Jerry Kohn
Jerome Kohn, who most of us knew as Jerry, died on November 8th. For many members of the Hannah Arendt Center, Jerry was a stalwart at our Virtual Reading Group sessions, always ready with a question or a marvelously revealing anecdote about his friend “Hannah.” Every Friday I would look for him. Over the last month, I have religiously marked his absence. You can read an obituary by Sam Roberts here.
For Arendt Scholars, Jerry was a brilliant interpreter and editor of Arendt’s work. His work editing her essays in Essays in Understanding (volumes 1 and 2), Responsibility and Judgment, The Promise of Politics, and with Ron Feldman The Jewish Writings are masterful jobs of curation that have made dozens of Arendt’s seminal essays available and accessible. But for Jerry’s work, only the most dedicated specialists would know of “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” “The Tradition of Political Thought,” “The Eggs Speak Up,” “Understanding and Politics,” “The Crisis Character of Modern Society,” and her “Letter to Robert M. Hutchins.” Jerry’s work editing and publishing these texts has been a labor of love and a gift to us all.
For those of us who knew him more personally, Jerry was at once loving and unwaveringly honest, a true friend. I will miss Jerry’s long emails, equally thanking me or taking me to task for something I had written in Amor Mundi. I will miss our lunches out on the North Fork near his house. But above all, his smile and his wit.
In 2022 I was honored to be the faculty sponsor when Jerry received an honorary degree from Bard College. The citation I wrote then is an apt way to recall Jerry. It reads as follows.
"How have the citizens of the United States dissipated the power of their Republic." This question drives Jerome Kohn's lifetime of writing and publishing. Kohn has never shied away from controversy or provocation. As Hannah Arendt's longtime teaching assistant, literary executor, and friend, Kohn has published her work and deepened our understanding of Arendt's thinking. And in his own writing he has emphasized his, and Arendt's, fears around the decline of the American Republic.
The failure of the American Republic is rooted, for Kohn, in the dissipation of political power—the tradition and practice of self-government by which groups of people gather together to act and speak in public in ways that matter. Political freedom requires more than casting a secret ballot. It means to act and speak in ways that make freedom and power palpable. Kohn argues that the original American democratic reality of citizens freely exercising power has been eclipsed by an "encroaching social totalisim" and the dominance of bureaucratic rule.
"Jerry" Kohn's life changed when he read two essays on Bertolt Brecht and "Truth and Politics" by Hannah Arendt in The New Yorker in 1966 and 1977. Unhappy in a doctoral program at Columbia at the time, Kohn sought out Arendt and convinced her to let him audit her courses at the New School for Social Research. Kohn and Arendt became dear friends and he took over as her teaching assistant the following year until her death in 1975. He has been Arendt's literary executor since 19xx.
That 1967 meeting also changed the future reception of Arendt's work. Since Arendt's death, Kohn has published five major volumes of Arendt's collected and unpublished writings that have broadened and deepened our understanding of Arendt's work. His many essays on Arendt have brought the insight of a friend and longtime confidante to Arendt scholarship, focusing attention on Arendt's insistence on plurality, freedom, and thinking for oneself.
The depth that Kohn adds to our understanding of Arendt can be gleaned from an anecdote he tells in a forthcoming book of anecdotes and stories about Arendt. He accompanied Arendt to a meeting discussing Hegel's Philosophy of History in 1971. Kohn recounts the meeting with his trademark humility and wit:
"The participants were seated at an oval table in stiff modernist chairs.... After more than two hours of talk, they tentatively concluded that the telos, the end joined to the beginning of Hegel’s massive undertaking, is absolute knowledge, the knowledge of Being. Which is to say that History knowing itself as History is Being. The meeting drew to a close with applause for all by all. As we walked back to her office, I asked Arendt, who had been unusually quiet during the meeting, what she thought History with a capital “H” is. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” she said."