Amor Mundi

The Fight Over Schedule F

Before former President Trump left office, he issued an executive order to reclassify nearly 70% of federal civil service bureaucrats into a new job category dubbed “Schedule F.” Schedule F employees would lose many of the civil service protections. President Biden rescinded the executive order, but a major promise of the former President’s campaign is that he would reclassify and fire large numbers of the civil service and replace them with loyalists.

Who and What We Are

Samantha Fazekas writes that Hannah Arendt’s distinction between who we are and what we are can help us learn to better take criticism of our performance at work. In the Human Condition, Arendt writes: “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world … This disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is . . . is implicit in everything somebody says and does.”

The Supreme Court in a Divided Nation

Jill Lepore writes about how Chief Justice William Howard Taft presided over a divided Court at a time of great ideological ferment. Taft brought a pragmatic and political sensibility to the Court. He both made the Court more efficient and expanded its power and authority. And as a conservative amidst the Progressive Era, Taft set the Court on his path of obstructing progressive legislation. 

On Zion, Zionism, and Zionists: A Biblical History

Jim Sleeper begins his long essay on the many forgotten historical and religious foundations of the shallow modern understanding of claims like “zionism,” “settler colonialism,” and “antisemitism” by quoting T.S. Eliot who writes, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” We can’t understand the eruptions in the Middle East and in the United States without facing the ancient religious passions that drive American and Jewish history.

Tekhines

Sarah Chandler is discovering the ancient Jewish art of measuring graves, or tekhines, and she writes about her visit to Hannah Arendt’s grave at Bard College. "I’ve invited my friends to accompany me to the cemetery that sits in the center of the campus of Bard College, located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. It is just over 100 miles north of my Brooklyn apartment, but I suspect it will take us at least three hours to get there on a Monday afternoon."

The Joy of Arendt Center Conferences

Arendt Center member Neil Gussman writes about his experience attending Hannah Arendt Center Conferences, most recently our conference Between Power and Authority. 

What we are reading: The Shoah After Gaza

Pankaj Mishra, who spoke at the 2022 Arendt Center Conference Rage and Reason, reflects on how to think about the Shoah in the wake of the war in Gaza and Israel.

What we're listening to: Victims, Villians, and Settler Colonialism

Mike Cosper explores why the West requires Israel to play by different rules when it comes to defense and modern warfare.

"Mafioso Politics"

Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt insists that we look reality in the face and seek to understand even what is most strange, difficult, and horrific. In a new essay, Timothy Snyder analyzes the context of how Trump is seeking to normalize criminality and violence. Snyder’s essay reminds us of Arendt’s worry in her final essay, that “Public opinion is dangerously inclined to condone not crime in the streets but all political transgressions short of murder.”