocaust. The agents then secretly transported Eichmann to Israel’s capital, where he was put on public trial—a watershed moment in global recognition of the genocide. To cover the proceedings, The New Yorker dispatched Hannah Arendt, the political theorist and author of “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Eichmann and Arendt had both been born in Germany in 1906. In 1933, the year that Eichmann underwent military training with the S.S., Arendt was arrested, and soon fled, eventually landing in New York. Arendt’s familiarity with Germany’s language and culture, and her experience of its descent into fascism, yielded reporting and insight that made “Eichmann in Jerusalem” an immediate, and controversial, sensation. Six decades later, Arendt’s admirers and critics would agree that “Eichmann in Jerusalem” has significantly shaped public understanding of the Holocaust. Many of Arendt’s observations about the bureaucracy of evil—if not its supposed “banality,” in her famous description—now seem indisputable, and the piece is full of surprising details that have faded. The trial, Arendt wrote, failed to achieve all the objectives of the newly reborn Jewish state; it did, however, “trigger the first serious effort” in West Germany to bring Nazi war criminals—many of whom were living openly, under their own names—to justice. Eichmann, a high-school dropout whose own bragging helped bring about his capture, in some ways seems an unlikely figure to make history. Arendt’s reporting helped guarantee that his crimes would be remembered. | 
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