Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, My Parents, and Me

Journalist Andrea Bernstein is the daughter of the late Richard J. Bernstein, a scholar of Hannah Arendt, and Carol L. Bernstein, an expert on cultural memory who took Walter Benjamin as her muse. For years, Andrea Bernstein saw her own work covering American politics and corruption in a separate sphere from her parents’ work. But as the twenty-first century increasingly sounds the notes of the first half of the previous century, it has become clear to Bernstein that her spheres of inquiry and those of her parents were converging. In this lecture, Bernstein leans on her journalistic tools and intellectual inheritance to explore how can we build upon the scholarship of Arendt and Benjamin—and her parents’ interpretation of them—to create a new intellectual roadmap to guide us forward as we struggle to defend facts, truth, and democracy.