I sent my friend Dave Kinnaman Hanna Arendt’s famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study in the Banality of Evil.  Dave became so engrossed in Arendt’s history of the Holocaust and her philosophy of murder that I then sent him an Israeli documentary of the Eichmann’s trial called The Specialist by director Eyal Sivan. Using original footage of the trial, Sivan reconstructs Arendt’s arguments of why the trial was a failure though it still rendered justice, and through her work she constructed a theory of how the Shoah occurred. Join Dave and I as we sift through the darkest part of the 20th Century using Sivan’s sly masterpiece of truth and Arendt’s arresting idea that the worst mass murderers use droll paperwork instead of bullets. 
 
Works Cited 
Hanna Arendt 
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil 
The Origins of Totalitarianism 
On Revolution 
The Human Condition 
On Violence 
 
Films 
The Specialist (1999) Eyal Sivan 
Eichmann (2009) Robert Young 
Operation Finale (2018) Christ Weitz 
The Eichmann Show (1961) Paul Andrew Williams 
Hanna Arendt (2012) Margarethe von Trotta 
The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996) William A Graham 
The Trial of Adolf Eichmann (1997) Michael Prazan 
Operation Eichamann (1961) R. G. Springsteen 
The Devil Speaks (2022) Yariv Mozer 
 
Other Books 
The Desk Killers, by Dan Gretton 
On Killing, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman 
The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders, by Ernst Klee 
 
You can find me, my books, and my blog at www.thatdylandavis.com.

33.2 The Specialist, Hannah Arendt And The Banality Of Evil

The Super 70 Podcast is a commentary you play along with the film for scene by scene analysis, or you can just listen in your car. Dylan Davis is the author of "FLYNN!", Dating Virginia, Buffalo Seine, and Threshold. He is a reader, listener, and appreciator of culture. Find him at www.thatdylandavis.com and on Twitter @thatdylandavis #super70podcast

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