Amor Mundi

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.”

The Tyranny of Rankings

Roger Berkowitz 
Yale and Harvard law schools have led a small movement of leading law schools refusing to participate in the corrupt practice of ranking schools led by institutions such as U.S. News & World Report. Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, explains why these rankings are not only silly, but dangerous. 

A Simple Tale that Undid a Totalitarian System

Roger Berkowitz
Robin Ashenden writes about the seismic significance of the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which appeared Sixty years ago last week.

What’s the Point of Museums?

Roger Berkowitz
There is a yearning for a truly non-biased and fully-inclusive museum. And since such a museum and such a show cannot exist, one group of curators have asked, "What's the Point of Museums?"

Racism and Institutional Change

Roger Berkowitz
John McWhorter, very much like Corey Robin, also argues that the left needs to change its focus from questions of recognition to questions of power. For McWhorter, evidence of the mistake made by contemporary leftist politics is the language of “systematic racism.”

Capitalism and Empathy

Roger Berkowitz
For Corey Robin, the history of the last 300 years teaches us that the most important political struggles are about who can regulate the market. Whoever does so will determine where power rests. And that is the lesson Robin argues the present-day left is refusing to learn.

What we learned

The midterm elections saw many crazy Trump-identified candidates lose, which dragged down the Republican Party and allowed the Democrats to hold the Senate. As of now, however, Republican candidates did win the popular vote. What is more, the Republicans continued to make strong inroads into core Democratic constituencies in Hispanic and Black voters, as well as college-educated white women in the suburbs.

Bigger Brain: Student Fellow Sage Saccomanno reflects

Sage Saccomanno
When I started working at HAC as a fellow three years ago, I never expected to be starting my own business before I graduated from Bard.

Realists, Optimists, and Revisionists

Roger Berkowitz
As Ukraine consolidates its victories in the South, it is worth asking, when and how will this war end? Ivan Krastev asks this question and outlines three different positions, the realists, the optimists, and the revisionists.