HOLOCAUST HORRORS The Museum of Jewish Heritage held a special advance screening of an episode of public television’s six-part series “Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State.” A post-screening panel discussion featured Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg; a psychiatry professor from Harvard Medical School, Robert Jay Lifton, and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Harry Reicher. The museum’s director, David Marwell, moderated the panel.

The first to speak was Mr. Hilberg, a Vienna native who fled Nazi persecution at age 12 and immigrated with his mother to America in 1938. A decade later, while serving in the American military in Munich, he discovered Hitler’s private library at the former Nazi Party headquarters. Mr. Hilberg went on to study at Columbia University’s graduate school and join the War Documentation Project to help to classify Nazi records. His book “The Destruction of European Jews,” has long been a standard in the field.

In his remarks, Mr. Hilberg emphasized that “many people in many different walks of life” – not only those directly affiliated with the SS – collaborated, supported, and participated in the destruction of the Jews.

For example, the German railroad system transported victims and slave labor and no railroad official was ever put on trial, he said. What about the gardening departments of the city of Lvov, which helped to camouflage a neighboring labor camp? Mr. Hilberg mentioned that many companies delivered supplies to concentration camps. He said that lawyers, too, were implicated. They applied the “rule of reason” to figuring out what the state received of confiscated pensions of Jews. “You didn’t have to be an ideologue,” he said, to participate in the destruction of the Jews.

Mr. Reicher spoke about the “mentoring system” inside camps like Auschwitz that managed to turn doctors 180 degrees from their Hippocratic Oath.

Mr. Lifton noted that when discussing genocide it is critical to address “our need as survivors to find some meaning” in what happened. He spoke of the “apocalyptic biology” behind Auschwitz, built on fanaticism and run by numbed routine.

He said there were three stages of socialization of Nazi medical doctors: Firstly, they were socialized to the medical profession, then to become doctors in the military, then to become doctors in the death camps. They “internalized the norm” within each, resulting in “an atrocity-producing situation.”

Mr. Lifton cautioned that his use of social science was not to “psychologize away their destructive behavior.”

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QUICK THINKING A crowd of people raised a convivial murmur within Elaine’s dark wood walls for a party for Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” (Little Brown), organized by Fast Company magazine. The restaurant was packed by the time the fashionably late arrived.

Fast Company’s editor-in-chief, John Byrne, said that his magazine recognized last July that Mr. Gladwell was a writer who spoke to their readership since “The Tipping Point,” became a best seller with “legs” that were still striding.

Mr. Gladwell said that some people seemed to be disappointed that he was on the cover of a business magazine. His doorman, for instance, recognized him as some tenants picked up their subscription copies. “You’re not a rapper, are you?” the doorman asked him.

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SPIEGELMAN SPEAKS Art Spiegelman was a crowd-pleasing speaker in a sold-out talk at the CUNY Graduate Center with Charles McGrath as part of the New York Times’ Arts & Leisure Weekend.

Mr. Spiegelman’s wit was evident when he said that the title of the discussion, “The Graphic Novel’s Unlikely Hero,” bothered him the moment he heard it. He draws “comics” not “graphic novels,” he said with a wrinkled smile, and he doesn’t believe much in heroes – certainly not in any comics he is interested in.

When speaking about whether or not graphic novels have become mainstream, he recalled attending a recent meeting of librarians and was amazed that they were eager to know what they should buy for their institutions. Mr. Spiegelman speculated that the success of the “Spider-man” movies may have fueled such interest.

When asked why he produced no new books for so long after “Maus,” he said it is like contracting the Asian flu: It has a 5- to 10-year gestation period.

When Mr. Spiegelman was younger, he said, he felt art was always trying to put one over on people. He said he finally understood Picasso’s paintings when a friend told him: “Just look at them as a giant cartoon panel!”