Charles Haimoff Lecture in German Studies

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Journalist Andrea Bernstein turns to her intellectual inheritance as a roadmap to politics in 2026

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.

Andrea Bernstein is a Peabody and duPont-Columbia award-winning investigative journalist, and accomplished author, speaker, and Visiting Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. She is also a frequent expert guest on well-known news shows, including Frontline, PBS Newshour, CNN, BBC, and CBC Documentary. Bernstein holds a BA cum laude from Yale University and was a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. She is the New York Times bestselling author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, The Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power (W.W. Norton, 2020) and podcast creator and co-host of Trump, Inc. (WNYC and ProPublica), Will Be Wild (Pineapple Street Studios, Amazon, & Wondery), We Don’t Talk About Leonard (ProPublica and On The Media), and The Law According to Trump (Slate). She covered all five trials of Donald J. Trump and his business for NPR.