Adam Hochschild
One Brief Shining Moment

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

Rachel Nolan
‘There’s Nothing for Me Here’

What caused Venezuela’s collapse, and who is responsible? A recent memoir tells the story as so many families have lived it.

Christopher R. Browning
Surely Not?

If the US president were a Manchurian candidate, are there things he would hesitate to do?

Self-Portrait as Psychology

a poem by
Jane Yeh

The straps on my shoes make an X
across my feet.
My eyes snap open and shut like
a purse. Plink plink.

The way we depart from ourselves
when the moon comes out.
The way a cat shows its claws when
picked up and held…

Gal Koplewitz
‘Legal Whack-A-Mole’

Since October 7, Israel’s oldest and most prominent human rights group has faced stiffer opposition than ever before.

Sasha Weiss, interviewed by Merve Emre
Mischief in the Pages

The seventh episode of “The Art of Editing”

Free from the Archives

Adolf Eichmann was captured in Buenos Aires sixty-five years ago today and smuggled back to Israel—Argentina had in the past refused extradition requests—to stand trial for crimes against humanity. He was found guilty and executed in 1961.

In the Review’s June 1, 1963, issue, Stephen Spender reviewed Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt’s account of the trial, in which she “sums up for us the immensely complex organization of those branches of the Nazi Party which were concerned with the ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish question.”

Stephen Spender
Death in Jerusalem

Arendt stresses in her subtitle that this book is her “report on the banality of evil.” The feeling that we all must in some mysterious way share the guilt of the Nazis is a sentimentality she deplores; nevertheless banality is the atmosphere in which our civilization breathes. Given the political situation, the surrounding banality, with its corruption of language, led to the program of mass-killing. Responsibility would have consisted of a day-to-day effort to keep one’s mind free of that banality, from the acceptance of those abstractions which first produced the mind and then the action of an Eichmann. The meaning of this, not only for Germany, but for all of us should be clear.

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