Roger Berkowitz

Hello everyone and welcome.

This is Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz, the podcast of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College in New York.

The Hannah Arendt Center provides an intellectual space for passionate, uncensored, nonpartisan thinking in the spirit of Hannah Arendt.

Arendt published numerous books and in this podcast we read them with you.

My name is Jana Tyree and I'm the director of academic programs here at the Ahrens Center.

It's my pleasure to welcome Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the center.

Every Friday, Roger Berkowitz hosts a virtual reading group for all of our members.

Together, we have been reading Ahrens since 2014.

She maintained relationships across profound intellectual and moral differences and came to understand that politics was not simply about determining who was right, but about preserving a world in which different people could live together.

My guest today, Professor Roger Berkowitz, has spent much of his intellectual life studying Arendt.

He is a professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College and the founder of the Hannah Arendt Center.

In his new book, A World We Share, he makes a provocative argument that perhaps the deepest crisis of democracy isn't simply a crisis of truth or institutions or political leadership.

Perhaps it is a crisis of friendship, of our increasingly fragile capacity to recognize one another as fellow human beings rather than political adversaries.

And that raises a question larger than any election or political movement.

What do we owe our country in a moment of genuine political crisis? And what do we still owe the people, institutions, and commitments that constitute the rest of our lives? It is my pleasure to welcome Professor Roger Berkowitz here to the Who, What, Why podcast.

Roger, thanks so much for joining us.

We've lost the muscle of being friends with people, especially people who disagree with us.

It is my pleasure to welcome to the podcast the founder of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, professor of political science, philosophy, and human rights, and author of the brand new book, A World We Share, Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, Roger Berkowitz.

Welcome, Roger.

It's great to be here, Andrew.

It's a different level.

Congrats on the book, A World We Share, Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World.

We Do Need More Friendship in the World by Roger Berkowitz.

And Roger, I sense you're not a huge presence on social media, but if someone wants to keep up with you, the center, how can they best do so?

Hello everyone and welcome.

This is Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz, the podcast of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College in New York.

The Hannah Arendt Center provides an intellectual space for passionate, uncensored, nonpartisan thinking in the spirit of Hannah Arendt.

Arendt published numerous books and in this podcast we read them with you.

My name is Jana Tyree and I'm the director of academic programs here at the Ahrendt Center.

It's my pleasure to welcome Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the center.

Every Friday, Roger Berkowitz hosts a virtual reading group for all of our members.

Together, we have been reading Ahrendt since 2014.

I'm Aaron Ross Powell, Senior Director of Liberal Projects at the Institute for Humane Studies.

In today's episode, my colleague Michael Brodrick sits down with Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College.

We spend a lot of time these days worrying that people can't agree on basic facts.

Roger's new book, A World We Share, makes a more unsettling case that what our politics is really missing isn't truth, but friendship.

What was friendship to Arendt, and why was it so important to her? And this one.

In what ways did Hannah Arendt consider the world to be broken, or to use the adjective she favored, shattered? We are taking the title of this new series from the subtitle of a new book by Roger Berkowitz, the other guest you'll be hearing from today.

Berkowitz is the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.

The title of his new book, out this week from Yale University Press, is A World We Share.

Ken Krimstein on Hannah Arendt's library card from France's Bibliothèque Nationale.

On Lapham's quarterly website, we've published an essay by editorial board member Curtis White that, although it does not touch on Hannah Arendt, does touch on why it is that we at The Quarterly like to pluralize the voices.

A disclaimer, although Roger Berkowitz's book inspired this new series, Lapham's quarterly remains an editorially independent publication.

The opinions you will hear from the other guests I've invited to join us for this series do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Roger Berkowitz or of the Hannah Arendt Center or of Bard College.