Articles

The Gift of Community
 

Roger Berkowitz

Philanthropy increasingly has a bad name in some circles these days. And there are real worries about the retreat of government being replaced by wealthy donors who then have an outsized impact on our public world. But it is also important to recall Aristotle’s insight that a political community depends upon virtues, including what he calls the virtue of liberality. It is meaningful, Aristotle writes, when wealthy citizens build shrines to the graces in public places...

What Would Have Been If He Had Spoke

Roger Berkowitz
Rolf Hochhuth died last week. Hochhuth was the author of The Deputy, A Christian Tragedy that premiered on the Freie Volksbühne stage in West Berlin in February 1963, making the author world-famous. The play is a documentary inquiry into the decision by Pope Pius XII to remain silent regarding the Holocaust, about which he knew. 

Federalism

Roger Berkowitz
As the President vacillates between claiming absolute powers and empowering the states, there is a renewed interest in the American principle of federalism. The appeal to the principle of federalism and the multiplication of powers throughout the United States Constitutional system is precisely the kind of thinking Hannah Arendt celebrated as the true innovation of the United States Constitution.

What We Are Reading:
Viral Extremities

Roger Berkowitz
Kristian Blickle of the Federal Reserve Board of New York has published a working paper, “Pandemics Change Cities: Municipal Spending and Voter Extremism in Germany, 1918-1933.” As described by Quint Forgey, Blickle’s paper “concludes that deaths caused by the 1918 influenza pandemic “profoundly shaped German society” in subsequent years and contributed to the strengthening of the Nazi Party.”

Radical Racial Imaginations

Roger Berkowitz
A bit over a year ago I attended a symposium on  “Black Intellectuals & The Condition of the Culture” at Skidmore College, featuring Margo Jefferson, Darryl Pinckney, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Orlando Patterson and John McWhorter. The conversations were free and provocative and at times brilliant. Now the transcripts of the symposium have been published by SALMAGUNDI.

Listen to the Experts?

Roger Berkowitz
Over and again we hear the refrain: “Listen to the experts.” Amidst a crisis that has witnessed a disastrous response from President Trump and  the federal government and from many states and cities—Mayor Bill DeBlasio has been particularly inept causing untold misery for New Yorkers like myself—there is a desire to have the experts guide us. 

I Am (Not) a Monster

Roger Berkowitz

In “I Am (Not) a Monster,” a new movie by Dr. Nelly Ben Hayoun, Dr. Hayoun travels around the world dressed as Hannah Arendt to ask thinkers and activists about the origins of knowledge. Ben Hayoun, a Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center and the founder of the University of the Underground, begins with Arendt’s idea that “To act is to begin something new.”

Failed President

Samantha Hill
Writing for the New York Review of Book, Fintan O’Toole dissects Trump’s failed leadership. Faced with a real emergency, Trump has been unable to set aside his self-promoting narcissism to guide the American people. O’Toole highlights the extent to which Trump’s delimited worldview as a business leader has influenced his posturing in managing the pandemic, examining at elisions in his language and refusal to face reality.

20-20 Foresight 

Roger Berkowitz
Seth Cotler points us to a book review written in 1983 by Samuel T. Francis that makes clear how much of the politics of populism and racism we are experiencing today was already visible to those with eyes to see it. The review of a book by Kevin Philips argues that the frustrations with America’s obsolete constitutional and political system will bring about a racially charged right-wing revolution in the United States.