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Only Power Can Check Power
Hannah Arendt saw America’s strength in its dispersion of power, rooted in civic engagement and local governance. As executive authority expands, the true challenge is not just legal resistance but the reinvigoration of collective action. Can we reclaim the founding spirit of self-governance, or will we cede our power to those who seek to consolidate it? 02-02-2025
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The Attack on Academic Thinking
Roger BerkowitzLen Gutkin tells of the egregious abrogation of academic freedom and intellectual integrity at Hamline University, where a art-history professor was fired for teaching about a medieval image of the prophet Muhammad.
01-08-2023
All Academic Thinking is Conservative
Roger BerkowitzJordi Graupera met Richard Bernstein when Graupera was a Ph.D. student at the New School in 2008. Last year, Graupera asked Bernstein to audit his final seminar on Hannah Arendt. Graupera’s account of that final class and his tribute to his teacher are well worth reading. So too is his retelling of Bernstein’s story of how he first met Arendt.
01-08-2023
Your Silence Will Not Protect You
Roger BerkowitzClem Cecil translates the speech by the Russian Poet and editor Alla Gutnikova at her trial at which she was accused and convicted of “encouraging minors to take part in demonstrations in support of Alexei Navalny last spring.”
01-08-2023
Transcendence and Finitude: In Memory of Drucilla Cornell
Roger BerkowitzDrucilla Cornell died on Monday, Dec 12, 2022. Drucilla was one of the most unique and self-possessed people I’ve met, someone who could laugh and cry unapologetically, often in quick succession. Her friends whom she collected and loved included academics, trainers, and people she encountered daily in shops and on the street. Her annual Christmas party was a place to witness her loving community. It was to be held this year on Dec. 16th. Sadly, we must instead mourn Drucilla’s passing. Those who knew Drucilla miss her; we all are richer for her work.
12-18-2022
The Twitter Files
Roger BerkowitzSince Elon Musk bought Twitter and started dismantling the company’s bureaucratic infrastructure, he has also begun a process of coming clean about Twitter’s highly idiosyncratic way of censoring posts and contributors. Instead of releasing the files at once, Musk is letting them out in parts and has tasked the journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others with writing about the files on Twitter itself.
12-11-2022
The Pillars Have Shattered
For Hannah Arendt, the rise of science, and the loss of civilization's pillars- religion, customs, and traditions- helped lead to the loss of a shared world. This process turned us inside ourselves, towards a radical subjectivization that she termed world alienation, which left us only with our own subjective truths, sealed off from any shared common sense. In a new essay, Marilynne Robinson argues for a reconciliation between science and religion. She writes that it is not simply that science deals with facts and religion with meaning; there are seeming facts of the world such as time and space that are impervious to scientific knowledge. And religion, while it offers traditions of meaningfulness, must grapple with the meaning of a scientific world aimed at progress.12-11-2022
Is Antisemitism a Virus?
Roger BerkowitzDavid Marchese interviews Tom Stoppard about the rising virus of antisemitism.
12-04-2022
Antisemitism and White Supremacy
Michael Eric Dyson has a courageous op-ed in which he moves on from acknowledging both Jewish racism and black antisemitism to recognizing “antisemitism as a toxic species of the white supremacy that threatens Black security and democracy’s future.”12-04-2022