ABSTRACT
In 1961 the New Yorker sent the eminent political thinker Hannah Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Her account and analysis of the trial first appeared in the February and March 1963 issues of that magazine. The articles were published as a book in May of the same year, with the contentious title Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Irving Howe, for one, was deeply troubled by Arendt's articles, both by their content and by their location in the New Yorker, a magazine then infamous for not allowing letters to the editor challenging or refuting articles it had published. Thus, Irving Howe saw in the Arendt controversy not mainly a Jewish problem, but one of social control and the nature and power of modern journalism. Ian Buruma also borrows from D. D. Guttenplan the equation between sectarian "narrowness" and Jewishness, a nearly fatal speck in Lipstadt's eye which makes her book "problematic".
