“Hannah Arendt has been sanitized in a certain way now, as a kind of wise Jewish figure,” says Benjamin Moser on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In Germany, she’s probably the most read Jewish philosopher. Germany, with all its censorship of anti-Zionist viewpoints, has kind of adopted her. There’s a Hannah Arendt Strasse in every town in Germany. There will be, you know, a little statue of her as this nice Jewish lady. But this happens, unfortunately, to a lot of really explosive artists and writers. They get sanitized.”

 

Hannah Arendt was controversial in her own times. She remains controversial in ours. This series of conversations, A Broken World, attempts to make sense of both Arendt’s broken world and our own, and it addresses the controversies around her work by doing what every issue of Lapham’s Quarterly does—pluralize the voices.

 

In this third episode in the series, Donovan Hohn speaks with Benjamin A. Saltzman, professor of English at the University of Chicago, about his essay “The Silence of Agamemnon,” adapted from his new book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. In the second part of the episode, Hohn speaks with Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Susan Sontag, about his new book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, a portrait gallery of Jewish opponents and critics of Zionism, among them Hannah Arendt. The unabridged, paywalled version of the podcast, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, includes a segment on Ahmad Sadiq Saad and the Jews of Egypt. 

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Works Cited

In order of mention.

 

I.F. Stone. “Holy War,” The New York Review of Books, August 3, 1967.

 

Benjamin A. Saltzman. “The Silence of Agamemnon,” Roundtable from Lapham’s Quarterly, Monday, October 19, 2026.

 

Benjamin A. Saltzman. Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2026.

 

Benjamin Moser. “Appellation Texas contrôlée: The Bloody History of the Lone Star State,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2004.

 

Benjamin Moser. “New Books,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2009.

 

Sholem Aleichem. Wandering Stars. Translated by Aliza Shevrin. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.

 

Grigoris Balakian. Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1918. Translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.

 

Mahmood Mamdani. Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. New York: Doubleday, 2009.

 

C.P. Cavafy. Complete Poems. Translated and introduced by Daniel Mendelsohn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

 

Benjamin Moser. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

 

Benjamin Moser. Sontag: Her Life and Work. New York: Ecco, 2020.

 

Benjamin Moser. The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters. New York: Liveright, 2023.

 

Benjamin Moser. Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History. New York: Doubleday, 2026.

 

Benjamin A. Saltzman. Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

 

Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages. Edited by R.D. Perry and Benjamin A. Saltzman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

 

Hannah Arendt. On Revolution. Introduced by Jonathan Schell. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

 

Hannah Arendt. “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent, Winter 1959.

 

Fred Moten. “Refuge, Refuse, Refrain.” In The Universal Machine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

 

Robert Penn Warren. Who Speaks for the Negro?. Introduced by David W. Blight. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

 

Ralph Ellison. “The World and the Jug.” In Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

 

Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

 

“Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age Without Facts,” live at Olin Auditorium at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, October 28–29, 2011.

 

John Stuart Mill. On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays. Edited by Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

 

Lewis H. Lapham. “Revised Text,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2004.

 

Lewis H. Lapham. “The Road to Shaaraim,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1988.

 

Hannah Arendt. Men in Dark Times. Boston, MA: Mariner Books Classics, 1970.

 

Omer Bartov. Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

 

Omer Bartov. Israel: What Went Wrong?. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026.

 

Norman G. Finkelstein. Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

 

Norman G. Finkelstein. I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom. New York: OR Books, 2025.

 

Roger Berkowitz. A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2026.

 

Theodor Herzl. A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question. Translated by Sylvie d’Avigdor. Preface and notes by Jacob de Haas. New York: Federation of American Zionists, 1917.

 

Benjamin Moser. “We Have Talked Enough About Ourselves,” Equator, October 29, 2025.

 

Elie Wiesel. Night. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

 

Benny Morris. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001. New York: Vintage Books, 2001.

 

Rashid Khalidi. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2021.

 

Ian Black. Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917–2017. New York: Grove Press, 2018.

 

Avi Shlaim. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.

 

Benny Morris. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

 

Bret Stephens. “A Blunt Warning for Israel,” New York Times, July 28, 2026.

 

Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Introduced by Amos Elon. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

 

Hannah Arendt. “Zionism Reconsidered,” The Menorah Journal, Autumn 1945.
 

Roger Berkowitz. “The Knife’s Edge,” Roundtable from Lapham’s Quarterly, Tuesday, October 13, 2026.

 

Clarice Lispector. The Hour of the Star. Translated by Benjamin Moser. Introduced by Colm Tóibín and afterword by Paulo Gurgel Valente. New York: New Directions, 2020.