Corey Robin's Blog, page 3

A Time For Choosing: The Case of Ezra Klein

After the killing of Charlie Kirk—as everyone now knows—Ezra Klein made the following two claims: If the following media reports are correct, one of those two claims cannot be true. Reuters: After the fatal shooting of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, U.S. Republicans have a warning for Americans: Mourn him respectfully or suffer the consequences. At least 15 people have been fired or suspended from their jobs after discussing the killing online…The total includes journalists, academic workers and teachers. On Friday, a junior Nasdaq employee was fired over her posts related to Kirk. Others have been subjected to torrents of online abuse or seen their offices flooded with calls demanding they be fired, part of a surge in right-wing rage that […]

Butler, Berkeley, and Fear

Judith Butler is one of 160 faculty, students, and staff members at UC Berkeley whose name the University of California has turned over to the Trump administration to help with the federal government’s investigation into alleged antisemitism on the Berkeley campus. Let’s slow that statement down so we can understand its components more clearly. Since February, Trump’s Department of Education has been investigating universities, including Berkeley and other UC campuses, for their handling of alleged antisemitism on their campuses. In March, the Justice Department announced a separate but parallel investigation of the UC campuses. In July, a House congressional committee called three university leaders to testify about alleged antisemitism on their campuses. One of the summoned was the chancellor of […]

Let’s not be stupid together

I thought my capacity for shock had been completely lost. But reading this message, which went out this morning to all public employees of the State of Virginia, stunned me: Good morning, State Colleagues: Many of you saw the Proclamation issued by the Governor last night asking Virginians to pause at noon today to reflect and pray for Charlie Kirk’s family, to reject all forms of violence, and for our Commonwealth and Nation to stand together. (You may find the Official Proclamation here.) Just as our Nation joined together after September 11th, so too must we make a similar and lasting commitment to defeat the evils that harm our democracy. Apparently, I learned on social media, even Williams College, in […]

Spinal Tap USA

America, where everything gets dialed up to 11. We can’t just have a country where people, being people, get mad and rowdy every once in a while and shout at or beat each other up. No, we have to live a country where people are constantly murdering other people. We can’t have a country where a few hunters in the countryside own rifles to hunt deer. No, we must allow every manchild, as a matter of constitutional right, to shlep or shoulder an Uzi onto or into every public space and square. We can’t have leaders and spokespersons who quietly and consistently denounce all violence. No, we have to mount elaborate martyrologies that turn every grifter into a saint, every […]

Rosh Hashanah at Brooklyn College

Here are some findings from the last two days of the New York Times. Let’s put these pieces together. New Yorkers stand with Palestine. New Yorkers think that Mamdani has the best position of any of the mayoral candidates on Palestine. Jewish New Yorkers stand with Mamdani. Younger (and educated) New Yorkers overwhelmingly stand with Mamdani. Many of those younger New Yorkers are students, in the process of being educated. Some of those students attend CUNY. This past weekend, Mamdani went to Brooklyn College, where he said that students and staff and faculty at CUNY should not be punished for their activism on behalf of Palestine. Brooklyn College has fired four instructors for their activism on Palestine and is hauling […]

Leni Riefenstahl: The Politics of Narcissism

My wife and I saw the new Leni Riefenstahl documentary this weekend. Compared to the documentary from the early 1990s, “The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl,” the new one falls short. Though stylishly made, it doesn’t break much new ground, and in certain ways, fails to do what the earlier documentary did: Explain why people are so fascinated by Riefenstahl in the first place. The first documentary devotes a good chunk of the film to explaining how pioneering were Riefensthal’s techniques, how innovative her approach to film and propaganda. It’s only by appreciating her filmic achievements that we can wrestle with what a monster she was. The original film quotes her saying something to the effect that people are […]

Genocide, the privilege of civilizations

In shul yesterday, as we headed into the second half of Deuteronomy, we happened on some of those passages that contain one of the invocations of Amalek that Netanyahu made famous after October 7: “Remember what Amalek did to you.” “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek.” These and another passage were mentioned by Netanyahu and a great many other right-wing Zionists to justify and explain the slaughter of Palestinians that ensued in response to the attacks of October 7. But there are two fascinating wrinkles in the Parsha that complicate that simple story. First, the injunction to destroy Amalek comes after a whole series of other injunctions that are designed to turn the Israelites into a civilized, moral […]

Dispatches from a Desert

News from the world that Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, are making for us.

It Feels Like the First Time

Until 2006, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch was chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which is the leading academic and rabbinical training institute for Conservative Judaism. Which is all the more reason to be surprised, even shocked, by what he says in this interview with Peter Beinart. You have to understand the position of the JTS within American, even international Jewry, and the rabbinate it produces, to grapple with the full weight of Rabbi Schorsch’s statement. And know that he’s now 89 years old, and what it must be like, to have lived a full Jewish life to that age, to have survived and been a refugee from Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, to have created this world of rabbinic Judaism in the […]

I love you more today than yesterday

I love magazines like The Atlantic. Ever since its editors first heard murmurings of a possible victory by Zohran Mamdani, the magazine has been running one anti-Mamdani article after another, with titles and claims like these: But now, having lapped this one field of propaganda, the magazine has decided to launch itself on a different course. On today’s website, I read a lengthy attack on the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization from which Mamdani hails. Pining for the days of Michael Harrington—when the organization had 7% of the membership it has today—the magazine declares that the problem with DSA is that it is not more like Mamdani, who knows how to build bridges, turn windy ideology into plain talk, […]