Articles

What We're Reading: Antisemitism & Free Speech 

By Samantha Hill
Ken Stern, who runs the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College, writes about Donald Trump’s Executive Order that was signed this week. Stern was responsible for drafting the working definition of antisemitism used in Trump’s order when he worked for the American Jewish Committee, and is now worried that it is being used to silence free speech on college campuses.

On Walter Benjamin’s Legacy: A Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno

THE 1967 CORRESPONDENCE between Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno followed Walter Benjamin’s death by nearly 30 years. The acrimony that grew between Arendt and Adorno during the intervening decades is present in these letters. Who had the right, ethically and intellectually, to edit and publish Benjamin’s work?  — Susan H. Gillespie and Samantha Rose Hill write in the L.A. Review of Books.

What We're Reading: Arendt on the Political 

By Samantha Hill
In an Interview with the Cambridge blog fifteen eightyfour, David Arndt discusses his new book Arendt on the Political. The book addresses the questions of politics and the political sphere while thinking about the underlying problems of democratic politics. 

Walter Benjamin's Last Work

WHEN HANNAH ARENDT escaped the Gurs internment camp in the middle of June 1940, she did not go to Marseilles to find her husband Heinrich Blücher — she went to Lourdes to find Walter Benjamin. — Samantha Hill writes this week for the L.A. Review of Books

Roger Berkowitz on the Hannah Arendt Center

Roger Berkowitz, academic director and founder of the Hannah Arendt Center discusses the Center's origins and continuing mission in Rural Intelligence.

Giving Tuesday

By Samantha Hill
Hannah Arendt Center fellow Amy Schiller writes about what happens when only rich people give to charity for the Washington Post. On “Giving Tuesday”, which follows “Cyber Monday” each year after Thanksgiving, Schiller highlights how up to thirty percent of all charitable gifts in the United States are made in December. And while charity has always been a part of the American mythos, who gives has changed over time, and giving on average has declined.

Totalitarianism and Loneliness

By Roger Berkowitz
Martha Minow recently spoke accepted the Leo Baeck Medal  at the Leo Baeck Institute on November 19, 2019. Minow describes what she calls “upstanders,” those who stand up to dehumanizing and oppressive systems and have the courage to act against bureaucratized evil. “To be an upstander,” Minow writes, “may seem daunting especially if it implies solo, heroic action.

Child Chef

By Samantha Hill
Adam Shatz writes about his life as a child chef for the New Yorker magazine. Shatz’s adolescent cooking career was provoked by early experiences with bullying and antisemitism. Turning to the kitchen, he went from baking chocolate cake, to starting a catering company at age 11, to being the subject of his art teacher’s documentary for a local cable-access channel, to studying in France, and eventually writing about culture and politics...

Dreams Under Dictatorship 

By Samantha Hill
Mireille Juchau revisits a book published by Charlotte Beradt in 1985 on The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation. Beradt was an acquaintance of Hannah Arendt’s and translated five her essays. Beradt’s work echoes Arendt’s work in the The Origins of Totalitarianism,and challenges readers to think about spaces of freedom in thinking, beyond the public and private realm: