Corey Robin's Blog, page 5

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 […]

Where are all the liberal humanitarians now?

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s—and this continued into the aughts and 2010s—the dominant idea in liberal foreign policy circles was that of “humanitarian intervention.” The claim was that though states should ordinarily respect the sovereignty of other states, under extreme circumstances, say of genocide or ethnic cleansing, it was not just the right, but the obligation, of the international community, to take coercive action, including using military force and violence, to stop the genocide or ethnic cleansing. Occasionally, the theory went, this might involve or entail toppling the regime that was engaged in the genocide. Thus Vietnam was allowed to invade Cambodia and overthrow the Khmer Rouge, Tanzania was allowed to invade Uganda and topple the […]

Virgin Sacrifice in the Ivy League

The Yale Medical School and Yale New Haven Hospital announced yesterday that they will no longer prescribe gender-affirming medications for patients under 19. Interestingly enough, much less wealthy and smaller healthcare institutions continue to provide medication and care to trans youth. In conjunction with Columbia’s decision to suspend or expel or revoke the degrees of over 70 pro-Palestine students, it’s hard not to think of Yale’s decision in light of the canonical literatures on sacrifice. In all these cases, these institutions are undoubtedly thinking that they have to sacrifice the smaller, more marginal, and more vulnerable, for the sake of preserving the larger, the more advanced, the whole. 70 pro-Palestine students in return for hundreds of millions of government research […]

Let’s make a deal

According to Gothamist, Columbia has disciplined more than 70 students for activism around Palestine. More than 2/3 of those students have been suspended or expelled. In return, Columbia is trying to negotiate about one billion dollars in research grants that Trump has frozen. That’s roughly $14.3 million per every punished student. I guess that’s a good deal for Columbia, huh? Not so good for education and freedom, though.

Ezra Klein and Shaul Magid on Israel, Palestine, and the Jews

Ezra Klein is out this morning with a surprisingly strong piece on how Zionism is dividing older and younger Jews. In the course of his article, Klein takes some surprisingly strong positions. The piece also shows that, whatever else it has done, the Zohran Mamdani campaign has helped push an important conversation about Israel and Palestine among a wider part of the population. The bottom line of Klein’s piece is that until recently, American Jews, most of whom were Democrats, created a mix of liberalism and Jewishness that found its expression in their support for the State of Israel. That experiment has come to an end: Jews can no longer be liberal and support the State of Israel. The two […]

Billy Ackman, Michael Walzer, and the Things Money Can and Can’t Buy

I’m not a fan of Billy Ackman for several reasons, but nothing has roused my ire more than than this: Because of Ackman, I now have to write about sports, which is something I never talk about unless it’s to make fun of it. For those of you who don’t follow such things, Ackman bought his way into some sort of big tennis match with a lot of big tennis pros. He sucked and lost, prompting Martina Navratilova to mockingly tweet of him, “Oh to have the confidence…” She might have added: “…of a very rich white man.” I can’t understand all the ins and outs of this story, except that his buying his way into this match took away […]