Amor Mundi

Migration as Avant-Garde
A Book Review

Max Feldman
They came out in the tens of thousands. In London and Paris, Dublin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, and others, people marched in the streets. They carried signs and banners, urging governments to do something, anything. “Refugees Welcome,” they said, illustrated with a silhouette of a family fleeing for their lives: a father first, then a mother dragging a child, whose foot trails in the air in the rush. “Bring Your Families,” they said.

What We're Reading:
Politics and Passions

By Samantha Hill
Hannah Arendt was notoriously wary of thinking about the passions in politics. From her critique of Rousseau’s empathy in On Revolution to her letter criticizing James Baldwin for putting forth a notion of political love, Arendt feared these emotions could not create real solidarity. She believed that such feelings were anti-democratic because they turned our capacity to love the many away from the public realm of political action...

The State Courts Fight Back

By Roger Berkowitz
In June the United States Supreme Court in Rucho v. Common Cause refused to intervene in two cases that considered constitutional challenges to political gerrymandering in North Carolina and Maryland. The Court found the Congressional maps to be “highly partisan, by any measure,” and “blatant examples of partisanship driving districting decisions.” And the Court held...

Literary Prize for Peace

Please join us in congratulating Bard College Professor Nuruddin Farah who has won the 2019 Lee Hochul Literary prize for Peace, awarded in Seoul, South Korea.

What We're Reading:
The Life and Death of Dignity and Self-Respect 

By Roger Berkowitz
Peter Baehr, an Arendt Scholar who has been living in Hong Kong for 20 years, writes a first-hand account of the pre-revolutionary situation in Hong Kong. Baehr wisely refuses to say what is the cause of the protests. And he is fatalistically clear that there is no way that the people of Hong Kong will triumph over the enormously power and oppressive Chinese government. And Baehr knows that the protesters know they are engaged in a futile effort. But even so...

An Appeal, A Denial, and A Letter Published

The following is a letter sent by Alan Sussman to the Board of Directors of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. Sussman is a trustee of one donor-advised-fund managed by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and he asked the Federation to send $1,000 to a group that opposes Israel's occupation of the West Bank. To his surprise and chagrin, his request to donate his family's money was denied.

A Symposium: Reimagining Human Health: The Microbiome, Farming, and Medicine. 

Hua Wang, Professor in Department of Food Science and Technology, Microbiology, and Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Human Nutrition (OSUN) at the Ohio State University, talks about the overuse of antibiotics and the health of the human microbiome in anticipation of the Symposium at Bard, September 19th and 20th.

What We're Reading

By Samantha Hill
Mike Jay writes about Walter Benjamin and Intoxication and Kathryn M. Rudy offers a startling account of how much it costs to be successful in some fields of academia.

Why Tell a Story?

By Nikita Nelin
Reading Arendt has caused me to consider the generative quality of my own work. All too often I find myself swinging from the narratives of hope to the voice of alarm and despair. From week to week my voice will vacillate between historically informed caution and a pragmatic optimism, which feels to be bordering on faith. Only loosely depending on the news of the day I am either warning people against the reactionary spirit that rises out of labeling our current...