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Humanities for the People: Settler Colonialism and Moral Derangement

I’ve published an expanded version of my essay on settler colonialism and campus culture on the Arendt Center’s Humanities for the People Medium Page. "What is so unsettling about the critique of settler colonialism is not simply its anti-political retreat into moral righteousness. More dangerous still is the elevation of all so-called indigenous people to be in some way more pure, more deserving, and more innocent than so-called setters."

Orwell on the Falsity of Hedonism

More so than economics, a politics of meaning and identity is driving our current politicization and polarization. I recently came across George Orwell’s 1940 review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where Orwell notes that the core aspect of Hitler's attraction is “the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop . . . not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics.”  

On Moral Error

There are, of course, important goals pursued by the DEI frameworks on campuses. But too often today the DEI bureaucracy is not actually doing what it ought to do, making our campuses more pluralist, more tolerant, and more thoughtful.  Danielle Allen has offered an essay that acknowledges the serious problems with our current DEI framework and seeks to begin a conversation around productive and positive solutions.

The Negation of Politics

Roger Berkowitz

On Friday, December 15th, Masha Gessen was finally awarded the 2023 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking in Bremen. The award ceremony, however, did not take place in the beautiful City Hall in Bremen, where it is traditionally given. Just days before the ceremony, rumors emerged that the Heinrich Böll Foundation, had decided to rescind the award. The cause was an article Gessen published in The New Yorker, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.”

Non-Ideological Thinking

Roger Berkowitz

Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from the antisemitism advisory committee at Harvard. He reminded us all that most students at Harvard are there to get an education and are not in the grip of morally reductive ideologies. At the same time, Wolpe recognizes that there is an ideology at Harvard “that grips far too many. The ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil.”

To Think About Horror in Serious Ways

Roger Berkowitz
David Marchese interviews writer and veteran Phil Klay on the humanity and inhumanity of war. Klay finds the humanity of war in its moral complexity, the struggle to see and acknowledge the reality of morally complex thinking that goes beyond ideological and partisan positions.

One of my Students Responds

Roger Berkowitz

My former student and current Arendt Center employee, Tobias Hess, asked to write about his feelings of unease about my characterization of some student protests for Palestine on college campuses. Like many students and non-students, and like myself, Hess is moved deeply by the plight of seemingly excessive destruction by Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza.

A Young Jew Looks to Gaza

Tobias Hess
The student movement for Palestine has been largely characterized as naive, and often, anti-semitic. But Tobias Hess, former HAC student-fellow and current employee of the Center, argues that the student movement is indicative of a sincere and understandable outrage. This is especially true for young Jews who, he says, feel betrayed by the "promise of Jewish self-determination [which has] spiraled into craven, narrow minded nationalism."

A Non-Ideological Thinking

Roger Berkowitz
In a speech at The Federalist Society last week, Bari Weiss points out the many similarities between what happened in Israel on October 7, and what happened in New York City and Washington DC. on September 11, 2001.