Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz

In this bonus episode, host Roger Berkowitz speaks with writer and somatic coach Nikita Nelin '09 about identity, embodiment, and politics. Nelin describes his grandfather, who pursued acting only after being told to “take off the combat boots,” a metaphor for shedding protective armor that later constrains life. Connecting this to his coaching, Nelin contrasts bodily “compression” and exhaustion he saw in clients after the 2024 election with the “armoring up” response of 2016, and argues for permission to seek joy and desire amid political despair. Berkowitz relates this to Arendt’s distinctions between tyranny and totalitarianism, questions of living well under dictatorship, and the need to create and act beyond mere survival. They discuss somatic practice as attention to sensation and learned schemas, Nelin’s shift from writerly ambition to coaching, and Arendt’s idea of beginning anew at any age. (Read Nelin's recent Quote of the Week on Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition here.)

Our next read is Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Join us here on the podcast beginning September 11th, or become a member of the Arendt Center to join the Virtual Reading Group and attend the live recordings!

 

ABOUT:

Produced by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, this podcast offers close readings of Arendt's books alongside engaging interviews and thought-provoking conversations. Released weekly, each episode provides listeners with a deeper understanding of Arendt's philosophy and its relevance to contemporary issues. Available on all major podcast platforms, listeners join us on a captivating intellectual journey through the mind of Hannah Arendt.

New episodes every Friday morning! Join Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, as he discusses the works of German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). 

 

THE HANNAH ARENDT CENTER:

The Hannah Arendt Center provides an intellectual space for passionate, uncensored, and nonpartisan thinking that reframes and deepens the fundamental questions facing our nation and our world. Become a member and enjoy several benefits including live access to our Virtual Reading Group that takes place most Fridays, and upon which this podcast is based: https://hac.bard.edu/membership/

More information can be found on our website: https://hac.bard.edu/ Follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/hannaharendt/ and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hannaharendtcenteratbard/

 

THE HOST:

Roger Berkowitz is the Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He is the author of the forthcoming A WORLD WE SHARE: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press; Oct. 6), editor of On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt (2024), The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition, and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (2017). Berkowitz edits the HA: Yearbook and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany.

 

EDITED BY:

Alex Fox Tschan is the editor & co-producer of the “Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz” podcast. He is a working musician, creative producer, & audio/visual editor at his Brooklyn-based studio, The Fox & The Sound. With 25 years of recording & performance experience, Tschan’s recent projects range from indie-pop albums to audiobooks for McNally Jackson. A full spread of his work & collaborations can be found at pastelhell.com.

Roger Berkowitz speaks with Samantha Fazekas about her book Hannah Arendt’s Unwritten Chapter on Judging (De Gruyter Brill, 2025). Fazekas argues that judging became central for Arendt as she confronted unprecedented political events like World War II, the Holocaust, and the Eichmann trial, which “explode” inherited moral and political categories. They discuss Arendt’s use of Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgment—subjective yet claiming universal validity—as a model for political judgment, emphasizing enlarged mentality, representative thinking, and public communicability. Judging, they argue, helps build a shared world through debate even without consensus. Fazekas also addresses the spectator–actor relation, and her claim that a “non-privative” privacy is necessary for thinking, judging, and meaningful action.

Samantha Fazekas was a teaching fellow for three years in political philosophy at Trinity, and is now a visiting researcher at the University of Marburg, Germany, splitting her time between the United States, Germany and Dublin. Hannah Arendt's Unwritten Chapter on Judging was her doctoral dissertation.

Our next read is Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Join us here on the podcast beginning September 11th, or become a member of the Arendt Center to join the Virtual Reading Group and attend the live recordings!

 

ABOUT:

Produced by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, this podcast offers close readings of Arendt's books alongside engaging interviews and thought-provoking conversations. Released weekly, each episode provides listeners with a deeper understanding of Arendt's philosophy and its relevance to contemporary issues. Available on all major podcast platforms, listeners join us on a captivating intellectual journey through the mind of Hannah Arendt.

New episodes every Friday morning! Join Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, as he discusses the works of German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). 

 

THE HANNAH ARENDT CENTER:

The Hannah Arendt Center provides an intellectual space for passionate, uncensored, and nonpartisan thinking that reframes and deepens the fundamental questions facing our nation and our world. Become a member and enjoy several benefits including live access to our Virtual Reading Group that takes place most Fridays, and upon which this podcast is based: https://hac.bard.edu/membership/

More information can be found on our website: https://hac.bard.edu/ Follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/hannaharendt/ and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hannaharendtcenteratbard/

 

THE HOST:

Roger Berkowitz is the Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He is the author of the forthcoming A WORLD WE SHARE: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press; Oct. 6), editor of On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt (2024), The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition, and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (2017). Berkowitz edits the HA: Yearbook and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany.

 

EDITED BY:

Alex Fox Tschan is the editor & co-producer of the “Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz” podcast. He is a working musician, creative producer, & audio/visual editor at his Brooklyn-based studio, The Fox & The Sound. With 25 years of recording & performance experience, Tschan’s recent projects range from indie-pop albums to audiobooks for McNally Jackson. A full spread of his work & collaborations can be found at pastelhell.com.

Host Roger Berkowitz closes our discussion of Hannah Arendt’s Responsibility and Judgment with her final public speech, “Home to Roost” (1975), presented as Arendt’s last assessment of the crisis of the U.S. republic. He highlights her claims that republics are fragile, that McCarthyism began a constitutional crisis by attacking due process and the civil service, and that Vietnam, foreign-policy failures, domestic turmoil, and Watergate signaled a swift decline of political power. Arendt warns against social-scientific “deeper causes” that rationalize events and blunt the shock of facts, arguing that modern PR and political image-making drove both economic “progress” toward waste and Vietnam-era policy. She distinguishes ordinary lying from “lying as a way of life,” rooted in totalitarianism, and argues Nixon showed how criminality flourishes when only terror seems beyond the pale; discussion connects these themes to present polarization, corruption, institutions’ resistance, and the need for public reckoning rather than amnesia.

Our next read is Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Join us here on the podcast beginning September 11th, or become a member of the Arendt Center to join the Virtual Reading Group and attend the live recordings!

 

ABOUT:

Produced by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, this podcast offers close readings of Arendt's books alongside engaging interviews and thought-provoking conversations. Released weekly, each episode provides listeners with a deeper understanding of Arendt's philosophy and its relevance to contemporary issues. Available on all major podcast platforms, listeners join us on a captivating intellectual journey through the mind of Hannah Arendt.

New episodes every Friday morning! Join Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, as he discusses the works of German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). 

 

THE HANNAH ARENDT CENTER:

The Hannah Arendt Center provides an intellectual space for passionate, uncensored, and nonpartisan thinking that reframes and deepens the fundamental questions facing our nation and our world. Become a member and enjoy several benefits including live access to our Virtual Reading Group that takes place most Fridays, and upon which this podcast is based: https://hac.bard.edu/membership/

More information can be found on our website: https://hac.bard.edu/ Follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/hannaharendt/ and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hannaharendtcenteratbard/

 

THE HOST:

Roger Berkowitz is the Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He is the author of the forthcoming A WORLD WE SHARE: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press; Oct. 6), editor of On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt (2024), The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition, and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (2017). Berkowitz edits the HA: Yearbook and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany.

 

EDITED BY:

Alex Fox Tschan is the editor & co-producer of the “Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz” podcast. He is a working musician, creative producer, & audio/visual editor at his Brooklyn-based studio, The Fox & The Sound. With 25 years of recording & performance experience, Tschan’s recent projects range from indie-pop albums to audiobooks for McNally Jackson. A full spread of his work & collaborations can be found at pastelhell.com.

Focusing on two essays from Responsibility and Judgment—Arendt’s 1964 review of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy and her 1966 introduction to Bernd Naumann’s Auschwitz on Trial—podcast host Roger Berkowitz traces Arendt’s insistence that judgment be grounded in understanding individuals and contexts. Arendt critiques Pope Pius XII’s “rigid adherence to normality” and failure to mobilize moral authority while warning against personalizing outrage in ways that obscure broader collaboration. In the Auschwitz trials, she examines limits of applying ordinary criminal law to extraordinary crimes, distinctions among perpetrators, and tensions between guilt and responsibility, prompting discussion about contemporary politics, language, complicity, and judging as citizens rather than rule-bound judges.

Our next read is Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Join us here on the podcast beginning September 11th, or become a member of the Arendt Center to join the Virtual Reading Group and attend the live recordings!

 

ABOUT:

Produced by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, this podcast offers close readings of Arendt's books alongside engaging interviews and thought-provoking conversations. Released weekly, each episode provides listeners with a deeper understanding of Arendt's philosophy and its relevance to contemporary issues. Available on all major podcast platforms, listeners join us on a captivating intellectual journey through the mind of Hannah Arendt.

New episodes every Friday morning! Join Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, as he discusses the works of German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). 

 

THE HANNAH ARENDT CENTER:

The Hannah Arendt Center provides an intellectual space for passionate, uncensored, and nonpartisan thinking that reframes and deepens the fundamental questions facing our nation and our world. Become a member and enjoy several benefits including live access to our Virtual Reading Group that takes place most Fridays, and upon which this podcast is based: https://hac.bard.edu/membership/

More information can be found on our website: https://hac.bard.edu/ Follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/hannaharendt/ and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hannaharendtcenteratbard/

 

THE HOST:

Roger Berkowitz is the Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He is the author of the forthcoming A WORLD WE SHARE: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press; Oct. 6), editor of On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt (2024), The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition, and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (2017). Berkowitz edits the HA: Yearbook and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany.

 

EDITED BY:

Alex Fox Tschan is the editor & co-producer of the “Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz” podcast. He is a working musician, creative producer, & audio/visual editor at his Brooklyn-based studio, The Fox & The Sound. With 25 years of recording & performance experience, Tschan’s recent projects range from indie-pop albums to audiobooks for McNally Jackson. A full spread of his work & collaborations can be found at pastelhell.com.

There's a shift in Hannah Arendt's Responsibility and Judgment from essays on moral and political responsibility to shorter essays of judgment about particular events, beginning with her controversial 1957 “Reflections on Little Rock.” In this episode of the podcast, host Roger Berkowitz situates the essay in the aftermath of Brown v. Board, and notes Arendt’s factual errors about the Little Rock photos and discourse, and recounts its fraught publication history in Commentary and Dissent, including rebuttals and Arendt’s responses. Berkowitz outlines Arendt’s core claims: equality is essential but can become dangerous if pursued without limit; only legally enforced segregation is unconstitutional; forced desegregation can become tyrannical by intruding on the social and private realms, especially parental control of education; and liberal centralization threatens federalism and dispersed power.

 

ABOUT:

Produced by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, this podcast offers close readings of Arendt's books alongside engaging interviews and thought-provoking conversations. Released weekly, each episode provides listeners with a deeper understanding of Arendt's philosophy and its relevance to contemporary issues. Available on all major podcast platforms, listeners join us on a captivating intellectual journey through the mind of Hannah Arendt.

New episodes every Friday morning! Join Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, as he discusses the works of German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). 

 

THE HANNAH ARENDT CENTER:

The Hannah Arendt Center provides an intellectual space for passionate, uncensored, and nonpartisan thinking that reframes and deepens the fundamental questions facing our nation and our world. Become a member and enjoy several benefits including live access to our Virtual Reading Group that takes place most Fridays, and upon which this podcast is based: https://hac.bard.edu/membership/

More information can be found on our website: https://hac.bard.edu/ Follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/hannaharendt/ and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hannaharendtcenteratbard/

 

THE HOST:

Roger Berkowitz is the Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He is the author of the forthcoming A WORLD WE SHARE: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press; Oct. 6), editor of On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt (2024), The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition, and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (2017). Berkowitz edits the HA: Yearbook and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany.

 

EDITED BY:

Alex Fox Tschan is the editor & co-producer of the “Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz” podcast. He is a working musician, creative producer, & audio/visual editor at his Brooklyn-based studio, The Fox & The Sound. With 25 years of recording & performance experience, Tschan’s recent projects range from indie-pop albums to audiobooks for McNally Jackson. A full spread of his work & collaborations can be found at pastelhell.com.