Corey Robin

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I wrote a piece for The New Yorker on America’s latest passion project: the Jew. My first and only experience of antisemitism in America came wrapped in a bow of care and concern. In 1993, I spent the summer in Tennessee with my girlfriend. At a barbecue, we were peppered with questions. What brought us south? How were we getting on? Where did we go to church? We explained that we didn’t go to church because we were Jewish. “That’s O.K.,” a woman reassured us. Having never thought that it wasn’t, I flashed a puzzled smile and recalled an observation of the German writer Ludwig Börne: “Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me […]

I hadn’t heard of Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, before this past weekend. But like many people, I’ve been struck by the pivot he’s signaled in how the Democrats, and the left more generally, should talk about Trump. Asked by Jake Tapper why he insists on calling Trump “weird” rather than an “existential threat to democracy,” which is how most Democrats and progressives have been describing Trump since 2016, Walz said: It gives him [Trump] way too much power. Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks, whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought we just give him way too much credit. When you just ratchet down some of the scariness […]

When he was deployed in Iraq and a student at Yale Law School, J.D. Vance occasionally blogged. “It’s like a diary,” he wrote, “only far more masculine.” Here’s what I learned about Vance from his blogs. (If you’re confused by the different names on the blogs, well, there’s a story there.) 1. Getting emotional, he feels “more like a female than I think I ever have or will.” 2. Except for Jesus Christ, Winston Churchill may have been the greatest man that ever lived, and his life was a lot like Vance’s. 3. He cries twice on one day. With one exception, this is the only time he’s cried since he was 13. 4. In the midst of having to […]

James Scott, the Yale political scientist who specialized in so many things, has died. Jim was a scholar of peasant politics and societies, Southeast Asia, state planning, ecology, forestry, Balzac, and much else. He meant a great deal to a great many people, intellectually and personally, but there’s a small cohort of us, who came to Yale in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for whom he holds a special place in our hearts. We had come to the political science department intending to study political theory, only to discover, upon our arrival, that the official political theorists on the faculty were neither political nor theoretical. Though we tried to make it work as theorists, many of us in this […]

This fall, I am teaching a course, “Politics Through Literature,” which still has spaces available for students to register. The course meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:30-10:45. You can register whether you are an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, another college in the CUNY system, or at any college in the New York area. Please reach out to me for information on how to register if you are an undergraduate outside the CUNY system. There is no online component; all instruction is in-person. The course is cross-listed: if you want to register for it as a political science course, it’s POLS 3440; if you want to register for it as an English course, it’s ENGL 3293. Below is the course […]

I’ve got a new piece up at The New Yorker on a new biography of Friedrich Hayek. I got a chance to range widely. From Hayek’s dalliance with the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet— In November, 1977, on a still-sticky evening along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek boarded a flight bound for Chile and settled into his seat in first class. He was headed to the Valparaíso Business School, where he was scheduled to receive an honorary degree. Upon arrival in Santiago, the Nobel laureate was greeted at the airport by the dean of the business school, Carlos Cáceres. They drove toward the Pacific Coast, stopping for a bite to eat in the city of Casablanca, […]

The summer after I graduated college, a group of friends and I moved out west and lived together in Berkeley, California. There were about ten of us in Rochdale Village, a complex of student cooperative housing on Haste Street, just off Telegraph Avenue, not far from the Berkley campus. I hadn’t thought about those apartments, or their name, till this afternoon, when I was reading Marx’s chapter on cooperation (chapter 11) in the first volume of Capital. I’m reading Capital in a new and amazing translation by Paul Reitter; it’s edited by Paul North. Wendy Brown has a foreword, and Will Roberts has an afterward. It’s due out this September. I’ll be reviewing it. In the middle of chapter 11, […]

I was working at my desk this morning when I got a text from my daughter, who’s 16 years old, and a student at Brooklyn Tech. She wanted to know if I would go with her to a walkout for Palestine that had been organized by and for New York City high school students. Having dragged her to so many demonstrations when she was much younger, I was thrilled to be asked to join her on this one. We met up, and at 3 pm, the students converged at 52 Chambers Street, where the Department of Education is located. I was impressed by a few of the increasingly familiar elements that distinguish this generation of protesters from previous ones—the extraordinary […]

The historian Arno Mayer, who had such an influence on my work and eventually became a friend, has died at 97. He wrote books on everything from the French Revolution to the First World War to the Holocaust to the creation of the State of Israel. He was one of a cohort of brilliant scholars at Princeton University who made the study of history, in which I majored as an undergraduate in the 1980s, the most exciting discipline and department in the world. I have a tribute to him at the New Left Review. Some excerpts: Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a […]

Up at The New Yorker this morning, I’ve got a double review of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s new book, Tyranny of the Minority, and Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath’s The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, which came out last year. My essay addresses the Constitution and the rise of the right, and asks whether any part of the Constitution might help us counter the right. I come out, surprisingly, thinking that, maybe, yes, it might. That’s what I learned from Fishkin and Forbath’s “wonderfully counterintuitive” book, as I say. The other surprise, for me, is the shift in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s position. Five years ago, you may recall, they were the leading scholarly voices arguing against the norm erosion of Donald Trump […]

Until now, I’ve avoided getting myself worked up about ChatGPT. Prompted by this article by a Columbia undergraduate this past spring, I thought that if a student knows enough about paper-writing to make ChatGPT work for them, in the way this student describes in his piece, without detection by a minimally alert instructor, that student has probably already mastered the skills of essay-writing far more than the author of this piece seems to realize. I at least could rest easy with the knowledge that if a student used ChatGPT to write a paper for me, and it was good, I wasn’t not teaching that student what they needed to learn how to do. But this recent article, by a Harvard […]

One of the most interesting dimensions of our contemporary crisis of democracy discourse and literature is its moralism. If you listen to the talking heads on MSNBC or read more sophisticated academic treatments of the topic, you’ll find a frequent claim that mainstream Republican leaders who are not Trump—people like McConnell or McCarthy—are cowards or careerists. Unlike the Greenes and Gaetzes of the party, goes the argument, these men are not ideologically opposed to democracy. They’re just insufficiently committed to democracy. That’s the problem. If they were ideologically principled, if they were honorable, if they were dedicated, out of conviction, to democracy, these leaders would take on the authoritarians in their midst. In the past, the argument continues, Republican leaders […]

Alan Arkin was a part of my childhood. He lived in Chappaqua, where I grew up. His son Tony was in my grade. Arkin used to come to our elementary school, I’m guessing, though I can’t remember for sure, for something like career day. He’d be spotted around town. More important to me was “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” Not only was it one of my favorite movies as a kid; it was also one of my dad’s. It’s one of the few movies where I remember my dad laughing out loud. The other was Mel Brooks’s “Spaceballs.” Anyway, I have fond memories of my dad and I laughing through “The Russians Are Coming.” In memory of […]