Corey Robin's Blog, page 2

Zohran’s Father and Me

I’ve mentioned before that part of what initially put Zohran Mamdani on my radar is that I’m a big reader and long-time fan of the work of his father Mahmood Mamdani. As if I couldn’t love the father anymore, I just read the following story in Chalkbeat. It turns out that Zohran Mamdani’s favorite teacher in high school was Mark Kagan, brother of Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan. Chalkbeat reports: When Mamdani was a student in Kagan’s 10th grade global history course, his father, Mahmood Mamdani, arrived at a parent conference frustrated with his son’s performance. “He was grousing [that] Zohran was getting just a 95,” Kagan recalled. “Like, ‘Why isn’t he working harder? He could be doing better than this.’” […]

The Reactionary Mind of Stephen Miller

I was amused to read today that in the course of railing against protesters in Washington, DC, Stephen Miller made a repeated point of calling them old and white. Not simply because the base of the Republican party is old and white. But also because he so perfectly illustrates a point I made years ago, in The Reactionary Mind, about how the right so often mimics the left: Conservatives often are the left’s best students. Sometimes, their studies are self-conscious and strategic, as they look to the left for ways to bend new vernaculars, or new media, to their suddenly delegitimated aims….At other times, the education of the conservative is unknowing, happening, as it were, behind his back. By resisting […]

Zohran Mamdani, the last liberal

Contemporary scholars, pundits, and politicians often describe Social Security as a social insurance program, which each of us pays into during our working years, that, one day, will protect us and other older people against the ravages of poverty. That description ticks all the boxes of contemporary piety: virtue (you worked for it); prudence (social insurance, setting money aside for a rainy day); fairness (reducing poverty); compassion (for the elderly). But just take a look for a minute at how Social Security was pushed in 1939 by the Roosevelt administration. “A monthly check to you—for the rest of your life.” The phrasing and imagery spill out and over with promises of the good life. That once was the program of […]

The Dreyfus Affair in 2025

My wife and I saw “An Officer and a Spy” last night, which I highly recommend. Because it’s a Roman Polanski film, it’s not being distributed anywhere in the US. Nor is it available on streaming. But you can see it at Film Forum. It’s a superbly made film, about the Dreyfus Affair. Less about Dreyfus himself than about about Georges Picquart, the French officer who played a critical role in getting Dreyfus exonerated. That frame is problematic in all sorts of ways: as David Bell wrote in an excellent piece from a few years ago, when the film came out, the film dramatically underplays the mobilization of the French Jewish community as well as of the Dreyfusards. The entire […]

Land acknowledgments for the Lenni Lenape? Yes! Land acknowledgments for the Palestinians? Antisemitism!

A cantor in Canada recently denounced what Israel is doing in Gaza as genocide. This is what ensued: Many colleagues, friends, and loved ones have gone from praising my recent award as a ‘Rabbinic Human Rights Hero’ for my efforts to mobilize the Jewish community against the death penalty, to vilifying me for what they claim is parroting anti-Semitic canards….I thought I knew of vitriol and recrimination; I was wrong. For years, proponents of the death penalty have lodged heinous verbal attacks against me for my public activism as the co-founder of ‘L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty.’ Even that could not have prepared me, however, for the deluge of hate and ridicule I have received throughout the Jewish world […]

John C. Calhoun in the Knesset

On Friday, Israeli novelist and Israel Prize recipient David Grossman publicly stated that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Yesterday, Oser Kassif, a member of the Knesset, read Grossman’s statement out to the Knesset. He was forcibly removed from the Knesset podium to shouts of “He will not say ‘genocide’ in here!” This reminds me of the period between 1836 and 1844 in Congress, when southern legislators were able to push through the Gag Rule, which prohibited the reading out, printing, or discussion of abolitionist petitions. The Gag Rule effectively ended all mention of abolition in Congress. If Congress didn’t pass it, slaveholder John C. Calhoun warned the Senate, abolition would spread among “the young, and the thoughtless,” and the […]

If you oppose the State of Israel, this post is not for you

If you oppose the state of Israel, this post is not for you. Let me repeat: This post is not for you. Many of my readers here, Jews and non-Jews, are already clear about the wrongness of what Israel is doing in Gaza. A subset of those readers are already clear that the State of Israel—as it was designed and constructed as an ethnocracy, an apartheid state, a Jewish supremacist state, what have you—is a historic injustice. This post is not for you. This post is for other people, Jews and non-Jews, who read my work, people who are less settled in their position on Israel and Palestine, people who identify as Zionist or with parts of the Zionist project, […]

The Right of Return, from Arkansas to Israel

The Forward has been running a series of articles about a group in northern Arkansas that owns adjacent tracts of land that Jews and non-whites are forbidden to purchase or live on. On Thursday, the attorney general of Arkansas said this was legal. The details are complicated—mostly focused on the fact that there’s been no purchase or sale or business transaction yet, so nothing formally violating the law—but the significance of this story for thinking about Israel and Zionism is not. The Arkansas group is called Return to the Land, and it is part of a larger national movement. Focusing on people’s proof of “ancestral heritage,” it seeks, according to its mission statement, to “put land [in the United States] […]

A Marx of Misreading

Marxists, particularly those of an academic or scholastic persuasion, often claim that people misread Marx, especially Capital. Spend fifteen minutes on the internet talking about Marx, and you’ll soon enough get a Marx bro telling you you’ve got it all wrong. He’ll cite chapter and verse to you. Actually, he’ll seldom cite chapter and verse. Usually, he’ll just cite name upon name. “You need to Hegel.” “You need to Althusser.” He won’t show you precisely you’ve got it wrong or where particularly you’re misreading. But he’ll tell you, you’ve got it wrong. Lately I’ve begun to wonder about a political project—no, not just a political project, but a world-building project—that’s tied to a text that almost everybody thinks everybody else […]

Politics in Obama’s Language

He’s been called the best writer to occupy the Oval Office since Ulysses S. Grant. Yet when it comes to Israel’s starving the Palestinians, he sounds like one of those apparatchik academics George Orwell pilloried in “Politics and the English Language.” On the topic of deliberate mass starvation, Primo Levi, in If This Is a Man, his memoir of his time in Auschwitz, wrote, “The lager is hunger: we are hunger, living hunger.” Starvation at Auschwitz—which could easily have been the title of his memoir, and not Survival at Auschwitz, as it was translated into English—was an experience that Levi kept returning to, in all his writing, across his life. These are just a few screenshots of a small selection […]