“Friendship is an enormous part of my life, and it was an enormous part of Arendt’s life,” Roger Berkowitz says on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “She was said to have a genius for friendship by her friends. She was an exile, stateless for eighteen years, and she really did come to believe that friendship is what she called a ‘homeland.’ She didn’t think of herself as German, or Jewish, or American, or European. She said, ‘The only people I love are my friends.’ Friendship is hard, and she uses this beautiful metaphor. She says, ‘Friendship exists on the knife’s edge.’”

 

Hannah Arendt was controversial in her own times. She remains controversial in ours. In her own times, the controversies sometimes tested Arendt’s friendships. Or shattered them. 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 second episode in the series, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jennifer Szalai, essayist and nonfiction book critic for The New York Times, about her article “Hannah Arendt is Not Your Icon,” and with Roger Berkowitz, academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center, about his new book, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of  Friendship in a Broken World, which examines the nature of friendship through the lens of Arendt’s biography and her thinking on the subject. On the unabridged, paywalled edition of the podcast available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, Berkowitz and Hohn turn to the present-day implications of Hannah Arendt’s controversial essay “Truth and Politics,” first published in The New Yorker in 1967.

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WORKS CITED

(In order of mention.)

 

Jennifer Szalai. “Hannah Arendt Is Not Your Icon,” New York Times, December 5, 2025.

 

Donovan Hohn. “Episode 39: A Broken World: Annie Dillard and Lewis H. Lapham.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, September 25, 2026.

 

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

 

“Voices: On Hannah Arendt,” Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, October 6, 2026.

 

Curtis White, “Song of a Lost World,” Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable, October 2, 2026.

 

Hannah Arendt. “Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker, February 18, 1967.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Roger Berkowitz. “Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’,” New York Times, July 7, 2013.

 

Jennifer Szalai. “Buying Tomorrow,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Fall 2011: The Future.

 

“Remembering Lewis H. Lapham,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2024.

 

Raoul Peck, director. I Am Not Your Negro. Velvet Film, 2017.

 

Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Edited by Jerome Kohn and Thomas Wild. New York: Library of America, 2025.

 

James Baldwin. “Autobiographical Notes.” In Notes of a Native Son. Introduced by Edward P. Jones. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

 

Thomas Paine. Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings. Edited by Mark Philp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

 

Jennifer Szalai. “How Empathy Became a Threat,” New York Times, July 18, 2025.

 

Donovan Hohn. “Episode 38: Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, September 11, 2026.

 

Adolf Eichmann. Memoirs: Part One. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2000.

 

“Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” LIFE, November 28, 1960.

 

“Eichmann’s Own Story: Part II,” LIFE, December 5, 1960.

 

Bettina Stangneth. Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. Translated by Ruth Martin. New York: Vintage Books, 2015.

 

Isaac Chotiner. “Is Zionism’s Moral Crisis About Roads Not Taken—Or Original Sin?,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2026.

 

Hannah Arendt. “Eichmann in Jerusalem—I,” The New Yorker, February 9, 1963.

 

Hannah Arendt. “Eichmann in Jerusalem—II,” The New Yorker, February 16, 1963.

 

Deborah E. Lipstadt. The Eichmann Trial. New York: Schocken Books, 2011.

 

David Cesarani. Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer.” Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006.

 

Margarethe von Trotta, director. Hannah Arendt. Heimatfilm, 2013.

 

Roger Berkowitz. The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.

 

Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics. Edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.

 

Donovan Hohn. “Episode 9: Roger Berkowitz.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, August 1, 2025.

 

Hannah Arendt. Responsibility and Judgement. Edited and introduced by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2003.

 

Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2021: Friendship.

 

Hannah Arendt. “Remembering W.H. Auden,” The New Yorker, January 12, 1975.

 

Thomas Meyer. Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind. Translated by Shelley Frisch. New York: Penguin Press, 2026.

 

Walt Whitman. “Song of Myself.” In Leaves of Grass: The Complete 1855 and 1891–92 Editions. Introduced by John Hollander. New York: Library of America, 2011.

 

Hannah Arendt. “The Crisis Character of Modern Society.” In Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975. Edited and introduced by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2018.

 

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Letters 1925–1975. Edited by Ursula Ludz and translated by Andrew Shields. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2004.

 

Michel de Montaigne. On Friendship. Translated by M.A. Screech. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

 

Plato. The Last Days of Socrates. Translated and introduced by Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin Classics, 2011.

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Of The Social Contract and Other Political Writings. Translated by Quintin Hoare and introduced by Christopher Bertram. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012.

 

Donovan Hohn. “Flint’s Water Crisis and the ‘Troublemaker’ Scientist,” The New York Times Magazine, August 16, 2026.

 

“The Arendt Forum 2026: Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?”, live at Olin Hall at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, October 15–17, 2026.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

 

James Baldwin. “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” The New Yorker, November 10, 1962.

 

Nicholas Boggs. Baldwin: A Love Story. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.

 

Hannah Arendt. “What Is Existential Philosophy?” In Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. Edited and introduced by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005.

 

Donovan Hohn, Charles Baxter, and Francine Prose. “Dark Charisma,” live at Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College’s 17th Annual International Conference on “JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times,” October 16–17, 2025.

 

Ludwig van Beethoven. Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 (audio recording). Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle, 2024.