Show Notes
“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.
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
More from The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
“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.’”
“Rabbi Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity,” Annie Dillard wrote in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. “The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels imprisoned them. This is our bleak world.”
As a companion to last week’s episode of The World in Time, we are sharing with listeners the first episode of Passages: On Morrison, a limited podcast series hosted by Namwali Serpell. The series takes the form of a traveling salon. In this first episode, Serpell and poet Tracy K. Smith read the opening of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's debut novel, and discuss all that the passage emits and erases. They also explore how the cultural treatment of Morrison as a literary icon or monument has obscured a true appreciation of her literary form, an appreciation that comes from turning to the page. Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
“The canon raised Toni Morrison,” says Namwali Serpell on this episode of The World in Time. “The canon is how she became who she is. Faulkner, Woolf, Shakespeare. She is much more interested in taking what’s there and reading it accurately, honestly. Let us be clear-minded and clear-sighted about what is there. But we don’t need to destroy it. And in fact, the Melville I read after reading Morrison’s analysis of the whiteness of the whale is a richer Melville.”
This bonus episode of The World in Time brings together a pair of conversations, one about the making of a movie, another about the making of an archive. Director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros talk to acting editor Donovan Hohn about their collaboration with Lewis Lapham on his 2005 "dramatic documentary musical," The American Ruling Class, now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Then writer and technologist Paul Ford, architect of the Harper's Magazine digital archive and co-founder of Aboard, a software consultancy, joins Hohn for a conversation about the new Lapham's Quarterly digital archive, whether technologists can move fast without breaking things, the gold rush origins of Silicon Valley, what Lewis Lapham would have made of our new Gilded Age, the magnificence of George Eliot's Middlemarch, and much else.