Amor Mundi

American Jewish Peace Archive: An Interview with Robert K. Lifton

HAC is proud to sponsor The American Jewish Peace Archive, a comprehensive repository of over 200 interviews with U.S. and Israeli Jews who have advocated for self-determination for Jews and Palestinians. Organized by activist and oral historian Aliza Becker, the Archive seeks to explore the plurality of Jewish thought on Israel. Today, we share an excerpt from a conversation with Robert K.Lifton, who served as President of the American Jewish Congress from 1988-1994.

Rebuilding Trust

Jedediah Britton Purdy writes that democracy depends on trust, but the fracturing world of experts and the loss of authority suffered by nearly all institutions means that trust is dispersed, politicized, and weaponized. : How can we rebuild common institutions of trust? His answer: “We need to practice nondefensively meeting serious disagreement—and proceeding to the rest of the human being.”

How to Combat Disinformation

In a long essay on the dangers and challenges of AI generated disinformation, Hannah Murphy pretty much gives up, noting that there may simply be no way to combat such advanced disinformation. One approach is X's Community Notes feature, which allows users to propose that a short note of context be added to any Tweet. Community Notes use the Pol.is software, which sorts feedback via algorithms that prioritize broad-cross-partisan consensus rather than popularity. 

The Plan to Denaturalize German Citizens

Hannah Arendt writes that one of the first and most important indicators of rising totalitarianism is the decision to denaturalize citizens on racial or religious grounds. With that in mind, on November 25, in Potsdam, less than 5 miles from the site where leading Nazis laid out the plans for the Final Solution, two dozen Germans came together to discuss plans for expelling asylum seekers, legally residing foreigners, and “unassimilated citizens.

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.”  

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."

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.

Remembering Kirstie McClure

Kirstie McClure has died. A longtime friend of the Hannah Arendt Center, McClure was most recently a beloved professor of Political Theory at UCLA. My own memories of Kirstie are of a truly rare intellectual intensity, always accompanied by a smile. Her writings on Arendt’s social question were some of the earliest and best.

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.”