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How Race Appears

By Thomas Chatterton Williams
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt laid out her concept of the polis — literally, an ancient Greek city state, but defined more broadly in Webster’s as “a state or society especially when characterized by a sense of community” — as a departure from the ancient understanding of the term...

Political Algorithms

By Roger Berkowitz
That politicians lie is hardly news. Politics and truth, Hannah Arendt reminds us, have never been on good terms. "Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician's or the demagogue's but also of the statesman's trade." And yet, Arendt raises the question of "what injury political power is capable of inflicting upon truth."

Self-Portrait

By Samantha Hill
Conor Friedersdorf profiles Hannah Arendt Center NEH Fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams for The Atlantic. Looking at Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Friedersdorf explores the ways in which the work of Chatterton Williams moves from personal experience. What ensues is a thoughtful engagement with a must read work that strikes out against the ideologically driven politics of our time.

In Such Times

By Kenyon Victor Adams
Li-Young Lee describes poetry as an utterance on the ‘dying breath’ and considers the distinct physiologies of exhalation and inhalation. For Lee, the exhaling or dying breath is foundational to the poet’s work and therefore, in Baldwin’s expansive sense of poetry, the work of all artists. I see a connection between Lee’s proposal of the dying breath as the foundation for all poetic...

Political Trials 

By Roger Berkowitz
In the final chapters of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt worries that the very strength of the Israeli Court in its trial of Adolf Eichmann—its fairness and its fidelity to law—prevented the court from understanding that Eichmann’s unprecedented acts required a political rather than a legal response. Eichmann himself argued that if he were guilty, it was of “aiding and abetting” in the commission of horrific crimes, that he himself had not...

Letter to the Editor of the Forward

By Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director and Founder of the Hannah Arendt Center
I am the person who invited Batya Ungar-Sargon, the Opinion Editor of the Forward, to participate in a recent conference hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a conference where she contends in a column published Oct. 12 that she was protested for being Jewish and, as a result, “couldn’t proceed” with her talk.

To The Editor:

I attended the conference on ‘Racism and Anti-Semitism’ at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Let me state at the outset that 1. I am not in any way affiliated or employed by the college. 2. I attend this conference annually as a community member who is interested in learning about complex political issues of timely relevance and 3. I am a Jew who has lived in Israel and who holds political views that are probably similar to those of your Opinion Editor, Batya Ungar-Sargon.

On the Hannah Arendt Center’s Conference: “Racism and Antisemitism”

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Reverend Jacqui Lewis, Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, Amy SchillerAfter the 12th Annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference, this year on “Racism and Antisemitism,” the journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon posted an editorial in the Forward claiming she was protested at Bard College for being Jewish. She said she was prevented from continuing to speak, and that Bard College had no plan to deal with the protesters.

When We Don’t Know What She Would Say

By Roger Berkowitz
Josh Rogin in the Washington Post asked readers to choose the public figures they would most like to hear comment on our present era. Tanner Greer published his answer: Hannah Arendt. What Greer welcomes above all in Arendt is her independence. That she approaches every issue fresh. And that before you read what she writes,  you don’t know what she will be arguing or how she will get there.