The Hannah Arendt Center For Politics and Humanities at Bard College There are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is –Hannahdangerous.Arendt2013ANNUAL REPORT
Roger HannahAcademicBerkowitzDirectorArendtCenter
My life’s work centers on the relentless inquiry into human thinking and the need to prize creative thought over and against mere knowledge. Otherwise, machines and people who are automated in their thinking will one day govern or even replace us. In 2006 I founded the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities too forge a middle ground between partisan think-tanks churning out white papers and universities living in a bubble. All my experience since the founding con rms the truth that there is a yearning for passionate thinking about the major questions and challenges of our age. I turned to Hannah Arendt as a symbol and the embodiment of humanistic thought grounded in a thorough understanding of the times in which we live. No other American thinker so engages (and, yes, sometimes enrages) citizens and students from all political persuasions, resisting all attempts at categorization from the right or the le —all the while insisting on human dignity. Arendt’s writings attract the minds and hearts of individuals who wish to think for themselves. She is that rare writer who compels her readers to think and re-think their most fundamental ethical and political convictions.
e Arendt Center conferences— “ inking in Dark Times”; “ e Intellectual Origins of the Financial Crisis”; “Lying and Politics”; “Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age Without Facts”; “Human Being in an Inhuman Age,” and “Does the President Matter?”—are major events in the intellectual life of the nation, attracting speakers such as Christopher Hitchens, Zadie Smith, Ray Kurzweil, Sherry Turkle, Bernard Kouchner, Ralph Nader, Lewis Lapham, and Walter Russell Mead. Attended by Bard students, guests from the Hudson Valley and New York City, and high school students from Bard’s early colleges in Manhattan, Queens, Newark, and New Orleans, these conferences bring together a diverse audience of engaged citizens.
e Arendt Center is not a mausoleum to Arendt’s legacy. Our conferences bring thought leaders from the academy, business, media, and the arts together to think together outside of tired clichés and jargons—insisting that passionate thinking knows neither partisan nor disciplinary boundaries. Over the last ve years we vigorously have pursued our mission to think what we are doing, sponsoring six major conferences that continue Arendt’s legacy of public thinking.
It’s clear that we can no longer count on the ways of the past to guide us in a global, technologically enhanced world. We must engage citizens everywhere in the relentless examination of issues from multiple points of view, with an emphasis on unimagined and unintended consequences — what Arendt called “thinking without banisters.” Arendt Center events nurture the foundational thinking that encourages the active citizenship that can humanize an o en-inhuman world.
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e Hannah Arendt Center at Bard honors Arendt’s conviction that truth telling and a vital public sphere, in which inquiry and debate regarding politics, history, and society ourish, are essential to freedom and democracy and therefore human dignity.”
Public discourse is the bedrock of our democracy. Amid the cacophony of media pundits and the proliferation of think tanks, the Hannah Arendt Center is unique: We address politics free from the jostling over policy. e Arendt Center is an institutional space for passionate, uncensored, non-partisan thinking that reframes and deepens the fundamental questions facing our nation and our world. We aim to leaven politics with the humanities and engage in thinking that is “smarter than the debate.” In the spirit of Hannah Arendt, the Center encourages us to “think what we are doing.”
-Leon Botstein, President, Bard College
While in France she worked for the organization Youth Aliyah that rescued Jewish youth from the ird Reich. In 1936 Arendt married her second husband, Heinrich Blücher. Arendt was again imprisoned in a concentration camp, Camp Gurs in the southwest of France. A er narrowly escaping, she and Blücher ed Nazi Europe, coming to New York in 1941. ey lived on Riverside Drive in NYC and in Kingston, NY (near Bard College where Blücher taught for 17 years).e1950’s saw the publication of Arendt’s major works: her comprehensive study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes e Origins of Totalitarianism, and e Human Condition. In 1961 Arendt covered the trial of Nazi o cial Adolf Eichmann for e New Yorker, which became Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. e same year brought the publication of On Revolution, her exploration of the true genius of the American tradition of political freedom. A frequent contributor to e New York Review of Books, Commonweal, e New Yorker, and other journals, Arendt published three major anthologies Between Past and Future, Men in Dark Times and Crisis of the Republic. She died in 1975 a er completing the rst two volumes of e Life of the Mind. Arendt is buried next to Heinrich Blücher in the cemetery at Bard College. Her personal library with over 4,000 annotated volumes is housed in the Stevenson Library at Bard HannahCollege. Arendt was the leading thinker of politics and the humanities in the contemporary era. No other scholar so enrages and so engages interlocutors from all political persuasions. In a book on the Holocaust, Arendt dared to write that Jewish leaders, too, were partly to blame; she raised pressing questions about the dangers that a thoughtless embrace of science pose to humanity; she insisted that human rights were counter productive; she questioned the forced integration of public schools; and she saw beyond the obvious evil of the Nazi regime to conceive of the banality of evil. Above all, she was a thinker of freedom.
Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover Germany in 1906. She completed her doctoral dissertation Love and Saint Augustine in 1929 under the supervision of Karl Jaspers. In the early 1930’s Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo while working for the German Zionist Organization, led by Kurt Blumenfeld. As she later told, she got on well with her young German guard who let her walk free. She ed to Paris, where she completed her biography of the brilliant 18th century German Jewish socialite Rahel Varnhagen, which remained unpublished until the late 1950’s.
“We are free to change the world and start something new in it.” - Hannah Arendt
e Arendt Center in any given week is a space for the student body to come together in both formal and informal academic discussions to think about politics and discuss the teachings of Han nah Arendt. It is a space for all at Bard and is celebrated among the student body.”
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As part of the NEH Endowment grant, the Center sponsors annual humanities reading workshops, bringing 10-12 scholars to the Center from around the world to read and think together about a major book in the humanities.
e Arendt Collection contains 5,000 volumes of Arendt’s work, many with heavy and signi cant annotations, that draw scholars from around the world. Lunchtime talks o er more intimate conversation and animated discussion led by both established and younger scholars. ey are opportunities for in-depth talks with students andfaculty.RayKurzweil, keynote speech, at the 2010 conference.
e Center hosts regular Student Dinners held around the Center’s conference room table to discuss texts, movies, and current controversies.political
–Roy Zabludowicz, Bard ‘13
Post-doctoral fellows and visiting scholars join with students and faculty to create a vibrant intellectual community that is the pulse of humanities and political thinking at Bard.
re alarm brought us
Planned partnerships with the NY Public Library and the NY Review of books Partnership with the NY His torical Society to host lectures and discussions.
—Jerome Kohn, Trustee, HannahArendt Bluecher Literary Trust
“Scholars, students, and teaching fellows at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College seek meaning in their own lives and to share that meaning with others.
New York City Lecture Series on Blogging and the New Public Intellectual to be endowed by the National Endow ment for the Humanities.
Since the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities exists solely or the good of the public, it surely deserves to be supported.”
Partnership with Hudson Valley Community Foundation for a series on Music of the Holocaust
A outside for Rob Riemen's talk at the 2009 Conference
In this sense, communication orients the activities of the Center.
Annual Conferences at Bard and Berlin reaching thousands of participants every year.
Lectures: the Center sponsors and cosponsors over 20 lectures by leading scholars and activists every year, creating an exciting community of scholars and students at Bard.
–Wyatt Mason : e Center collaborates with the Institute for Writing and inking at Bard to train High School Teachers at under-priv ileged schools in the Hudson Valley to use Arendt Center lectures and conferences as teaching tools in the class room.
Undergraduate Curriculum: By integrating with Bard’s First-Year Seminar, the Language and inking program, and the Center for Civic Engagement, the Arendt Center enriches and supports the leading campuswide initiatives.
e Center co-sponsors an annual NEH Seminar that brings 17 high school teachers to Bard for a ve week intensive course on Hannah Arendt and politics, geared toward bringing Arendt’s work into high school curricula.
“I have found the vigor and vitality and diversity of the students and writers and scholars who populate the Hannah Arendt Center to be notable, but I have been as impressed-and moved– by the generosity and openness of the environment. Meaningful work is being done at the Center, gi ed students maturing into independent minds.”
Collaborating with the Institute for Writing & inking, local high schools, and Bard High School Early Colleges in New York City, Newark, and New Orleans, the Center o ers underserved students customized lessons based upon our conferences and lectures.
–Hannah Arendt
responsibilityassumeforit.”
e Center for Civic Engagement, the Arendt Center organizes and hosts campuswide discussions of signi cant events, such as the 10th year anniversary of 9-11, Occupy Wall Street, the Election, and race relations on campus.
Working with Bard’s Prison Initiative, we sponsor an annual Arendt Center Fellow who teaches full Bard courses in Bard’s degree granting programs in New York state prisons.
e Free Speech Cube, where students can comment on conference themes.
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to
As the intellectual cornerstone of the Center for Civic Engagement, the Arendt Center promotes thoughtful engagement and citizenship.active rough conferences asking “Does the President Matter?” and “What is an Educated Citizen,” the Center brings humanities thinking to bear on politics and promotes engaged democratic citizenship in the spirit of Hannah Arendt.
Copper Plate for David Schorr's Original Engraving of Hannah Arendt
-Hannah Arendt
Noted theatre director, Robert Woodru , will be a Senior Arendt Center Fellow and teach a new course, Performing Arendt, in which students will create multimedia performances inspired by Arendt’s writing. Woodru plans to create a stage and musical work to be performed at Bard Summerscape.
Danh Vo is an internationally acclaimed artist who will be creating a limited edition work inspired by Arendt in collaboration with the Center.
Photographer Gilles Peress and poet Ann Lauterbach, both Bard faculty members, are active participants in Arendt Center events.
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Bill T. Jones, one of the most honored American choreographers of our time, is a Bard faculty member who actively participates in Center events and discussions.
e Center for Curatorial Studies has commissioned works in collaboration with the Arendt Center and curatorial students regularly take Arendt Center courses.
David Schorr, the artist who created the famed engraving which graces the cover of Arendt’s biography, was commissioned by the Center to create a limited edition engraving of Arendt.
“Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.”
“To live together in a world means essentially that the world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time” -Hannah Arendt
e Open Marginalia Project, in collaboration with the University of Oldenburg in Germany, will create an innovative open-access portal hosting transcriptions and commentaries on the marginalia in Arendt’s private library.
e Center’s Blog is one of the most visited and in uential academic blogs in the country, with over 20,000 visits per month.
e Center’s website is a hub for Arendt scholars around the world, with links to the Hannah Arendt Library at Bard, a video library of talks given at the Hannah Arendt Center, and webcast footage from our conferences.
e Quote of the Week features international scholars and public intellectuals exploring the political and ethical relevance of Arendt’s work.
e Center has 5,000 fans on Facebook and 800 followers on Twitter.
—Hannah Arendt HA is the Center’s journal, dedicated to publishing accessible essays based on the best talks given at the Center each year.
inking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics is the Center’s award-winning inaugural volume of essays introducing the core of Arendt’s thinking to a wide audience. e Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis, our latest book, brings together political thinkers, economists, and business people to ask a er the underlying grounds of the 2008 nancial crisis.
“Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, ickering, and o en weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth.”
Reading DenktagebuchArendt’s is a book in process comprised of 10 essays by leading scholars about di erent parts of Arendt’s recently published Denktagebuch, “Book of oughts,” an extraordinary thinking diary she kept for more than 30 years.
Writing in the New York Review of Books 40 years ago, Hannah Arendt noticed that unwelcome facts are tolerated only to the extent that they are consciously or unconsciously transformed into opinions. is tendency to transform fact into opinion, to blur the dividing line between them, has led to the now widely observed de-factualization of our world. In her essay “Truth and Politics,” she suggests that our de-factualized politics demands a pre-political discourse of truth-telling. How do we tell the truth amid the defactualization of our world?
We stand at the precipice of a new age, one in which super-intelligent machines and incalculably complex statistical models remake the world according to a rationality whose logic is not human. Robots remove humans from the battle eld and in factories; statistical models replace human judgment in social policy; and social networks like Facebook and Twitter, as well as virtual reality games like second life, rarify the day-to-day human contact.
Politics needs speech and action that can uphold the truth. It is a political crisis, therefore, when politics and truth go their separate ways. When politicians can no longer inspire, they lose their ability to lead and to summon their citizens to higher and collective ideals. e rise of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and the Pirate Parties are together a response to the diminished authority and sway of political leaders. e question emerges: How does the President matter when political lies as well as political truths are no longer compelling?
Research Associate
Hannah Arendt Center Visiting Fellow Cristiana Grigore will be a visiting fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center in 2013. She is–– a Fulbright scholar from Romania who recently nished her masters decree in International Education Policies and Management at Vanderbilt University.
Associate Fellows Je rey Jurgens received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social eory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as associate fellow at the Center. Je Champlin received his BA from Middlebury College and Ph. D. from New York University. His teaching and research focuses on connections between literature, philosophy, and political theory. He is presently teaching at the Al-Quds Bard College in Jerusalem.
omas Wild is an Assistant Professor of German at Bard College. Dr. Wild studied German literature and culture as well as political science in Berlin and Munich, where he received his Ph.D. Among his many publications are a monograph on Hannah Arendt’s relationships with key postwar German writers, and an “intellectual biography” of Hannah Arendt. Most recently, he co-edited Arendt’s conversations and correspondence with the eminent German historian Joachim Fest.
Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow Ian Storey holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He is a junior teaching fellow at the Center, teaching Political Science courses at Bard College. His dissertation is “ e Taste of Politics: Kant’s Aesthetics, Judgment, and Belonging in the World.”
Senior Fellow Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer for e New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. His writing also appears in e New York Review of Books, GQ, and e New Yorker. At Yale University Press, he is consulting editor at large for the Margellos World Republic of Letters, an imprint devoted to world literature in translation. Modern Library publishes his translations of the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete and I Promise to be Good.
Grace Hunt completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New School of Social Research in New York in 2012. Her dissertation, “A rmative Reactions: A eory of Embodied Dignity,” won the 2013 American Dialectic Annual Dissertation Contest. Junior Fellow John LeJeune will complete his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California-San Diego in 2012. His work focuses on Political eory and Comparative Politics. His dissertation, “Rise and Fall of the Councils: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Revolution” applies Hannah Arendt’s ideas to the concept of modern day revolution.
e Arendt Center inking Circle includes members who give over $1,000. inking Circle Members get reserved seating at our events and can host private dinners at which Arendt Center Director Roger Berkowitz and other members of the Center will speak or lead discussions. Hannah Arendt Center Sta Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center Je rey Katz, Executive Director of the Hannah Arendt Center Bridget Hollenback, Director of Outreach and Social Media e Hannah Arendt Center Board of Advisors Jenny Lyn Bader Howard Berkowitz Judith Roth Berkowitz Roger Berkowitz Dean DavidChrisJeromeMartyHachamovitchKahnKohnBrodyMatias e Hannah Arendt Center Advisory Committee Kimberly Braswell Mark Flanagan Ric StevenJoshuaMarkFouadGordonL.MarrowMaslow $1,000+ Jack Blum John and Peggy Bader Alexander Bazelow Chris Brody Carol Einiger Ric Fouad Marin Community Foundation Sandra Ga ner Stephen Graham Nancy Leonard Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lipp Steven Maslow Mrs. Ellen J. and Mr. Paul N. Roth Alan Sussman Rebecca Wester eld 2010-2012 Contribution Levels $100,000 + Anonymous (1) $50,000+ Roger BruceJimmyBerkowitzGrosfeldandFrancescaSlovin $25,000+ Charles Stevenson $10,000+ Anonymous (1) Jenny Lyn Bader Elisa Loti Dean Hachamovitch $5,000+ Alice and Nate Gantcher Richard Gilder Mark DavidMarshallDavidRobertGordonLippMatiasDanielRoseRoseOscarSchaferStemermanFelicitasorne