New York can be a distracting place, a tough environment to imagine isolation and
silence, which is where my head is supposed to be these days. That said, New York is a very good place to find inspiration from others. While the constant flow of art and ideas can be numbing, it can also fit pieces in the puzzle as well. Last week, we attended the closing night screening of the New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center. The film was Hannah Arendt, an eponymous biopic directed by Margarethe von Trotta. The narrative is strong, as is the setting and atmosphere – more cigarettes smoked than in a season of Mad Men – but most memorable are the philosophical musings of Ms. Arendt. Credited with developing the idea of “the banality of evil”, Ms. Arendt’s pursuit of understanding is ferocious.She argued that the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was not so much an evil-minded villain as an unthinking bureaucrat only doing his job. Viewers of the film witness Ms. Arendt espouse her theories to attentive students, argue her points with colleagues, and most interesting of all, contemplate the complexities of humankind as she sits and smokes at home, staring into oblivion.  “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”