Corey Robin's Blog, page 3

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

Two weeks ago, the New York Times ginned up a controversy over Zohran Mamdani’s college application. In his senior year of high school, Mamdani applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American. He made a point of specifying that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. Mamdani’s opponents, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system of higher ed for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American. Peter Beinart has an excellent video out this morning, which puts the story in Mamdani’s family context—and […]

The two best analyses of Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory are this one, by Michael Thomas Carter, and this conversation that Daniel Denvir, the Terry Gross of the left, hosted with two organizers in New York City. Both analyses focus on the elephant in the room. Virtually all of the commentariat have emphasized Mamdani’s videos, his undeniable charisma and political fluency, and Cuomo’s weaknesses. The latter were oddly invisible to most commentators up until the very night that Cuomo conceded; then it became obvious that he was a weak candidate and was always going to lose; there’s a lesson there about power, which people always treat as static, when it’s not). But easily the most important factor in Zohran’s victory is […]

I’m seldom one to ride the “we’ve never seen anything like this before” bandwagon. But after reading enough headlines like this one below— —I start to reconsider. The amount of unnecessary death that we tolerate in this country—not just within one group but across many groups, states, and regions, from school shootings to heat waves to floods to fires to covid and now to measles and assassinations—is astounding. “Tolerate” isn’t quite the right word because that sounds like some sort of longstanding practice or habit we’ve accepted for years and decades. But this kind of toleration is new. It’s not the product of ancient holdovers or superstitions or lack of knowledge. It’s an attitude to new forms of destruction that […]

I wasn’t going to address the controversy over what Zohran Mamdani did or didn’t say about the phrase “globalize the intifada.” But now that Hakeem Jeffries, the Minority Leader of the Democrats in the House, has decided to weigh in on it, on the Sunday morning talk shows no less—specifically, by invoking the fear that Jewish New Yorkers like me are supposed to be feeling when we hear the phrase being used—I think it’s worth a comment or two. Jeffries claims that Mamdani needs to “clarify his position” on the phrase, which is silly, because the only reason Jeffries is even talking about Mamdani’s position is that he has clarified it. On June 17, Tim Miller, an interviewer for The […]