Departments

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Hannah Arendt

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    3/21/19

    Nazis Have Always Been Trolls

    by Adam Serwer

    Historically, they rely on murderous insincerity and the unwillingness of liberal societies to see them for what they are.

  • SOURCE: NYT
    7-7-13

    Roger Berkowitz: Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’

    Roger Berkowitz is associate professor of political studies and human rights, and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, at Bard College.The movie “Hannah Arendt,” which opened in New York in May, has unleashed emotional commentary that mirrors the fierce debate Arendt herself ignited over half a century ago, when she covered the trial of the notorious war criminal Adolf Eichmann. One of the pre-eminent political thinkers of the 20th century, Arendt, who died in 1975 at the age of 69, was a Jew arrested by the German police in 1933, forced into exile and later imprisoned in an internment camp. She escaped and fled to the United States in 1941, where she wrote the seminal books “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “The Human Condition.”

  • SOURCE: Corey Robin's Blog
    2-3-13

    Corey Robin: The Question of Palestine at Brooklyn College, Then and Now

    Corey Robin is an American political theorist, journalist and associate professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.In 1942, Brooklyn College hired a young instructor to teach a summer course on Modern European history. Though academically trained, the instructor was primarily known as the author of a series of incendiary articles in the Jewish press on Jewish politics and Zionism.An active though ambivalent Zionist, the instructor did not shy from scorching criticism of the movement for Jewish settlement in Palestine. She had already come to some unsettling conclusions in private. In an unpublished essay, she compared the Zionists to the Nazis, arguing that both movements assumed that the Jews were “totally foreign” to other peoples based on their “inalterable substance.” She wrote in a letter that she found “this territorial experiment” of the Jews in Palestine “increasingly problematic.” By the spring of 1942, she was more public in her criticisms. In March, she wrote that the Irgun—the Jewish paramilitary group whose most prominent commander was Menachem Begin—was a “fascist organization” that “employed terrorist methods in their fight against Arabs in Palestine.”