Judith Butler is one of the world’s most influential academics and public intellectuals and a leading supporter of the BDS movement. In this essay, Russell Berman of Stanford University critiques Butler’s (ab)use of Hannah Arendt’s controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem to support her own emphatically anti-Zionist conclusions. Russell shows how Arendt’s reservations about a single judicial act is illegitimately inflated by Butler into a fundamental rejection of the state. He traces the changing representation of justice from Arendt’s reading of Eichmann to Butler’s reading of Arendt, from the critique of the trial to the rejection of the state.

Representing the Trial: Judith Butler Reads Hannah Arendt Reading Adolf Eichmann

by Russell Berman