The Rural We: Roger Berkowitz
Roger Berkowitz is the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The Center holds Arendt's personal library and is a destination for those studying her writing. Through a number of popular conferences and events, Berkowitz uses Arendt’s words to engage challenging ideas and foster constructive discussions between people of extremely diverse backgrounds and points of view. Arendt is perhaps best known in the zeitgeist for her writing on the trial of Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann, where she coined the term “the banality of evil,” but the impact of her writing on the world of politics was pervasive in her own time. For her writings on equality, race, education, feminism and more, she is derided and cheered by members of the left and right simultaneously. It is the way in which her work defies partisanship that Berkowitz feels makes it so valuable in turbulent times.
I was hired at Bard in a nontraditional way in 2005. I was given two years to figure out what I may or may not do. I was not an Arendt scholar at all but I’d read a lot of her work and I always found it very provocative and important and then I learned we had her library.
It was the 100th anniversary of her birth in 2006 and I got this idea that we would have a conference. But I didn’t really like Arendt scholarship. A lot of it is very jargon based and tries to bring her into some political group. I’ve always found her to be someone who thinks outside of the box, outside of jargon, outside of discipline. She says things that are provocative and make you rethink the world afresh. So I thought, let's have an Arendt conference where we don’t invite Arendt scholars but instead bring together artists, business people, intellectuals, people who I think are really smart. Have them come and spend two days together and talk about why Arendt matters.
The mission of the Center has always been to be an institutional space that nurtures and provokes and supports bold and provocative thinking about the world in the spirit of Hanna Arendt. I don’t want this to be a mausoleum to Arendt. I don’t want it to be a place scholars come to worship her and write about what this or that word means.
When she wrote about the trial of Adolph Eichmann she thought deeply about what it meant and wrote something that was bold and provocative — it pissed a lot of people off — but it made a lot of people think. It’s considered one of the great books of the 20th century for a reason.
The dominant themes in her work are freedom and plurality. Plurality means that it’s a basic fact that all human beings are different and unique. There’s an equality to that but part of that equality is our right to be different. As a result of that, she thinks that there is no truth in politics. To speak about truth in politics is a mistake. Politics is about opinions and there should be no expectation that everyone should agree.
I’ve tried to make it clear to myself, and anyone who asks, that I am not Arendt’s defense attorney. But I do see my job as being to defend the nuance, and complexity, and power of her writing. So, when I see people simplify that and try and denigrate it or 'cancel' it, or delegitimize it, I do see it as my job to respond in a way that is true to the work.
We have a big annual conference in October. This year it was on racism and anti-Semitism, next year it is going to be on revitalizing democracy. It will be a month before the election and I think it’s going to really exciting. We have a tough talks lecture series where we bring in people whose views are out of the mainstream in campus culture — from super liberals like black nationalists to very conservative people who are against things like affirmative action and women’s studies programs. The idea is to bring viewpoints to a liberal community like Bard that students don’t usually get to encounter.
We also have a weekly newsletter called 'Amor Mundi,' which means 'to love the world,' which was a mantra of Arendt’s. She lived in dark times. She was arrested and put in a concentration camp, she escaped, she got here, and she would say to people that the hardest thing was to love the world, and yet somehow that’s what she insisted that she would do. She would understand what was going on and, even in the darkest times, she would figure out what was good in the world.
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