ABSTRACT
Russell A. Berman critiques Judith Butler’s misreading of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem in order to support her own anti-Zionist conclusions. Berman shows how Arendt’s reservations about a single judicial act are illegitimately inflated by her to delegitimise the entire idea of a Jewish state. At once a reception history of the trial and a critique of Butler’s neo-diasporism, he reveals the radically changing representation of justice from Arendt’s reading of Eichmann to Butler’s reading of Arendt, from Arendt’s critique of the trial to Butler’s rejection of the state. Berman concludes that Butler mischaracterises Arendt in order to provide her own anti-Zionism with a false genealogy, there being no philologically tenable grounds for Butler’s colonisation of Arendt for her own antinomianism.
