The Zone of Interest begins on a lovely afternoon somewhere in the Polish countryside. A husband and wife are enjoying a picnic on the banks of a river with their five children; they eat lunch and ...

The Zone of Interest offers a different, terrifying view of the Holocaust by focusing on the mundane lives of Nazis next to Auschwitz. Hannah Arendt's theory on the banality of evil helps us ...

A domestic still life about the commandant of Auschwitz, Glazer's first film since "Under the Skin" is another forensic analysis of human empathy. Holocaust cinema has so implicitly existed in the ...

Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen. In 1963, writing ...

My opposition to the death penalty is weakening. I have opposed the death penalty after being persuaded that it contributes to the culture of death that leaves many aspects of our wondrously free and ...

When the images of dead Palestinian children become a punchline on a television show, where the host, guest, and the audience ...

Philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" in the early 1960s. It refers to the idea that ordinary people can commit horrific atrocities, not out of sadism or outright ...

Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for The New Criterion’s sixth annual Circle Lecture on September 26, 2024. Over the last six decades, a certain phrase has ...