2022

The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The Ground on Which We Stand: Hannah Arendt on Powerless, Necessary Truth — Roger Berkowitz draws vital lessons from Hannah Arendt’s “Truth and Politics.”

Quillette, Lessons from Hannah Arendt on Arresting Our ‘Flight From Reality’ — Fascism, communism, and transhumanism all lure us into rejecting the real human condition in favor of ideological constructs.

2019

Rural Intelligence, The Rural We: Roger Berkowitz — The founder of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard uses the controversial writer's library to foster meaningful discussion.

2017

The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting “The Origins of Totalitarianism” — Roger Berkowitz reviews Hannah Arendt’s landmark “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” framing the book within the context of contemporary politics.

2012

Bookforum, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred by Paul Reitter —From Sigmund Freud to Theodor Herzl, from Alexander Portnoy to Alvy Singer, the stereotypical self-hating Jew is someone who despises his difference and yearns to assimilate. Today, the label has an added political connotation, as Jews who criticize Israel are frequently branded as self-hating. The California-based radical-Zionist website masada2000 offers a list of more than 8,000 “Self-Hating Israel-Threatening” Jews—or “S.H.I.T. Jews” as it labels them. Masada2000 names Rabbi Michael Lerner, Woody Allen, and Noam Chomsky as Jews who “know the Truth but hate their heritage to such a degree that nothing else matters to them except bashing Israel right out of existence.” It is rare for a Jewish intellectual to escape accusations of self-hatred.

But as omnipresent as the idea of the self-hating Jew is, few people have any idea where the notion comes from. Ohio State University professor Paul Reitter’s On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred offers an answer in the form of a revisionist history. Reitter begins with an account of how Jewish self-hatred grew out of the resentment assimilated Jews felt for their ineradicable Jewishness. But Reitter’s story is novel in two respects. First, he cleaves Jewish self-hatred from its complex three-hundred-year history of assimilation. Second, Reitter provocatively seeks to rehabilitate Jewish self-hatred, and to reveal its “affirmative and even redemptive Ur-meanings.” However, as right as Reitter is to resist blanket condemnations of Jewish self-hatred, his recuperative efforts are meaningless and anachronistic.

2013

The Paris Review, Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film — In 1963, The New Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of “Jewish Affairs.” Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, unleashed what Irving Howe called a “civil war” among New York intellectuals. While some reviews cursed Arendt as a self-hating Jew and Nazi lover, the Jewish Daily Forward accusing her of “polemical vulgarity,” Robert Lowell termed her portrayal of Eichmann a “masterpiece,” and Bruno Bettelheim said it was the best protection against “dehumanizing totalitarianism.” Across the city, Arendt’s friends chose sides. When Dissent sponsored a meeting at the Hotel Diplomat, a crowd gathered to shout down Alfred Kazin and Raul Hilberg—then the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholar—for defending Arendt, while in The Partisan Review Lionel Abel opined that Eichmann “comes off so much better in [Arendt’s] book than do his victims.”

In the years since that fiery time, Eichmann in Jerusalem has remained something to condemn or defend rather than a book to be read and understood. I therefore had some fears when I heard that German director Margarethe von Trotta was making a film about Arendt’s coverage of the trial. But Hannah Arendt accomplishes something rare in any biopic and unheard of in a half century of critical hyperbole over all things Arendt: it actually brings Arendt’s work back into believable—and accessible—focus.

The New York Times, Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ — 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.”

2011

Democracy, The Politics of Anti-Political Protest: What to Make of OWS — This idea of a leaderless movement is often mentioned in connection with the Occupy Wall Street protesters’ lack of demands. What’s overlooked is the deep conviction that many in the movement have about the idea of consensus and the practice of direct and leaderless democracy.

2010

Democracy, Why We Must Judge — It’s not all relative: Without judgment, a society loses its sense of justice.