The Hannah Arendt Center

07/31/2026

Thanks for listening!

Roger Berkowitz

Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz

05/19/2026

As the spring semester comes to a close, so does our Courage to Be series for the 2025-26 year. Our Director of Programs, Jana Mader, just wrapped up final presentations with her students from The Courage to Be: Artistic Encounters with Nature — featuring truly inspiring projects exploring art, nature, and courage. A beautiful ending to a year filled with thoughtful conversations, curiosity, and inspiring ideas.

05/18/2026

“In politics we are concerned with the world and not with ourselves.” - Hannah Arendt

Revisiting a Quote by Micah Bornfree (formerly White), originally published April 2019, which explores Hannah Arendt’s statements during a panel discussion titled The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? Find it on our Medium publication, Quote of the Week!

05/13/2026

Look what just arrived!

Hannah Arendt: An American Hero, an anthology by that does more than honor Arendt’s legacy-it enacts it, with an introduction by Roger Berkowitz. We have a limited number of signed copies, so become a member [link in bio] and request yours today!

Be sure to check out the festival in NYC, and sign up for a free discussion we’re hosting on June 6th at 3p with and others! Learn more on our website [link in bio].

04/29/2026

The Courage to Be Program for the 2025-2026 academic year has reached its end! Here are some highlights from the work that our student fellows and Courage to Be faculty did this year!

The Courage to Be program is an undergraduate Common Course series that brings together students, faculty, and internationally renowned experts in diverse fields on the topic of courage. Courage To Be courses and events take place each spring semester at Bard College and are hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center. As part of our Courage To Be Fellowship program, Bard students have the opportunity to organize events and work with artists, writers, activists, and other professionals on our annual lecture series.

Video by Media Fellow:

04/27/2026

Our Quote of the Week is a recurring feature of our weekly Amor Mundi newsletter.

“The feature is deceptively modest. A quotation, after all, is only a few sentences lifted out of a larger work. But the practice of choosing one, sitting with it, and writing about it is to take a passage seriously enough it weight it, return to it, and offer it to others to weigh in turn… The Quote of the Week is, in this sense, a discipline.”-

Our latest Quote is by a visiting professor of history at and an associate fellow at the Arendt Center. Find it on our Medium publication!

04/24/2026

Thank you to everyone who came out last night and watched on the livestream our 4th annual - Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking!

Uday Singh Mehta, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at discussed the choices surrounding militant non-violence in the context of Ghandi, Hannah Arendt, and more. Watch it now on our YouTube channel!

We are thrilled to continue this speaker series with our partners and as an opportunity for our Klemens von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Jess Feldman has become part of the life and soul of the Hannah Arendt Center and the community at these past two years, especially through their teaching at the Jess will be missed as they move on to new opportunities, and it has been a privilege and pleasure to get to know and work with them.

We are also excited to announce that these annual lectures will soon be published through our partnership with De Gruyter, and available for sale and through our new Publications Circle membership tier. More details and announcements to come!

04/21/2026

Announcing our summer read!

Friday, June 12th, we’ll begin reading “Responsibility and Judgement”, Hannah Arendt’s indispensable investigation into some of the most troubling and important issues of our time.

“Responsibility and Judgment” gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt’s life, where she addresses fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices. At the heart of the book is a profound ethical investigation, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in which Arendt confronts the inadequacy of traditional moral “truths” as standards to judge what we are capable of doing and examines anew our ability to distinguish good from evil and right from wrong. We also see how Arendt comes to understand that alongside the radical evil she had addressed in earlier analyses of totalitarianism, there exists a more pernicious evil, independent of political ideology, whose ex*****on is limitless when the perpetrator feels no remorse and can forget his acts as soon as they are committed.

Find edition information, the reading schedule, and information on how to join on our website! [link in bio]

04/10/2026

We finished reading “Crises of the Republic” for the Virtual Reading Group today. Look for the discussion Friday the 17th on the pod!

To wrap up this riveting series, we’re reading an additional essay next week titled “Home to Roost.” Find it at the Library of Congress website, then join the discussion in person on the 17th (free to HAC members and the Bard College community) or afterwards online on our YouTube channel and “Reading Hannah Arendt” podcast.

04/09/2026

What a fantastic final dinner lecture in our Courage to Be series! Loubna Mrie spoke to Bard College students enrolled in our Courage courses about Defiance and the Syrian and Palestinian liberation movements.

Lecture organized by HAC Courage to Be Fellow مالية with thanks to Ziad

Photos and video by HAC Media Fellow

program lead by Jana Marlene Mader