I want to engage questions such as these in order to extend the film's project of discharging the aura that makes discussion of the Holocaust both so seductive and so proprietary, so symbolically transcendent and so institutionally specific. In order to do this, I want to set out in more detail the film's interpretive perspective as well as indicate some limitations of its formal re'visioning of received Holocaust tropes. The bulk of this essay will take up the film's interpretive questions about the meaning of crime, justice, and the state and develop them not only in ways that the film itself does. The goal here is to accept the film's challenge of reconsidering the Eichmann trial today, decades after its precedents for discussing the events referred to under the rubric of the Holocaust have become dominant norms for the historiography of morals. What kind of moment was the Eichmann trial in the history of moral thought and legal institutions? The Specialist's disciplined aesthetic allows us to pursue that question with a freshness that the importance of the trial for subsequent developments in the terms of sovereignty and international justice certainly justifies. After considering what the Eichmann trial has suggested about psychological, ethical, and institutional bases for establishing international law, I will consider political responses—particularly cold war responses—to the trial's consolidation of the international public significance of the Holocaust. For, perhaps more important than setting a general, codifiable legal precedent, the trial condensed a self'evident political meaning for the Holocaust, available to those who exercise jurisdiction over it.At the end of the essay, I return to the starting point, Sivan and Brauman's film, and, more specifically, the aesthetic questions The Specialist poses about cinematic and literary testimony as a form for exemplifying moral judgment and political choice. I will argue that to the extent the film aestheticizes the process of evidence and adjudication—distancing it, framing it (in an echo of Heidegger's revealing technological Ge'stell)—it implies a notion of autonomous judgment that, while it throws into relief both the trial's politicization and moralization, suggests a nonpolitical model of justice based on perceptive intuition. The quality of the film as a (cinematic) representation of a (judicial) representation also serves as a point of critique. I suggest that, in the context of what some literary and film scholars recognize as a distinct Holocaust genre, its presentation of alternative tropes to those established in the prosecution's highly theatrical narrative, while groundbreaking, does not complete the task of moving from fresh perception of the trial to public deliberation on its wider uses. Such deliberation would indicate a more polemical (on the model of a courtroom's own agonistic procedure) juxtaposition of tropes that could illustrate to a critical public the stakes of one representation of the Holocaust versus another.¹⁸ Nonetheless, The Specialist remains a powerful disruption of the condensation of morality, law, and statehood that the Eichmann trial in its received form has allowed to accrue to the advantage of specific sovereignties and jurisdictions of the industrial West.