Corey Robin's Blog, page 13

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Polio in Gaza: A Jewish Fable

You probably have to be Jewish to appreciate the full and bitter irony of this sentence:

Nearly 11 months into a devastating war, a serious new challenge has emerged in Gaza: polio.

Growing up, there were two uncontested heroes in the Jewish-American pantheon: Sandy Koufax and Jonas Salk. If you were really in the know, you’d add a third: Albert Sabin.

Salk invented the polio vaccine, Sabin invented the oral polio vaccine.

Now Israel has contributed an entirely new entry to the history of polio.

It almost reads like a fable from Jewish literature. Except it’s not.

Syllabus for Politics Through Literature class

In two weeks, I start teaching. My class this fall is Politics Through Literature, which I’ve taught before but have made some big changes to. There are still seats available in the class. If you’re a student at Brooklyn College or any of the colleges in the CUNY system, or if you’re a student in the New York area (the class meets in person), you should sign up for the class. We meet on Monday and Wednesday mornings, from 9:30 to 10:45.

The course readings are below; the syllabus is here.

I’ve decided to open the semester with a set of readings on sex and sickness—Amia Srinivasan’s essay on teaching pornography and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor—and how our most personal experiences of the body are constructed through art, broadly defined.

We then move to a set of programmatic readings on politics and literature: one from Arendt, one from Sartre, and another from Thomas De Quincey. What distinguishes a political from a literary experience? What do the two activities have in common? How are the literary artist and the political actor engaged in a single enterprise? How not?

From there, we engage a series of ancient and modern literary texts about politics, the city, and the family—Aeschylus, Brecht, and Babel—refracted through one critical essay by Virginia Woolf and another by Walter Benjamin.

The last part of the course takes up the question of love and beauty. Helped along by readings from Plato, Nietzsche, Barbara Fields, Mary Wollstonecraft, and, again, Srinivasan, we conclude the course with Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Though I’ve taught the course before, as I said, I think this semester may be the most exciting and interesting set of readings we’ve done. If you’re a student in the New York area and need help in signing up for the class, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at crobin@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

Course readings

Part I: Sex and Sickness

Week 1

8.28

Intro to class. No reading.

Week 2 (39 pages)

9.2

Labor Day. No class.

9.4

Amia Srinivasan, “Talking to My Students About Porn,” The Right to Sex (New York: Picador, 2021), pp. 33-71 [CR]

Week 3 (85 pages)

9.9

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Anchor, 1978), pp. 3-42 [CR]

9.11

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Anchor, 1978), pp. 43-87 [CR]Part II: Politics and Literature

Week 4 (55 pages)

9.16

Hannah Arendt, “Freedom and Politics, a Lecture,” Thinking Without a Banister, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2018), pp. 220-244 [CR]

9.18

Thomas De Quincey, “The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power, pp. 1-8 [CR]Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why Write?” “What is Literature?” and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 48-69 [CR]Part II: Ancients and Moderns

Week 5 (74 pages)

9.23

Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 99-172

9.25

            No additional reading

Week 6 (54 pages)

9.30

Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 173-226

10.2

            Erev Rosh Hashanah. No class.

Week 7 (51 pages)

10.7

Aeschylus, The Eumenides, in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 227-277

10.9

            No additional reading.

Week 8 (48 pages)

10.14

Columbus Day. No class. Monday classes will meet on Tuesday.

10.15

In-class midterm. No reading.

10.16

Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), pp. 3-24 [CR]Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in The Storyteller Essays, trans. Tess Lewis (New York: New York Review of Books, 2019), pp. 48-73 [CR]

Week 9 (93 pages)       

10.21

Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1951), pp. 19-111

10.23

No additional reading.

Week 10 (tk pages)

10.28

Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories, trans. Boris Drayluk (London: Pushkin Press, 2016), TBA [CR]

10.30

Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, trans. Boris Drayluk (London: Pushkin Press, 2014), TBA [CR]Part IV: Beauty, Love, Desire

Week 11 (32 pages)

11.4

Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), pp. 9-12, 25-31 [CR]

11.6

Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), pp. 40-60 [CR]

Week 12 (47 pages)

11.11

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 25-43 [CR]

11.13

Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” in Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2012), pp. 111-148 [CR]

Week 13 (24 pages)

11.18

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Feminist Papers, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1973), pp. 40-51 [CR]

11.20

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Feminist Papers, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1973), pp. 64-71, 79-82 [CR]

Week 14 (50 pages)

11.25

Amia Srinivasan, “The Right to Sex” and “Coda: The Politics of Desire” in The Right to Sex (New York: Picador, 2021), pp. 73-122 [CR]

11.27

            No class.

Week 15 (90 pages)

12.2

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 3-58

12.4

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 61-93

Week 16 (110 pages)

12.9

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 97-163

12.11

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 164-206

Syllabus for Politics Through Literature class

In two weeks, I start teaching. My class this fall is Politics Through Literature, which I’ve taught before but have made some big changes to. There are still seats available in the class. If you’re a student at Brooklyn College or any of the colleges in the CUNY system, or if you’re a student in the New York area (the class meets in person), you should sign up for the class. We meet on Monday and Wednesday mornings, from 9:30 to 10:45.

The course readings are below; the syllabus is here.

I’ve decided to open the semester with a set of readings on sex and sickness—Amia Srinivasan’s essay on teaching pornography and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor—and how our most personal experiences of the body are constructed through art, broadly defined.

We then move to a set of programmatic readings on politics and literature: one from Arendt, one from Sartre, and another from Thomas De Quincey. What distinguishes a political from a literary experience? What do the two activities have in common? How are the literary artist and the political actor engaged in a single enterprise? How not?

From there, we engage a series of ancient and modern literary texts about politics, the city, and the family—Aeschylus, Brecht, and Babel—refracted through one critical essay by Virginia Woolf and another by Walter Benjamin.

The last part of the course takes up the question of love and beauty. Helped along by readings from Plato, Nietzsche, Barbara Fields, Mary Wollstonecraft, and, again, Srinivasan, we conclude the course with Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Though I’ve taught the course before, as I said, I think this semester may be the most exciting and interesting set of readings we’ve done. If you’re a student in the New York area and need help in signing up for the class, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at crobin@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

Course readings

Part I: Sex and Sickness

Week 1

8.28

Intro to class. No reading.

Week 2 (39 pages)

9.2

Labor Day. No class.

9.4

Amia Srinivasan, “Talking to My Students About Porn,” The Right to Sex (New York: Picador, 2021), pp. 33-71 [CR]

Week 3 (85 pages)

9.9

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Anchor, 1978), pp. 3-42 [CR]

9.11

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Anchor, 1978), pp. 43-87 [CR]

Part II: Politics and Literature

Week 4 (55 pages)

9.16

Hannah Arendt, “Freedom and Politics, a Lecture,” Thinking Without a Banister, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2018), pp. 220-244 [CR]

9.18

Thomas De Quincey, “The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power, pp. 1-8 [CR]Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why Write?” “What is Literature?” and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 48-69 [CR]

Part II: Ancients and Moderns

Week 5 (74 pages)

9.23

Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 99-172

9.25

            No additional reading

Week 6 (54 pages)

9.30

Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 173-226

10.2

            Erev Rosh Hashanah. No class.

Week 7 (51 pages)

10.7

Aeschylus, The Eumenides, in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 227-277

10.9

            No additional reading.

Week 8 (48 pages)

10.14

Columbus Day. No class. Monday classes will meet on Tuesday.

10.15

In-class midterm. No reading.

10.16

Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), pp. 3-24 [CR]Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in The Storyteller Essays, trans. Tess Lewis (New York: New York Review of Books, 2019), pp. 48-73 [CR]

Week 9 (93 pages)       

10.21

Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1951), pp. 19-111

10.23

No additional reading.

Week 10 (tk pages)

10.28

Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories, trans. Boris Drayluk (London: Pushkin Press, 2016), TBA [CR]

10.30

Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, trans. Boris Drayluk (London: Pushkin Press, 2014), TBA [CR]

Part IV: Beauty, Love, Desire

Week 11 (32 pages)

11.4

Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), pp. 9-12, 25-31 [CR]

11.6

Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), pp. 40-60 [CR]

Week 12 (47 pages)

11.11

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 25-43 [CR]

11.13

Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” in Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2012), pp. 111-148 [CR]

Week 13 (24 pages)

11.18

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Feminist Papers, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1973), pp. 40-51 [CR]

11.20

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Feminist Papers, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1973), pp. 64-71, 79-82 [CR]

Week 14 (50 pages)

11.25

Amia Srinivasan, “The Right to Sex” and “Coda: The Politics of Desire” in The Right to Sex (New York: Picador, 2021), pp. 73-122 [CR]

11.27

            No class.

Week 15 (90 pages)

12.2

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 3-58

12.4

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 61-93

Week 16 (110 pages)

12.9

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 97-163

12.11

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 164-206

How not to write about the Holocaust

As anyone who knows me or reads my work knows, I have an infinite amount of interest in writing about the Holocaust, in whatever genre: history, fiction, essay, travelogue, diary, memoir, poetry, whatever.

I also have an infinite appetite for voices in writing about the Holocaust: sardonic, ironic, bemused, impatient, poignant, heroic, anti-heroic, sociological, callow, creepy, fantastical, comedic, whatever.

But the article in the September issue of Harper’s, “My Auschwitz Vacation,” by the writer Tanya Gold, tested my patience.

It’s unbearably familiar and hackneyed. How many articles can we read on the silliness and stupidity of a tourist’s response to an extermination camp? Teenagers go to Auschwitz and take selfies. Justin Bieber visits the Anne Frank House and writes in the guestbook that Frank would have been a “belieber.” There’s no business like Shoah business. We get it!

While we’re on the topic, why should a tourist’s response to Auschwitz be any more elevated or sophisticated than their response to Chartres or the Louvre? Or the Smithsonian or the Golden Gate Bridge? I’ll confess, I’m never certain how to respond to any tourist site, whether it is a site of exaltation or hell on earth. Not knowing how to respond myself, I’m unclear how to judge the response of others. Does Gold know? I’m not quite sure. She leaves no room for any response to Poland other than her own, which is conveniently not a response to Poland at all but to other people’s responses to Poland. Smug and small, that’s how the article reads.

At points, it’s presumptuous, substituting the author’s own speculations about what people are thinking for evidence of what they are thinking. It’s filled with comments from taxi drivers and tour guides, who provide about as much insight into man’s inhumanity to man as anyone who’s read a Thomas Friedman column on, well, anything, would expect.

And it’s sentimental, closing with the following observation from one of Gold’s interview subjects:

Gebert says, “We live in a bubble, from Britain to Warsaw. A rich, protected bubble. We just pretend we don’t realize it.” The real world is not here, he says, and he is right. The real world, he says, is Kyiv and Kabul, Be’eri and Rafah.’

Why are Kyiv and Kabul, Be’eri and Rafah, the real world? Why is suffering the only thing in the world that’s real? (Not to mention that there’s suffering in Britain and Warsaw and all sorts of places that are not the sites of war crimes and mass murder.) And how is this little shopping list of international inhumanity, with all its nods to the world’s currently approved hot spots of concern, any less superficial than the observations on Auschwitz and Kraków that Gold cites and sniffs at?

The article is one long pastiche of Holocaust writing over the last sixty years, which nowise warrants the author’s assumption of superiority over the subject.

Breaking up is hard to do. Unless you’re Karl Marx.

It’s probably been done before, though I don’t know of the book if it has, but one could write a terrific book on Marx and his breakups.

The model here would be Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives. Instead of a book about five Victorian marriages, however, and the mix of intellectual, personal, and political sparks they emitted, this would be a book about Marx’s intellectual and political divorces. And how each was a critical turning point in his thought and life.

The criterion for inclusion would be that Marx had a personal relationship with these individuals. No chapters on Hegel or Smith or Aristotle. Otherwise it would be too sprawling and insufficiently personal, more of a standard intellectual history rather than the biography of mutual minds that I have in mind.

There would be chapters on Marx and Bauer, Marx and Ruge, Marx and Hess, Marx and Grün, Marx and Feuerbach, Marx and Proudhon, Marx and Bakunin, Marx and Lasalle, and so on. There’d also be a final chapter on Marx’s one enduring love: with Engels.

Where Rose’s book is interested in what marriage brings to and does for a mind, this book would focus on what divorce brings to a mind. Some of the questions it might ask: Why was it so necessary for Marx not only to break with other minds but also to project onto those minds positions that he once held, using those minds as a way of working himself to another position? Why did so many of Marx’s breakups occur in such a concentrated period of time (1843 to 1848), when Marx was in his twenties. Relatedly, why are one’s twenties such a critical moment in intellectual and political formation more generally? And what was so different about Marx’s relationship with Engels that allowed both for the relationship to endure and for Marx to grow inside of it?

Such a book also would allow readers to see that some of the ideas people associate with Marx are in fact the ideas of the partners he ultimately rejected.

Pat Carta, 1945-2024

Pat Carta, an extraordinary organizer with Local 34 and one of the great leaders of the unions at Yale, has died.

I worked closely with Pat between 1993 and 1996. She trained me as an organizer, and though I don’t think she ever realized this, she felt like family to me. In fact, she reminded me a great deal of my family, particularly my mom. She was tough, warm, smart, loving, difficult, charismatic, powerful, relentless, demanding, honest, fearless. I always wished I could tell her what she meant to me, but she wasn’t someone who invited that kind of disclosure. Unless you said it from afar. As I’m doing now.

Though it’s been nearly 30 years now, two things about Pat stand out across the decades.

First, she understood fear like no one I’ve ever met. Every organizer knows about fear—the fear of the boss, the fear of retaliation, the fear of vulnerability. Pat understood something else, something deeper, about fear: the fear we have of our own power, particularly when we’re using it against people who have authority over us or people we respect.

Underneath every one of our fears of someone with power, Pat thought, is our fear of defeating or overcoming that power. Pat understood that because all of us grow up with fear, we learn to live with our fear. We adapt to it, our limbs and organs grow around it, we internalize it, it becomes a part of us. When it comes time to letting go of it, we can be suddenly and surprisingly reluctant to do so. We’ve gotten too attached.

Psychoanalysts and political theorists—Plato and Rousseau come to mind—know all about this kind of thing. Pat did, too. And gave me a classroom experience in overcoming it, the likes of which I never learned from anyone else.

Second, I’ve never met anyone with a stronger sense of working-class consciousness.

A lot of people, particularly in academia and journalism, have a lot of opinions and ideas about working-class people in America. And, of course, like any group of people, there’s a dizzying amount of diversity in the working class. I know it’s hard to believe this, and it’s certainly hard to say it, but Pat seemed to transcend all that. I’ve never seen anyone reach across the differences between people—people sitting right next to her at a table—by a combination of love and confrontation. From that combination, she created class consciousness.

Pat was a white, Italian, Catholic woman, a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a daughter. Above all, she was a member of the working class. She understood and felt its grievances, she hated the humiliation and indignity workers suffered, she knew how smart workers could be, she knew the difference between resentment, on the one hand, and rights and respect, on the other. She felt those things keenly, whether up close or on far. She knew how to talk about them. She knew how to fight for them.

Pat is part of a generation of workers and organizers whose knowledge you’ll never find in a book. In fact, she always used to laugh, in a fun way, at graduate students taking notes in organizing meetings. Everything important, she said, was up here, pointing to her head, and in here, pointing to her heart. You can’t write it down.

Well, Pat, here I am, writing it down.

Our Democracy versus The Democracy

I’ve noticed an interesting if subtle choice of words in Walz’s commentary. He frequently invokes the phrase “the democracy.” This is noticeable for two reasons. First, since the rise of Trump, liberals and progressives of all stripes have resorted to the phrase “our democracy.” I’ve never liked it. It’s cringey and sanctimonious. It has the air of a fetish, as if democracy were a possession, like a precious ring or family heirloom. Democracy is not a possession; it’s a prospect and a process, a condition to be fought for, perpetually. Second, during the early half of the nineteenth century, democracy was frequently called “the democracy.” As if it were a threatening animal, which it was. It was initially the term […]

Our Democracy versus The Democracy

I’ve noticed an interesting if subtle choice of words in Walz’s commentary. He frequently invokes the phrase “the democracy.”

This is noticeable for two reasons.

First, since the rise of Trump, liberals and progressives of all stripes have resorted to the phrase “our democracy.” I’ve never liked it. It’s cringey and sanctimonious. It has the air of a fetish, as if democracy were a possession, like a precious ring or family heirloom. Democracy is not a possession; it’s a prospect and a process, a condition to be fought for, perpetually.

Second, during the early half of the nineteenth century, democracy was frequently called “the democracy.” As if it were a threatening animal, which it was. It was initially the term of choice among the Federalists, who were democracy’s great critics. But then it got taken up by democracy’s advocates, with pride, much as “queer” was a century and a half later.

I have no idea if Tim Walz knows this history or not, though he was a history teacher in high school, so he might. Whether he does or doesn’t, it’s a welcome shift in the discourse. One that I hope others embrace.

Tim Walz, Hannah Arendt, and the Occupation at Wounded Knee

Before Tim Walz became a politician, he was a high school teacher. One of his passions as a teacher was the subject of the Holocaust. Walz wrote his masters’ thesis on “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom.” It argued that the way we teach the Holocaust and genocide in school was mistaken. Walz pushed for an approach that didn’t separate the Holocaust from other genocides and human rights abuses. He also insisted that it was a mistake to focus on the maniacal character of Hitler and the Nazis. Instead he argued for a more integrated, comparative, and historicist approach, incorporating factors such as colonialism, economics, and civil war, and connecting the Holocaust to the […]