Amor Mundi

What We're Reading: The Firing Line

By Roger Berkowitz
John McWhorter comments on the firing of Steven Wilson, formerly CEO of a group of charter schools in New York that serve primarily students of color. Wilson was fired after a petition circulated titled,  “Hold the CEO of Ascend Public Charter Schools Accountable for White Supremacist Rhetoric.”  What exactly was the “white supremacist rhetoric” that Wilson was guilty of?

Political Algorithms

By Roger Berkowitz
That politicians lie is hardly news. Politics and truth, Hannah Arendt reminds us, have never been on good terms. "Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician's or the demagogue's but also of the statesman's trade." And yet, Arendt raises the question of "what injury political power is capable of inflicting upon truth."

What We're Reading: Better Angels

Nellie Bowles looks at the organization Better Angels, which hosts conversations for Republicans and Democrats across the country, helping to bridge the political and cultural divide on the ground.  

Self-Portrait

By Samantha Hill
Conor Friedersdorf profiles Hannah Arendt Center NEH Fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams for The Atlantic. Looking at Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Friedersdorf explores the ways in which the work of Chatterton Williams moves from personal experience. What ensues is a thoughtful engagement with a must read work that strikes out against the ideologically driven politics of our time.

In Such Times

By Kenyon Victor Adams
Li-Young Lee describes poetry as an utterance on the ‘dying breath’ and considers the distinct physiologies of exhalation and inhalation. For Lee, the exhaling or dying breath is foundational to the poet’s work and therefore, in Baldwin’s expansive sense of poetry, the work of all artists. I see a connection between Lee’s proposal of the dying breath as the foundation for all poetic...

What We're Reading: Propaganda

By Samantha Hill
Echoing Hannah Arendt’s definition of ideology in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Timothy Snyder looks at Hitler’s use of propaganda within the context of our contemporary political situation. How are singular ideas transformed into ideological narratives that claim to explain away the ills of the world?

Political Trials 

By Roger Berkowitz
In the final chapters of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt worries that the very strength of the Israeli Court in its trial of Adolf Eichmann—its fairness and its fidelity to law—prevented the court from understanding that Eichmann’s unprecedented acts required a political rather than a legal response. Eichmann himself argued that if he were guilty, it was of “aiding and abetting” in the commission of horrific crimes, that he himself had not...

Mrs. Stern Wanders The Prussian State Library

The Mrs. Stern in the play ’s title is actually a young Hannah Arendt, who at the time went by her married name, of Johanna Stern. Arendt speaks about her arrest in her famous interview with Günter Gaus. She tells Gaus that after the burning of the Reichstag she could no longer avoid politics.

Letter to the Editor of the Forward

By Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director and Founder of the Hannah Arendt Center
I am the person who invited Batya Ungar-Sargon, the Opinion Editor of the Forward, to participate in a recent conference hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a conference where she contends in a column published Oct. 12 that she was protested for being Jewish and, as a result, “couldn’t proceed” with her talk.