#david berkowitz

[outofeverythingthisnamewasleft]

A policeman stands guard outside the apartment of David Berkowitz in Yonkers, August 11, 1977. Photo: Bettmann Archives/Getty/Bettmann Archive

[quantumfrail]

Longlegs is like someone drunkenly described Silence of the Lambs to David Lynch.

If Nic Cage had given a subdued psychopath performance I think it could have elevated it massively. Unfortunately what we got was an indie film Joker with prosthetic makeup that made him look like the Temu version of David Berkowitz from Criminal Mimes.

[earlefromunder]

Son of Sam

[thethirdbear]

eventually i crossed that invisible line of no return, after years of mental torment, behavioral problems, deep inner struggles and my own rebellious ways, i became the criminal that at the time, it seemed as if it was my destiny to become.

[earlefromunder]

Yes ma’am I am son of sam

[lovelyheart502]

IM NOT OVER THIS !!!

He went to prison when he was in his 20s and now he is in 70s << the magnitude of this is unimaginable

as if he was born just to spend most of his life in prison !!!

#davidberkowitz #SonOfSam

[myowntwisteduniverse]

[whetstonefires]

In the 90s i went to elementary school with a kid named Timothy McVeigh and i still sometimes wonder if the reason he moved away and was never heard from again in early 1996 was his parents were changing his legal name and re-enrolling him somewhere no one knew he'd had the same name as the Oklahoma City Bomber.

So what I'm saying is this happens irl too and one of the many dick moves involved in becoming a mass murderer in this day and age is that everyone with your same name gets screwed over.

We should talk more about what a dick move it is to name horror movie villains regular-ass people names.

Michael Meyers? Dick move. How many thousands of Mr. Michael Meyers are out there every day meeting people going "Ope! Haha Michael Meyers! Oh just don't kill me! Haha." Shut up. Meyers et al should kill you, and John Carpenter for causing this.

You know who did this right? Thomas Harris. Named his villain just the right inconceivable combination of sounds. I don't think there are any fucking Hannibal Lecters out there uncomfortably laughing off cannibal jokes in a job interview. And if there are, then I think they've got bigger problems coming from parents willing to name a squishy little baby Hannibal Fucking Lecter.

[geekgyrl]

David Berkowitz Son of Sam

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Serial Killer

Serial Killer - a person who methodically murders a substantial number of people over a period of time.

The definition of serial murder varies.

The lowest number of victims is 3 in most cases, although certain investigative agencies move the barometer higher or lower.

Signs of a Serial Killer

Serial killers often share some common traits. Here are just a few to consider:

Childhood troubles: Some of the most prolific serial killers have long histories of brutal child abuse in their pasts. For example, Ottis Toole—convicted of six counts of murder—grew up a victim of incest and violence at the hands of relatives. This is a common element in the backstories of several serial killers. Persistent bedwetting, fire starting, and cruelty to animals during youth can also be harbingers of future serial killing.

Lack of empathy: Serial killers almost always have a total lack of empathy, remorse, or guilt. They see themselves as entitled to torturing and killing their victims, often dehumanizing them in their eventual confessions to law enforcement.

Manipulative personalities: Some serial killers are quite charismatic and manipulative. Ted Bundy wrapped the media around his finger during his trial. H.H. Holmes made a name for himself as a prolific swindler and con man alongside killing dozens of people. Harold Shipman was a well-respected doctor and pillar of his community who killed well over two hundred patients.

Methodical killing style: Most serial killers murder their victims in a methodical, pattern-based fashion. For instance, Moses Sithole of South Africa chose women victims in their twenties who were unemployed. After offering them jobs, he would lead them to one of the remote areas where he committed his crimes.

Motives of Serial Killers

While each serial killer might murder for different reasons, certain motives crop up time and time again. Consider the following:

Hunger for power: Serial killers often murder because of a desire for power. They seek to dominate their victims, not just kill them. Some theorize the worst mass murderers of history (e.g., Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, etc.) might have become serial killers if their ascension to power didn’t enable them to enact their violent crime fantasies on a wider scale.

Notoriety: Both serial murderers and spree killers (like mass shooters) often kill in the interest of attention. The Son of Sam killer (David Berkowitz) sent letters taunting New York police. The Zodiac Killer (still unknown) sent cryptic messages about his killings to Bay Area newspapers and law enforcement agencies. Albert DeSalvo, the alleged Boston Strangler, may have turned himself in for even more murders than he actually committed in the interest of greater notoriety.

Psychosis: Many—some would argue all—serial killers are verifiable and literal psychopaths. For instance, murderers like Ed Kemper and Jeffrey Dahmer had troubled histories before they even began killing their victims.

Revenge: Some serial murderers use their killings as an opportunity to seek revenge against the people who wronged them. For instance, a “black widow” (e.g., female serial killer), such as Aileen Wuornos, might murder innocent men or the wrongdoers themselves to feel like they are exacting revenge upon men who brutally mistreated them.

Sadistic pleasure: Serial killers might gain a deranged sense of delight in torturing and murdering their victims. For instance, both Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer) preyed on young women to act out their sadistic sexual fantasies before killing them.

Some Notorious Serial Killers

These are just a few of the worst serial killers in history:

Aileen Wuornos: Although Wuornos argued her killings were in self-defense, juries convicted her of 6 counts of first-degree murder for crimes that occurred between November 1989 and November 1990 in Florida. The state executed her in 2002.

Albert DeSalvo: Despite the fact DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler, people dispute the credibility of his claims. Authorities associate thirteen female victims with the Boston Strangler. In 2013, experts confirmed DNA evidence linked DeSalvo to the sexual assault and murder of one of those victims.

David Berkowitz: The media called Berkowitz the Son of Sam after he used the phrase in a letter he mailed to New York police before they identified him. He was sentenced to serve 6 life sentences for murdering 6 young women and attempting to kill others.

Ed Kemper: Nicknamed the “Co-ed Killer,” Kemper murdered 10 people, most of them female college students he picked up while they were hitchhiking.

Gary Ridgway: Also known as the Green River Killer, Ridgway killed more than four dozen people, the bodies of whom he tended to deposit in the woods around the Green River in Washington.

Harold Shipman: An English doctor, Shipman killed his female victims by way of lethal injections. A jury convicted him of fifteen murders, although there is evidence he was responsible for the deaths of up to 250 people.

Henri Landru: Nicknamed the “Bluebeard of Gambais,” Landru was a Frenchman who killed at least eleven people between 1914 and 1919. After the jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death, he died by guillotine.

H.H. Holmes: Although convicted of just one murder, Holmes confessed to more than two dozen. Prior to his imprisonment, he was a con artist, responsible for check forgeries, insurance fraud, and other crimes. The state of Pennsylvania hanged him for the killing of Benjamin Pitezel, Holmes’s former business partner.

Jack the Ripper: Authorities associate this unknown person (or persons) with multiple murders in Victorian England. The victims were all women, and all died from violent stabbings.

Jeffrey Dahmer: This US American serial killer, also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, stalked the Midwest for victims. He preserved and even ate the body parts of those he killed before being apprehended by the police.

John Wayne Gacy: Also known as the Killer Clown, Gacy—a party clown performer— almost exclusively preyed on young men. When law enforcement brought him to justice, the remains they found buried in his house made for one of the most notorious and grisly crime scenes in history.

Ottis Toole: Juries convicted Toole of 6 counts of murder plus arson. He died while in prison in Florida.

Richard Ramirez: This Los Angeles serial murderer attacked almost 20 people and killed at least 13. The media referred to him as the “Night Stalker” before criminologists were able to track down and identify him.

Ted Bundy: Responsible for crimes in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado, Bundy had at least two dozen victims but possibly as many as a hundred. He was responsible for abducting, sexually assaulting, and killing young women across the five states.

Zodiac Killer: Responsible for one of the most notorious killing sprees in US American history, the still unidentified Zodiac Killer was active in and around San Francisco in the late 1960s. The media referred to the unknown male by the name “Zodiac Killer” after he used the term Zodiac in his cryptic messages to Bay Area newspapers and law enforcement agencies.

The Investigation of a Serial Killer

To investigate a serial killer, various levels of law enforcement will work together.

If a local pattern emerges, the relevant police department might coordinate with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

If a more disparate geographical pattern of killings crops up, investigators might begin to reach out to other areas about cold cases of a similar ilk.

Investigative task forces might work for years or even decades to identify a serial killer.

They seek to connect separate events over a sustained period of time, as well as to build a psychological profile of the killer.

This helps narrow down the search for the perpetrator.

They then tie together clues left behind to capture the murderer.

Sometimes they’re successful—other times, cases stay cold and mysteries remain unsolved.

History of Serial Killings

When most people refer to the crime sprees of serial killers, they’re thinking of a particularly notorious set of murderers from recent history.

Serial killers have existed throughout all of history, however, in one iteration or another and are not unique to a particular country.

Jack the Ripper, an unknown person (or persons) authorities associate with a series of slayings in Victorian England, is practically synonymous with the term “serial killer.”

Henri Landru (the Bluebeard of Gambais) was a French killer from around the same era.

Source ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[ultravioletqueen]

As a fan of true crime videos, something that really bothers me about Alastor is that he looks NOTHING like a real serial killer despite being canonically one.

It doesn't bother me that there are Aroace characters who are bad people, there are all kinds of bad people, but it bothers me in the case of Alastor because Vivziepop made him that way just because he is narcissistic, as if all Aroace people were like that because of narcissism💀

and something that Vivziepop did not take (or want to take) into account is that the VAST MAJORITY of serial killers are STRAIGHT MEN, I'm not saying that,the facts say it: Ted Bundy, Paul Bernardo, Charles Manson, david berkowitz , Jack the Ripper, the strangler, the dating show killer (I forgot the names of these two but you get my point) and more.

I know there are exceptions (Jeffrey Dahmer and John Gacey) but in most cases serial killers are men who have preferences in victims based on their sexual desire and personal tastes (literally there was a generation of women who dyed their hair to escape by Ted Bundy).

We are supposed to believe that he is only a narcissist, but in that case why would he have friends, why would he have a moral compass that he rigorously follows? The narcissistic side doesn't come in if he has such genuine friendships with Rosie and Mimzy, it's an incongruity the size of a house.

Even if there are abusers who may have close ties these are not genuine or have ulterior motives, but this is not the case with Alastor and makes it a huge nonsense.

Besides, what was there about their murders? What were their victims like? What drove him to kill? Would this have anything to do with his mother?

I like the theories that are related to Alastor's mother since it gives us a glimpse of a possible more human side than what the series can show, I especially like the theory of Alastor with an abusive father because 1) it goes with the profile of murderers who had unstable family lives and 2) it would explain why most of his friends are women, since they must remind him of his mother (the person he loves the most) and that is why he is naturally kind to them.

Connected to the abusive father theory, it would be interesting if Alastor's victims had in common being wife beaters, with his father being his first victim (either getting tired of him or getting revenge on him for killing his mother) and getting rid of his body by eating it. .

But sadly vivziepop only make him a edgelord that wants attention 24/7 , what a shame

[mopmolp]

Serial killers homes

Jeffery Dahmer lived in Apartment 213, 924 North 25th Street, Milwaukee, USA. The apartment was destroyed 15 months after his arrest.

John Wayne Gacy lived at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, Norwood Park, Chicago, USA. The house was torn down in 1979 but was rebuilt.

Dennis Raders (BTK killers) home which was located in Park City, Kansas. The house was bulldozed in 2006.

David Berkowitzs (son of Sam’s ) apartment building at 35 Pine Street, Yonkers

Ed Geins home was located in Plainfield, Wisconsin. A fire destroyed the house in 1958 10 days before it was scheduled to be auctioned.

[liver-f4ilure]

Criminals Still alive PT 1

Including only murderers

(OLD POST REDONE!)

Adnan Colak

(AKA. The Beast of Artvin)

Age: 71 (September 5th, 1952, Türkiye)

Crime: killing 11 people via axe ages 68-95, 6 of which were women whom he raped before killing. The span of his crimes were 1992-1995 in the Turkish district of Artvin.

Convictions/Sentence: 6 death sentences + 40yrs imprisonment however it was commuted to life imprisonment when Türkiye abolished the death penalty in 2004.

Where are they now?: released in 2005 under a conditional release arrangement.

Fact: I really can’t find a single thing on how he killed them but he was named the ‘axe murderer’

Artyom Anoufriev

(AKA. Academy Maniacs)

Age: 29 (October 4th 1992, Irkutsk, Russia)

Crime: Artyom and the other member of the academy maniacs, Nikita Lytkin, killed 6 people via hammer, mallet, baseball bat or knife. Artyom said he administered the first blows while Nikita mocked the victims. The two would hit the victim 15-20 times before they passed. In total they had 15 victims with 9 of them surviving.

Conviction/sentence: 6 counts murder, robbery, abuse of victims bodies and organizing extremist activities. Artyom was sentenced to life imprisonment while Nikita was sentenced to 24 years which was then reduced to 20years. However on December 1st 2021 he was found dead via su!cide. He had 9 more years left in his sentence.

Where are they now?: still incarcerated

Fact: the case was the first one involving violent extremism in the Irkutsk Oblast that was solved using forensic science.

Beverly Allitt

(AKA. Angel of Death)

Age: 55 (October 4th 1968, Grantham, England)

Crime: killing 4 children via injecting large doses of insulin and attempted to kill 9 other children during her time as a nurse (aka angel of death)

Conviction/Sentance: 4 counts murder, 5 counts attempted murder. Sentenced to 13 consecutive life sentences.

Where are they now?: still incarcerated

Fact:During early childhood and adolescence she would do ‘attention-seeking’ behaviours including going to multiple doctors and getting her prefectly healthy appendix removed. her motive for her crimes was FDIA ( factitious disorder imposed by another) aka Münchhausen by proxy.

Catherine Brinie

(AKA.The Moorhouse Murders)

Age: 73 (May 23rd 1951, Australia?)

Crime: murdering and abducting 4 women (attempting to kill 1) all ranging in ages from 15-31 with her husband, David Birnie (1951-2005) almost all their victims were rapd. The couple gained the name ‘the moorhouse murders’ since they committed the crimes in their house at 3 Moorhouse Street.

Conviction/Sentence: She was sentenced to 4 terms life imprisonment with possibility of parole after 20 years. Her husband pleaded guilty to 4 counts murder, 5 counts abduction and 4 counts rape.

Where are they now?: still incarcerated

Fact: the couple only had 1 survivor, Kate Moir who was 17 at the time of her escape and wasn’t believed by police when she made the report.

Charles Cullen

(AKA. The Angel of death)

Age: 64 (February 22nd 1960, West Orange, New Jersey USA)

Crime: Cullen, a nurse, killed 29 with a suspected 400 more people by injecting lethal doses of insulin and Digoxin. His crimes lasted from 1988-2003 and through several medical centres in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Conviction/sentence: convicted of 29 counts murder and sentenced to 18 consecutive life sentences and will be eligible for parole June 10th 2403.

Where are they now?: still incarcerated

Fact: in 2006 during a sentencing hearing in a Pennsylvanian courtroom Cullen, for 30 minutes kept repeating”Your Honour, you need to step down” until Judge William H. platt had him gagged with cloth and duct tape. Yet through the cloth he still kept repeating his words.

David Berkowitz

(AKA. Son of Sam)

Age: 71 (June 1st 1953, Brooklyn New York USA)

Crime: killing 6 people (mainly couples) via .44 calibre gun, leaving 11 wounded and 2 via stabbing in ‘75. He also reported being apart of multiple unsolved arsons

Convictions/Sentance: 6 counts murder in the second degree, 7 counts attempted second degree murder. Sentenced to life imprisonment with possibility of parole after 25yrs

Where are they now?: Still incarcerated

Fact: Stacy Moskowitz was the only blonde victim of Berkowitz and didn’t survive. At the police station Stacy’s mother reported a detective called her ‘ms. Berkowitz’ instead of Moskowitz. He gained his name because of his motive saying his neighbours dog ‘Sam’ was the devil and told him to do it which he later claimed was fake. He also was apart of a satanic cult named ‘The sons of Sam’ but not any members have been found. He is the reason for a set of laws called ‘The son of Sam laws’ which prohibit criminals from profiting off media.

(I COULD DO A WHOLE INFO POST ON THIS CASE ITS SO INTERESTING!)

Dennis Rader

(AKA. BTK Killer)

Age: 79 (March 9th 1945, Pittsburg, Kansas USA)

Crime: killed 10-12+ victims all ranging in age (9-62) by suffocation or strangulation. First he would break into his victims houses (usually families) tie them up, torture them then kill them. He sometimes masturbated over his female victims.

Convictions/Sentance: 10 counts murder in the first degree (suspected more victims). Sentance to life imprisonment with possibility of parole after 175yrs.

Where are they now?: still incarcerated

Fact: Rader got so caught up in sending letters to taunt police that he sent a floppy disc which was traced back to him, leading to his arrest

Gary Ridgway

(AKA.the green river killer)

Age: 75 (Febuary 18th 1949 Salt Lake City Utah USA)

Crime: Ridgeway killed 49 woman minority of them prostitutes or underage runaways and would pick them up off the highway and strangle them to death via his own hands then would dump their bodies in the green river(coining the name ‘Green river killer’ or other forested areas and often returned to the scene to commit acts of necrophilia. His victims were found in both Washington and Oregon. His crimes spanned from 1982 to 1988 but it’s possible he was still attacking people up to 2001 when he was finally apprehended the same year.

Convictions/sentence: 49 counts aggravated first degree murder, 48 counts tampering with evidence and solicitation. Ridgeway was sentenced to 49 life sentences without possibility of parole.

Where are they now?: still incarcerated

Fact: Ridgeway would wet the bed up until he was 13. At 16 he led a 6yr old boy into the woods and stabbed him through the ribs into the liver, he thankfully survived.

Part 2 coming soon…

—

I DO NOT CONDONE!

-Vivi

[lovelyheart502]

His parole hearings will be held in this mooooonth

[terresdebrume]

"I want to try something," David says one Friday evening, after they've gone to bed.

Joe sighs, rolling his eyes in as long suffering a way as he can manage and plopping the latest adventure of Dick Tracy on his bedside table.

"I told you before, I'm not going fucking diving, if you wanna—"

"Not that," David cuts off impatiently no doubt remembering the way Joe called the entire practice a nutjob's hobby.

"Well I ain't going horse riding either," Joe says, irked by the interruption.

"What? Oh, you—just because I said I don't mind horses one time—"

"Please, like I didn't see you make puppy eyes at that pony."

They'd found it right there, on their street, munching on the flowers on Mr. Berkowitz' windowsill and causing quite the fucking ruckus. Half the neighborhood was gawking, wondering how the fuck it had come there and how to make it leave, when it had somehow come out that David's sister had used.to.ride horses and he'd accompany her sometimes. Promoted to the rank of local expert, David was then tasked with catching the pony—took about five seconds and a bit of quiet muttering—and hold it until the proper authorities could be summoned.

It was painfully easy to see David had grown fond of the beast in record time (faster than he'd grown fond of Joe back at the beginning, at any rate) and that he was sad to see it go. Also, if Joe had had any doubt on the subject, the mulish expression that appears on David's face would have tipped him off. Nothing makes him stubborn like Joe being right about a thing he doesn't want to admit to.

But hey, they must have both matured a bit since the war: Joe doesn't keep pushing (yet) and David ignores the jab in favor of pouting:

"I meant in the bedroom."

"Jesus Christ," Joe says, because that's who he usually blames when David gets some kind of harebrained idea in his head.

David rolls his eyes at that, and Joe would scold him except, well. David may have a penchant for making sex more complicated than it really needs to be—Joe had never thought fucking could require accessories before he started having his way with David on the regular—but there was one particular episode involving a blindfold and Joe's mouth on David's ass that would be hard.to describe as anything short of a resounding success. Joe likes simple dick-in-hole stuff if left in charge, but sometimes hearing David out pays off.

"Fine," Joe says eventually, "let's hear it. With any luck it'll get it out of your system."

"If you're going to make fun of me then—"

"Jesus, sweetheart, don't be such a wilted flower and spit it out."

"I want to play a game," David sighs after a moment, audibly frustrated. "A game of trust."

Joe stiffens immediately, and not in the fun way. What the fuck is a game.of trust anyway? Is this a fucking test? Is there a correct answer he's supposed to give if he wants to keep this thing he and David have been working on for over five years stable? Is that what it is about? Because if so—

"I mean," David continues, clearly having sensed Joe's sudden step back, "I want—I want to have the initiative, this week."

The whole week? Granted, Joe's off work, but still. And besides:

"The fuck you mean, you want the initiative?"

"I mean," David says, clearly clinging to that overly factual composure he uses as a defense sometimes, "I want to be the one to start things, between us. And I want to be sure you won't."

"Webster," Joe warns, if you think I'm gonna let you—Fuck, I don't even know, you asking if you can tie me to the bed or what?"

"No," David says immediately.

He doesn't sound like he's lying, but he's also turning deeply pink in a way that makes Joe wonder if he should consider using the bedsheets in unprecedented ways. It's an idle thought, but it makes him feel immediately and needlessly embarrassed, so he groans:

"Then fucking what?"

"I just—I don't want to tie you up!" David repeats. "Just. If I start something, you could just. Keep your hands to yourself."

"And what, just lie there and think of England?" Joe provoques, and David finally leans away from him under the light sheet they use in summer.

"No! Jesus, Joe you make it sound so—I just want to be allowed to tease you a bit alright?"

Joe scowls at him.

"So like. Tying me up with a promise instead of strings."

David let's out an exasperated sigh but nods anyway. Joe should probably say no. It's stupid and unnecessary, and it's not like David minds when Joe's the one in charge, quite the contrary. In fact, Joe's starting to think if anyone's ever going to get tied to their bed it's likely to be David. But then there's. Mmh.

See, the thing about the blindfold was: Joe may have complained about how ridiculous it was right down to the last minute, but the way David reacted to it was—well. Resounding success. But even before that, there'd been something intriguing. A current of curiosity Joe would rather chew his own tongue than admit to, but which had run shivers down his spine anyway.

Right now, there's a tingle behind Joe's ribs, and so he only Rob's David for a few minutes more before he pretends to feel very magnanimous and ask:

"So that's it? No other rules, just... No touching you?"

David hums and tilts his head, and Joe's suspicions are confirmed: this is a game of control. And David played Joe like a fucking fiddle by calling it a game of trust. Fucking hell. Well, two can play that game, and it may not be this week but someone's definitely gonna get fucked until they beg for mercy in the future.

"Yeah," David says. "And, you know."

Yeah. There was an incident early on when Joe hadn't quite realized David had been serious when he'd laughingly told him to stop touching him after he came. David isn't shy, and a solid push of his thigh against Joe's head was enough to get him to actually stop, but it seriously soured both their moods for a couple days. Since then, they've learned to be a little more careful when they play those games where one of them might say stop without really meaning it.

And, well. David's games are often irritating and tend to bring Joe pricklier attributes back to the surface, especially at the beginning, and Joe knows himself enough to realize he might not be able to stop his mouth from running away from him. It's good they've always been good at hearing each other past the mouth noises.

Armed with this knowledge, the tingle on Joe's spine shivers south, and Joe hears himself ask:

"When do you wanna start?"

David, beaming rolls them in bed until he can pepper kisses all over Joe's face, and by the end of the ensuing solid—normal, classic—bout of lovemaking that follows, he's all but forgotten his question.

ETA: More from this first draft in reblogs.

ETA 2: Currently publishing a cleaned up and fleshed out version of this over on terresdebrume @ AO3 for those who would like more of that kind of porn :P

[mariacallous]

Nearly every day someone or other on my social media feeds will share the same quote by Hannah Arendt. It reads:

This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.  

It’s a damning quote about autocracies by the late German-Jewish political theorist, whose book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” has also found a new audience in a political climate where lies and misinformation are flowing down from high office, where Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on a common set of facts, and where Mark Zuckerberg said his company will no longer moderate hate speech and misinformation on Facebook and its other platforms.

The only problem? Arendt never said it — or at least not exactly. As the Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz pointed out over the summer, Arendt said and wrote “many similar things,” but the viral quote seems to have been patched together from various other statements she made in a long and prolific career. 

Berkowitz isn’t the only one to note the irony that a philosopher who considered truth “the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us” is represented by someone else’s version of what she did or didn’t say. But distortion may be the inevitable consequence of celebrity: Interest in Arendt, who died in 1975 at the age of 69, is riding a wave that hasn’t crested. 

A new book, “What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt,” gathers and translates all of Arendt’s poems for the first time in English. A new, critical edition of her unfinished final book, “The Life of the Mind,” came out last year to glowing reviews. A recent study by UCLA scholar David Kim, “Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World,” explores her notions of intergroup cooperation in the fight against bigotry — and her blind spots in applying the notion of solidarity to African-Americans and other oppressed groups. 

The Israeli media have discovered — or re-re-discovered — her thoughts on war and responsibility in the 15 months since Oct. 7. Vera Weidenbach, in Haaretz, invoked Arendt in criticizing the failure of the progressive left to condemn Hamas, in calling Benjamin Netanyahu a “wannabe dictator,” and in decrying “the deterioration of moral standards” among the Israeli public. 

Another Haaretz columnist, Robert Zaretsky, wrote that Arendt would have found Israel’s initial response to the Hamas massacre “utterly justifiable” — and would also have supported the International Criminal Court’s decision to prosecute Hamas and Israel for war crimes. 

Conservative pundit Bret Stephens embraces her anti-totalitarian writings; a contributor to Sapir, the journal he edits, quotes her in rebuking “post-colonialists” who justified the Oct. 7 attacks.

Of course, Arendt isn���t around to defend or deny these appropriations. And because she wrote so much and in language that was painstakingly nuanced, she’s ripe for cherry-picking. Her ideas are invoked in conversations about a host of contemporary ills: authoritarianism, racial- and gender-based violence, climate change, and right-wing populism, to name a few.

“People like to appeal to her because her name brings a sense of authority and weight into a conversation. You know, some people joke about ‘St. Hannah.’ She can’t do anything wrong,” said Samantha Rose Hill, author of a 2021 biography of Arendt and editor of the new collection of her poems. “She was very anti-ideological. And so there’s a question for readers about how seriously they take her position on certain topics, and to what extent she’s just trying to get us to think about the different sides of the political argument.” 

Arendt was born in 1906 in what is now Hanover, Germany, to secular, middle-class Jewish parents. Having read all of Kant’s works by the age of 14, she received her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg when she was 22. 

In 1933, she spent eight days as a prisoner of the Gestapo, jailed for the research into antisemitism she had done for the World Zionist Organization. Released, she fled to France, where she worked for Youth Aliyah, helping Jews immigrate to Palestine. She was eventually able to escape through Spain and Lisbon to New York, where she arrived as a stateless refugee in 1941.

At Columbia University, the eminent Jewish historian Salo Baron helped Arendt get published in English and land a teaching post in modern Jewish history at Brooklyn College (she later taught at Princeton, The New School and the University of Chicago). Baron also hired Arendt as head of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, an organization charged with rescuing heirless Jewish books and artifacts stolen by the Nazis.  

“The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951, established her reputation and her place as one of the “New York Intellectuals,” a largely Jewish tribe of left-leaning, anti-Stalinist writers. 

Their political disputes were fierce and legendary, and many in the crowd turned to the right with the rise of the radical left and its disdain for Israel. Arendt, fiercely independent, was hard to pin down ideologically, but she drew across-the-board ire in 1963 when her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a mastermind of the Holocaust, appeared in The New Yorker. Critics charged that the now famous phrase she used to describe the Nazis’ genocidal enterprise, “the banality of evil,” minimized Eichmann’s crimes. Worse, they said, she had shown remarkably little empathy for the Jews forced into collaborating with their tormentors. 

Arendt’s reputation took another, posthumous, hit in 1982 when a biographer wrote about her youthful love affair and lasting friendship with the famed German philosopher and later Nazi Party member Martin Heidegger. 

Her defenders, however, remained fiercely loyal to her work and her legacy. They included Jerome Kohn, who died in November at the age of 93. Much that was written and said about her was “preposterous,” wrote Kohn, her executor, former research assistant and the founder of the Hannah Arendt Center at The New School in Manhattan. He was particularly adamant about accusations that she was a “self-hating Jew.” 

In a collection he edited of Arendt’s Jewish writings, Kohn insisted that her experience as a Jew — as a target of antisemitism in her youth, as a German Jew left stateless, as a supporter of a Jewish nation in Palestine, (albeit a binational state of Jews and Arabs) — “is literally the foundation of her thought: it supports her thinking even when she is not thinking about Jews or Jewish questions.”

In his book about Arendt’s notion of “solidarity,” Kim, a professor in the department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, says Arendt’s perception of how the world failed the Jews shaped her thinking on liberation for other oppressed peoples — and not always for the better. While she considered herself what today we might call an “antiracist,” by the late 1960s she was wary of the Black Power movement and rejected the idea of assigning collective guilt to white people for the evils of slavery, Jim Crow and lingering racism. Her resistance to the militant wing of the civil rights movement, writes Kim, “tells the story of Arendt’s imperfect love for the world.”

And yet in death Arendt seems to have gotten the last word: Beginning with the rise of Donald Trump and the resurgence of real and would-be autocrats from Venezuela to Hungary to Russia, her works are back in fashion. Even her poems — published together for the first time in the new collection — reflect preoccupations that seem of the moment: alienation, loneliness, the feeling of being a refugee, the terror of living under totalitarianism and a way of thinking free of ideological orthodoxies.

And yet Hill, the editor of the poetry collection, cautions against relying on Arendt as a sort of intellectual guru. At a conference in November, she even suggested “it’s time to put her back on the shelf.” 

“We live in a radically different time today, and I think that requires a new form of analysis,” Hill, a professor at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, told me. “I think that to try to divine what is happening right now through her work is a sort of misdirection, and it can lead to a kind of looking away from reality, which is the very thing that she cautioned us against.”