Articles

Doubters and Skeptics

Roger Berkowitz
Sebastian Veg, who writes about China, has published his introduction to the Thai translation of Hannah Arendt’s “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.”

The Attack on Academic Thinking  

Roger Berkowitz
Len Gutkin tells of the egregious abrogation of academic freedom and intellectual integrity at Hamline University, where a art-history professor was fired for teaching about a medieval image of the prophet Muhammad.

All Academic Thinking is Conservative

Roger Berkowitz
Jordi Graupera met Richard Bernstein when Graupera was a Ph.D. student at the New School in 2008. Last year, Graupera asked Bernstein to audit his final seminar on Hannah Arendt. Graupera’s account of that final class and his tribute to his teacher are well worth reading. So too is his retelling of Bernstein’s story of how he first met Arendt. 

The Twitter Files

Roger Berkowitz
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter and started dismantling the company’s bureaucratic infrastructure, he has also begun a process of coming clean about Twitter’s highly idiosyncratic way of censoring posts and contributors. Instead of releasing the files at once, Musk is letting them out in parts and has tasked the journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others with writing about the files on Twitter itself. 

Is Antisemitism a Virus?

Roger Berkowitz
David Marchese interviews Tom Stoppard about the rising virus of antisemitism.
 

Antisemitism and White Supremacy

Michael Eric Dyson has a courageous op-ed in which he moves on from acknowledging both Jewish racism and black antisemitism to recognizing “antisemitism as a toxic species of the white supremacy that threatens Black security and democracy’s future.”

A Simple Tale that Undid a Totalitarian System

Roger Berkowitz
Robin Ashenden writes about the seismic significance of the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which appeared Sixty years ago last week.

Racism and Institutional Change

Roger Berkowitz
John McWhorter, very much like Corey Robin, also argues that the left needs to change its focus from questions of recognition to questions of power. For McWhorter, evidence of the mistake made by contemporary leftist politics is the language of “systematic racism.”

Capitalism and Empathy

Roger Berkowitz
For Corey Robin, the history of the last 300 years teaches us that the most important political struggles are about who can regulate the market. Whoever does so will determine where power rests. And that is the lesson Robin argues the present-day left is refusing to learn.