Amor Mundi

Amor Mundi Podcast Special Series,Thinking the Plague: Looking in the Mirror

This is episode 5,” Looking In the Mirror.”  It features the Arendt Center's Founder and Director Roger Berkowitz in conversation with Jerome Kohn, a political thinker, the literary executor for Hannah Arendt,  and the editor of many volumes of Arendt’s posthumous works including “Thinking Without a Bannister,” “The Jewish Writings,”  “Essays in Understanding,” and Responsibility and Judgment.”

Podcast: Living with Honor, part of our special series: Thinking the Plague

Roger Berkowitz speaks with Uday Mehta, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York.

Isolation and Loneliness

Dhruv Khullar writes about the loneliness and solidarity of treating the coronavirus in New York for the New Yorker magazine. Looking at patient’s experiences of the ICU and feelings of isolation, Khullar talks about how doctors are managing the pandemic.

The Threat to the Republic

By Roger Berkowitz
In March, 2017, I published an essay “Why Arendt Matters” about the newly inaugurated President Trump. I wrote that, “Common sense insists that we not abandon reality and imagine that the United States is experiencing totalitarianism.” I argued that while the President was leading a mass movement, and that while mass movements are at the core of totalitarian domination, it is also the case that not all mass movements are totalitarian.

The Loss of the Spoken Word and Distinction in the age of COVID-19

Hannah Arendt Center member Scott McLain writes this week's member submission.

In Memoriam: Dora Amelan

We at the Hannah Arendt Center mourn the death of Dora Amelan (1920-2020). Dora was a remarkable French Jewish woman who worked with the Children’s Aid Society in the French internment camps during WWII, saving many children and adults. Dora was the mother of Bjorn Amelan and mother-in-law to his partner Bill T. Jones, who has long collaborated with the Hannah Arendt Center and Bard College. Dora passed away this week in Paris, from complications associated with Covid-19. 

The Erosion of the Common World

Roger Berkowitz
It has become common sense that President Trump lies. Once again there are countless articles and Twitter feeds and video compilations showing that the President has lied, stated falsehoods, and denied having said what he said. And yet through it all, the President’s popularity rating is soaring.

Arendt’s Eichmann: Murderer, Idealist, Clown

By Jerome Kohn
Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi Higher SS officer and member of the Gestapo during the Second World War. When the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem was adopted as German policy at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, it became Eichmann’s job to organize the destruction of millions of Jews.

What We Are Reading:
The Plague And the Literary Cure

Roger Berkowitz
Jill Lepore writes about the literature of epidemics, looking back at great works about plagues by Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Stephen King, Albert Camus, and Jose Saramago. What all plague literature shares is, first, the knowledge that the plague threatens the human world, that is “cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal.”