By Ruixiang (Claire) Hu (class of 2027), Felipe Silvestri (class of 2026), and Philip Yanakiev (class of 2027)

On January 24, 2025 on the Duke University campus, the “Diaspora, Exile and Interreligious Dialogue” Bass Connections project at Duke University teamed up with the DKU Humanities Research Center “Para-politics of Empathy” project for a joint seminar. The seminar was led by Professor Kolleen Guy and Professor Jay Winter and the Bass Connections interdisciplinary project team-lead Professor Malachi Hacohen, Professor of History and Religion, and Director of the Religions and Public Life Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

The seminar explored the limits and possibilities of empathetic action as a form of para-politics by looking at case studies of stateless refugees in Asia and the Pacific during the period of the Second World War. The case studies emerged from a project initiated in 2022 and funded by the HRC that engaged faculty, student-researchers, and eventually led to Signature Work projects. This collaborative work culminated in a book entitledStatelessness after Arendt: European Refugees in China and the Pacific during the Second World War, which focuses on the stateless using Arendt’s ideas and applying them to the Asia and the Pacific. Nine DKU students participated in the project as research assistants. Their research shows that stateless people weren’t powerless—they often created their own ways of living and organizing, even without official recognition. In Asia, the project shows that being stateless was not a uniform experience, but a variety of possibilities reflecting the political structure of the states and cities in which refugees found shelter. The book, scheduled for publication in May 2025, highlights how these individuals found ways to shape their own futures.

The joint Duke and DKU seminar at Duke extended key arguments from the book to examine how different actors — “agents of empathy”— assisted the stateless in reclaiming their rights. Through grass-roots initiatives from below, these actors used empathy to bring those politically exiled, who have been pushed to the margins of society, back into the political realm. Professor Guy and Winter argued that empathy is key to understanding their actions. Drawing on ideas from cultural theorist Raymond Williams, they argue that empathy can combine emotion and thought to drive meaningful change. Two key concepts emerged in the seminar: the realm of parapolitics, a term usedby Professor Winter that describes political actions by the stateless in order to gain back their rights; and Professor Guy’s agents of empathy, outsiders who acted as catalysts of parapolitical life by mobilizing refugees’ efforts to regain the pathway back to the political. These were not just individuals who constructed parapolitics, but those who aided the stateless; those who mixed thought and action in an effort to highlight and transcend the tragedy of the stateless.

With the 8:30 a.m. sun casting a glow over Duke’s stunning Gothic architecture, Professor Winter began with an excerpt of Hannah Arendt’s poem on exile. Addressing an audience of Duke professors, graduate students, and undergraduates from both Duke and DKU, he pointed out the stanza’s inherent oxymoron: how can one long for a state that has rejected them? This is the paradox that faced Hannah Arendt, who wrote seminal worksOn Totalitarianism, On Revolution, and Eichmann In Jerusalem. As an Aristotelian, she presents a bifurcated worldview; the rise of the totalitarian state did not come suddenly, it was a process that had been gathering momentum for a long time and culminated in the interwar period. Arendt sees their despair as pariahs, where their exclusion from the political realm is the gravest consequence and compassion and empathy are useless emotions. The thesis Winter advanced is that Arendt’s rejection of emotion in political action, especially in light of the plight of refugees and the failure of the interwar nation-state system, is a flawed reflection of her own despair at being a pariah in a world of nation states that had no place for her and for millions like her.

Professor Winter, drawing on Arendt’s work on statehood and totalitarianism, describes how there is no arguing against her logic until the conclusion.She leaves us with only silence when she describes the plight of the stateless.  She was unable to draw on the political sophistication of the stateless and their tendency to come together in social and religious groups to perform their statelessness.  Arendt was completely “deaf to religious life”, and the core religious concept of paradox was unacceptable for her. Professor Winter explained the clear push towards the secular in Arendt’s work; noting she renounced everything specifically Jewish and European and became overly American in the process, with no record of ever having gone to a synagogue or other religious activity at any point in the US. Arendt was in the dual position of both philosopher and stateless. Approaching the stateless, she was both an insider and an outsider, and left out the rich social and cultural world she herself knew at the time. And in particular, for her, emotion played no role in achieving any political program. What Guy and Winter term ‘parapolitics’ was outside of her political thought. 

Professor Kolleen Guy then presented Laura Margolis’ case study, as an agent of empathy. Her story illustrates what[how] Parapolitics looks like, not as merely political action, but also as emotional commitment. She argues that it is precisely emotion that makes these agents effective, a rejection of Arendtian conception of the dangers of empathy. Laura Margolis was a transnational agent of empathy. She toiled tirelessly all over the world, helping the stateless in Shanghai between 1941 and 1943. The case study focused on her work in Shanghai with Jewish refugees arriving in the treaty port. Angered at the situation of those who had lost their statehood, Laura Margolis channeled this into effective action and thus became a force against bureaucratic restrictions facing the refugees. In Shanghai, she was responsible forfeeding about 20,000 Jewish refugees. To ensure the soup kitchens under her supervision remained open, she employed “cocktail dress diplomacy” while combining pragmatic commitment and emotional engagement. Her case shows how empathy informs political action; how one can be empathetic and drive social change; how one can offer refugees a pathway out of their isolation and indignity. 

Professor Winter concluded the meeting with the story of the Mir Yeshiva. Originally a Lithuanian yeshiva in Byelorussia, it was the most esteemed place for studying the Torah in Europe. With the Soviet advance, its members fled to Lithuania in 1940. Caught between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the yeshiva turned to Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinksy, an esteemed religious figure, for a reading of the Torah and Talmud to guide them through these troubling times. He found no clear answer in these texts, and concluded that it was best to wait the war out in Lithuania. The students at the yeshiva, however, believed that survival trumped everything else and started making arrangements to flee to the Far East. A key figure in the process was the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara. He provided all 350 students with transit visas, and with them. They had little food and freedom of movement, especially at the start of their sojourn. They lived in a synagogue built by the crooked businessman Silas Aaron Hardoon that no other Jewish resident or refugee in Shanghai would touch. At last, in 1947, all Jewish refugees were expelled from Shanghai by the Nationalist government and the students of the yeshiva re-settled in Israel and the US. Their deep-rooted spiritual life was such that none was willing to recount their escape to the East, as it contravened the teachings of their holy leader. The Mir Yeshiva’s example thus offers an alternative perspective on parapolitics: it is not confined solely to those within the political sphere who can reintegrate outsiders, but it can also empower those on the margins in reclaiming their full political identity.

After Professor Guy and Professor Winter presented the two case studies, the floor was open. A lively discussion ensued. Professor Malachi Cohen and graduate student Avital Schkolnik observed that Arendt herself maintained a complex relationship with faith, particularly Judaism, and noted significant internal debate within the Jewish community at that time. Postdoctoral Associate Reut Israela Ben-Yaakov also added to the discussion, bringing forwardthe Frankfurt School’s view on religion, especially Walter Benjamin and Horkheimer’s conceptions of religion. Former DKU student Muhammad Usama (Class of 2023), now pursuing a doctoral degree in History at Duke University, also participated in the dialogue.

We would like to extend our warm thanks to the Diaspora, Exile and Interreligious Dialogue Bass Connections project at Duke University for hosting the joint seminar. We would also like to thank the Humanities Research Center at DKU for their continuous support for scholarly research.