Among all of Hannah Arendt's writings, Eichmann in Jerusalem generated by far the most acrimonious and tangled controversy, which has since cast a long shadow on her eventful but otherwise respectable and illustrious career as a public intellectual and academic. The Eichmann “affair” raised a host of questions about Arendt not only as a political thinker but as an individual Jew. Gershom Scholem's cruel phrase that Arendt lacked “Ahabath Israel” (love of the Jewish people) captures this collective bitterness.

Ironically this book is Hannah Arendt’s most intensely Jewish work, in which she identifies herself morally and epistemologically with the Jewish people. It is as if some of the deepest paradoxes of retaining a Jewish identity under conditions of modernity came to the fore in Arendt’s search for the moral, political, and jurisprudential bases on which the trial and sentencing of Adolf Eichmann could take place. Arendt had struggled to bring together the universal and the particular, her modernist cosmopolitanism and her belief in some form of collective Jewish self-determination all her life. Precisely because this work was so close to who she truly was, it distracted from her equanimity and exhibited at times an astonishing lack of perspective, balance of judgment, and judicious expression.