Amor Mundi

The End of The Golden Age

Franklin Foer has an essay arguing that “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” What Foer calls the Golden Age was not only good for Jews; the emergence of Jewish-Americans helped define a new American liberalism, one the shed the assimilationist metaphor of the melting pot for the hyphenated-identity of the mosaic. But that Golden Age is ending. Antisemitism, once relegated to the fringes of American society, is back with a vengeance.

Liberalism and Liberal-Democracy

N.S. Lyons interviews Polish philosopher and politician Ryszard Legutko about Polish politics and liberal democracy. Asked about the difference between liberalism and progressivism, Legutko answers, "As I see it, liberalism is not about freedom but about power and social engineering . . . liberals always assume a dominant position, claiming to know how to distribute freedom in the optimal proportions, therefore, deserving to be the irrevocable referees."

Chilling Pro-Palestinian Speech

Eyal Press, has written about my Bard College colleague and collaborator, Ken Stern, who has become a critic of the chilling effect of using the the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.) definition of antisemitism to shut down criticism of Israel on college campuses. Stern was one of the original creators of the definition, which was intended to help quantify incidences of antisemitism. But he has always opposed the use of the definition to shut down or regulate speech.

Check out our new Hannah Arendt Personal Library Website

Over the last few months, we have been improving our online navigation for the Hannah Arendt Personal Library (HAPL). The Stevenson library’s new Archives & Special Collections site was launched last week and with it, a new page for the HAPL!

The Supreme Court Between Power and Authority

Last week, the Court agreed without dissent to decide whether a former president of the United States is immune from criminal prosecution. But even amidst a unanimous judgment, the justices couldn't present themselves as a body above politics. For Hannah Arendt, the authority of the American Supreme Court was an essential aspect of the country’s foundation of freedom. Without it, all laws appear simply as means of power and politics.

How Antisemitism Shape Shifts

Arendt argues that antisemitism gains its political power because it is able to be weaponized as an ideology that imagines Jews to be the root of all political and social evils; antisemitism, therefore, has little to do with actual Jews. Noah Feldman, without mentioning Arendt, makes a similar point in an essay asking how antisemitism is transforming today in contemporary politics. Understanding that antisemitism is a secular ideology is the first step to both confronting and resisting it.

American Jewish Peace Archive: Julie Iny 

In lieu of the ongoing war in Israel and Gaza, the Hannah Arendt Center has decided to publish excerpts from the American Jewish Peace Archive — a project of activist and oral historian, Aliza Becker, that is sponsored by the Center. Today, we’re sharing the story of another U.S. peace activist, Julie Iny, who in 1996 was one of three co-founders of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that has played a central role in the American movement for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

Arendt, Michael Denneny, and the Origins of Gay Cultural Activism

Blake Smith writes about Arendt’s influence on the late Michael Denneny, her former student and one of the most influential gay cultural activists of the '70s. Smith writes, "Like Arendt, Denneny came to argue that the best hope for the survival of freedom lay not in traditional ideas of abstract, universal human rights . . . but rather in minority communities devoted to creating new practices, pleasures and identities, in a spirit of political engagement."

In Memoriam Ingeborg Nordmann

Few have done more to enrich Hannah Arendt scholarship than Ingeborg Nordmann. Nordmann worked with her friends and colleague Ursula Ludz to bring out the first edition of Arendt’s Denktagebuch in 2002 and reissued it in its present form in 2016. Their extraordinary edition has deepened and changed Arendt scholarship, offering a path to Arendt’s thought process and to her at times more personal reflections.