The recent death of Norman Podhoretz a few months ago returns us to the moment that most defined him—not as a polemicist of later decades, but as a moral voice forged in confrontation. At the beginning of his career, Podhoretz etched his reputation in a now-famous intellectual clash with Hannah Arendt over her reporting on the Eichmann Trial. It was there, a decade and a half after the Allied Forces terminated the German genocidal war machine and in the glare of global attention, that he insisted furiously on something unfashionable then as now: that evil must be recognized as evil, plainly and without adornment.

More than sixty years have passed since Adolf Eichmann stood trial in Jerusalem. The proceedings themselves were a watershed—not only legally, but morally and culturally. Unlike the earlier Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial was broadcast to the world. Each day’s testimony traveled across continents, entering living rooms and shaping global consciousness. But alongside the courtroom, another arena emerged: a secondary battleground of interpretation, waged in the pages of journals, newspapers, and the halls of academia.

It was here that Arendt, already renowned for her work on totalitarianism, published her controversial account. What she........

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