Articles

Cruel Optimism

By Samantha Hill

Plurality and Populism

By Samantha Hill

Courage to Be Student Essays. Misbah Awan on Rana Abdelhamid

By Misbah Awan
A dispatch from the Hannah Arendt Center's Courage to Be Dinner and Lecture Series.

Rahel Varnhagen

By Roger Berkowitz

Arendt and Scholem

By Samantha Hill
Nathan Goldman reviews The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem for the L.A. Review of Books.

Racism and Antisemitism

Antisemitism has suddenly inserted itself into the questions of privilege and racism in the wake of the marches in Charlottesville and the attacks in Pittsburgh. What is not often recognized, however, is that White nationalist groups in the United States are founded upon an antisemitic ideology.

American Citizenship

“these citizens are united only by one thing, and that’s a big thing: that is, you become a citizen of the United States by consenting to its Constitution. The Constitution… is the constant remembrance of a sacred act, the act of foundation. And the foundation is to make a union out of wholly disparate ethnic minorities and religions, and still (a) have a union and (b) not assimilate or level down these differences.”
—Arendt, 1973

Understanding Trump

I doubt Mr. Trump has much to say about Hegel. But he may be the kind of instinctive statesman that Hegel described - a figure who has harnessed and embodied forces that he himself only half-understands. By contrast I fear that Mr. Macron, learned though he is, currently looks more like the embodiment of a dying order. —Gideon Rachman

A Liberal Nationalism

Hannah Arendt understood that nationalism—ethnic nationalism—could undermine the political equality at the center of the modern state.  But she worried equally if not more about imperialism and globalization. Politics, Arendt argued, is about the artificial constitution of bounded peoples that live together in a common and shared world.