By Florence Jammot
On December 15, 1961, in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death for crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity.
The court's judgment was largely met with public consensus, but some spoke out against it, and on May 29, 1962, a group of Holocaust survivors and intellectuals, including philosophers Hannah Arendt, Hugo Bergmann, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, sent a petition to Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi demanding that Eichmann's death sentence be commuted.
By opposing Eichmann's execution they raised questions about the Holocaust and also defended values of Judaism, raising questions about Jewish morality for Israel, and about the very nature of a Jewish State.
ABOUT EXECUTING EICHMANN brings together the texts, eyewitness accounts, archival footage, audio recordings, and materials from the time, with discussions amongst contemporary Israeli historians and philosophers to both set out the facts, and go over the arguments. Amongst those taking part are historians Anita Shapira and Hanna Yablonka, and philosophers Moshe Halbertal and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. Returning to a little remembered debate that was central to that era, they also expose its relevancy today, and why it deserves to be revisited.
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