A Letter from Roger Berkowitz

Dear friend,

Have you seen "Hannah Arendt," the critically acclaimed film by Margarethe von Trotta? It has spurred a storm of commentary, including my recent essays in the New York Times and the Paris Review. The best reaction to the film is to re-read Eichmann in Jerusalem itself, the powerful book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann that first unleashed the controversy fifty years ago.

[caption id="attachment_11191" align="alignleft" width="150"] Roger Berkowitz[/caption]

With the movie being seen by hundreds of thousands of people, this is an exciting time for the Arendt Center. I have been speaking around the country at Q&A sessions after the movie. Audiences are hungry to confront the questions Arendt highlighted: the dangers of thoughtlessness and loneliness that together can lead to ideological conformism and unthinking evil.

We have a unique opportunity in the wake of this cultural interest in Hannah Arendt to bring the power of Arendt's thinking to a wider and politically engaged audience. I founded the Hannah Arendt Center to forge a middle ground between partisan think tanks churning out white papers and universities living in a bubble. All my experience since the founding sustains the truth that there is a yearning for passionate thinking about the major questions and challenges of our age.

I turned to Hannah Arendt as a symbol and the embodiment of humanistic thought grounded in thorough understanding. No other American thinker so engages (and, yes, sometimes enrages) citizens and students from all political persuasions, resisting all attempts at categorization on the right or the left, and all the while insisting on human dignity. Arendt's writings attract the minds and hearts of individuals who wish to think for themselves. She is that rare writer who compels her readers to think and re-think their most fundamental ethical and political convictions.

The Arendt Center engages citizens everywhere in Arendt-like thinking: relentless examination of issues from multiple points of view, with an emphasis on unimagined and unintended consequences --"thinking without banisters" is the phrase most closely associated with Arendt's methods; "the banality of evil" is the sound bite by which she is best known. We are continually striving to nurture engaging and thought provoking lectures, discussions, and events. And the next few months will be truly exciting.

• Our sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast: The Crisis of the Educated Citizen" will be happening at Bard College on October 3-4 and will bring together such luminaries as Richard Rodriguez (Hunger of Memory), Matthew Crawford (Shop Craft as Soul Craft), Danielle Allen (Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education), Bard President Leon Botstein (Jefferson's Children), and many more.
• 2013 will see the publication of the second annual edition of the HA Journal which revisits the best talks, essays, and lectures of the previous year.
• "Blogging and the New Public Intellectual"-- our New York City Lecture Series-will continue this fall, beginning with a discussion between Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead with Media Critic Jay Rosen on Sunday, Oct. 27 at 5pm at the Bard Graduate Center in NYC.
• The great American theatre director Robert Woodruff will be a senior fellow at the Arendt Center in the Fall and teach a course "Performing Arendt," designed to work with students to develop a multi-disciplinary performance piece inspired by Arendt's thinking.
• We will welcome back Senior Fellow Wyatt Mason and three new post-doctoral fellows who will teach courses at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as on Bard's Annandale campus.
• We are editing a volume of essays "Reading Arendt's Denktagebuch," based on a week-long working group we hosted last summer to read and discuss Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch, the book of thoughts she kept for over 30 years.
• We will hold our second annual Berlin conference in May of 2014 in conjunction with ECLA of Bard.
• This fall we will launch a new annual series on Bard's campus teaching historical consciousness by focusing on a single fascinating year in history. The first event on September 19-20 features short talks by a dozen scholars about events from the fateful year 1933 as well as a Cabaret featuring songs and food from the period.
• Supported by a grant from the NY Council for the Humanities, the Arendt Center will host a series of public conversations in low-income neighborhoods throughout New York State in conjunction with our fall conference and centered on discussions of Richard Rodriguez's book, Hunger of Memory.
• We expect the NEH Seminar at Bard to continue in 2014 for the third year, directed by Kathy Jones, and bringing 17 high school teachers to the Arendt Center for five weeks to learn how to teach Hannah Arendt's political thinking to high school students.
• The Arendt Center and the Hannah Arendt Library recently acquired the complete transcript of the Trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem—one of only three copies in the United States—and plan on digitizing the transcript as pat of our continuing effort to make the material of the Arendt Library widely available and useful for Arendt scholars around the world.
• As part of a new initiative to encourage scholarship on and explore the enduring question of hate in human civilization, the Arendt Center will sponsor a syllabus competition to spur development of liberal arts courses on human hatred that will be taught in the fall semester 2014.
• If you missed it, take a look at my recently published essay on Hannah Arendt in the New York Times.
• We will continue to bring you thoughtful and timely commentary and content on our blog and website.

All of this and much, much more is in the works. But, we need your help and your support. The Arendt Center nurtures the foundational thinking that encourages the active citizenship that can humanize an often-inhuman world. But this programming comes at a cost.

Today we launch a 10 day/100 member challenge. Please click here and become a member of the Hannah Arendt Center. If you are already a member, we would ask you to renew your membership now. The Arendt Center needs the help of supporters like you, those that understand that we must "think what we are doing."

Learn more about membership here. One exciting new benefit of membership will be our virtual reading group. Members will be able to log on monthly to a live discussion about an essay or chapter by Arendt with members of the Arendt Center community.

We thank you in advance and look forward to seeing you at future real and virtual Hannah Arendt Center events.

Roger Berkowitz