How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today By Masha Gessen Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures… Read More In the Shadow of the Holocaust
First posted July 11, 2015 “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is… Read More Hannah Arendt: pariah and 21st-century cosmopolitan
A tribute to Richard Bernstein, 1932-2022 “All academic thinking, whether right, left or middle, is conservative in the extreme,” Arendt had written to him. “Nobody wants to hear what he hasn’t heard before.” Recalling these words, Bernstein leaned toward his laptop camera, growing bigger on our screens. We must all fight off this tendency to… Read More A philosophy professor’s final class
Arendt shows us “how to think the world anew […] how to hold ourselves accountable for our actions, how to think critically without succumbing to ideology,” Hill writes. “Only when we do this, she says, will we be able to love the world.” The peak of her pariahdom came when she covered Adolf Eichmann’s… Read More Book review – The Philosopher’s Trail: On Samantha Rose Hill’s “Hannah Arendt”
After the truth-shower 