Amor Mundi

Whistleblowing as Civil Disobedience: Leaks in the Era of Trump and the Deep State

By Allison Stanger

Writing in the March–April 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs, the political philosopher Michael Walzer, whom some of you may know as the author of Just and Unjust Wars, identified several types of leaks and whistleblowing and explored their ethical implications. Walzer defined whistleblowing as conveying what a person “believes to be immoral or illegal conduct to bureaucratic superiors or to the public,” and he implied that there was no way to make...

Fake News

By Roger Berkowitz
Fake news is everywhere these days. The “fake news” claim was first made by President Donald Trump a few weeks after his election. As the New York Times observes in a major editorial statement alongside graphical images, over 40 world leaders have now employed the President’s “fake news” meme to discredit press reports of their corruption or abuse of power.

Child Chef

By Samantha Hill
Adam Shatz writes about his life as a child chef for the New Yorker magazine. Shatz’s adolescent cooking career was provoked by early experiences with bullying and antisemitism. Turning to the kitchen, he went from baking chocolate cake, to starting a catering company at age 11, to being the subject of his art teacher’s documentary for a local cable-access channel, to studying in France, and eventually writing about culture and politics...

Totalitarianism and Loneliness

By Roger Berkowitz
Martha Minow recently spoke accepted the Leo Baeck Medal  at the Leo Baeck Institute on November 19, 2019. Minow describes what she calls “upstanders,” those who stand up to dehumanizing and oppressive systems and have the courage to act against bureaucratized evil. “To be an upstander,” Minow writes, “may seem daunting especially if it implies solo, heroic action.

Episode 2 - Seyla Benhabib

Join Roger Berkowitz as he talks with Seyla Benhabib, the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. Her new book, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration explores the intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century, including Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, and many others.

What Goebbels Could Do With Facebook

By Roger Berkowitz
The Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen [who became famous playing the character Borat in movies] gave the Keynote Address to the Anti-Defamation League last week. His speech was deadly serious about the real danger of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and social media. I wrote recently about the “increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale” of information and misinformation on social media.”

Dreams Under Dictatorship 

By Samantha Hill
Mireille Juchau revisits a book published by Charlotte Beradt in 1985 on The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation. Beradt was an acquaintance of Hannah Arendt’s and translated five her essays. Beradt’s work echoes Arendt’s work in the The Origins of Totalitarianism,and challenges readers to think about spaces of freedom in thinking, beyond the public and private realm:   

How Race Appears

By Thomas Chatterton Williams
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt laid out her concept of the polis — literally, an ancient Greek city state, but defined more broadly in Webster’s as “a state or society especially when characterized by a sense of community” — as a departure from the ancient understanding of the term...

What Does It Mean to Educate Citizens?

Leon Botstein, Bard College President, discusses education and the public sphere in this talk from our 2013 Annual Conference