The German-Jewish-American thinker Hannah Arendt, born in Hannover, exiled to Paris and later to New York, dedicated her work to the reinvention of the public realm and to freedom in political action.
 
Arendt, who had learned to think with Martin Heidegger, Plato, Kurt Blumenfeld, Rosa Luxemburg, Immanuel Kant, Rahel Varnhagen, Karl Jaspers and Walter Benjamin was expelled from Germany in 1933 and from Europe in 1940. She found her way into the Anglo-American
world through her dialog with thinkers and poets like Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson and W.H. Auden.
 
Arendt's work confronted race violence, discrimination, the experience of revolution, of town councils, and other forms of direct political representation. For Arendt, civil disobedience sustains democracy by interrupting the automatism of state authorities. To empower the right of citizens to dissent from civil government and to join together in collective acts of civil disobedience, she even suggested including the right to civil disobedience as a constitutional amendment.
 
Today, as in the 1960s, the ideas of this woman philosopher inspire theoretical debates as well as civil political initiatives. There is no claim of a Judeo-European-American symbiosis, but the conference at Villa Aurora will explore the influence of her European-American experience and the particular importance of transcultural exchange in Arendt's theory of political action.
 
The conference is organized by Villa Aurora in cooperation with the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, Annandale on Hudson.
 

Participants are:
 
Roger Berkowitz, Bard College
Peg Birmingham, DePaul University
Robert Harrison, Stanford University
Wolfgang Heuer, Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin)
Martín Plot, California Institute of the Arts  
Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University
 
Concept:
Marie Luise Knott, freelance author, journalist and translator, Berlin
 
Schedule:
 
Saturday, November 9th, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
CONFERENCE @ Villa Aurora
 
Sunday, November 10th, 11:00 a.m.
LECTURE & SCREENING @ Skirball Cultural Center
 
Roger Berkowitz: "Jewish Voices in the Eichmann-Controversy"
 
Hannah Arendt
a Film by Margarethe von Trotta
Germany, 2012, 113 min, digital, starring Barbara Sukowa, Julia Jentsch and Ulrich Noethen
 
Tickets are $ 6 at the door.