Few are the texts which mold a generation's thinking and discourse instantly and lastingly, and create conceptual breakthroughs. If the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem elevated talk of the Holocaust to the public sphere and granted it the legitimacy and circulation it had not previously had, then the report of the trial by Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) transformed this speech and revolutionized its language and meanings. Thus the two events, the trial and the book, and subsequently the fierce controversy around the book as well, became inextricably connected and of one piece. Not only did the trial take on mythological dimensions as a restorative and expiatory event, summing up a historical chapter and, as it were, “rendering justice” to the victims of the Holocaust, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel, as if justice could be rendered; Arendt's book itself, which endeavored to deconstruct the redemptive mythical discourse of the trial – and the maelstrom which engulfed the book and its author – also assumed mythical dimensions. It is therefore no longer possible to discuss the Eichmann trial and its significance separately from Arendt's analysis of it; or to discuss the meaning of the book without referring to its reception and perception.