Corey Robin

The graduate students at CUNY voted today to support the call for an academic boycott of Israel. Good for them. The vote was greeted with unsurprising opposition from the CUNY Graduate Center administration and from CUNY Chancellor James Milliken. The Graduate Center stressed in a public statement that the vote is “not a resolution supported by the GC nor the university as a whole” and that the center is “opposed to academic boycotts which “directly violate academic freedom.” “We are disappointed by this vote from one student group,” a statement from CUNY’s Chancellor James B. Milliken read, “but it will not change CUNY’s position.” … In the lead up to the vote, Milliken already made clear that he opposed the doctoral […]

In September 2017, I got a “cease and desist” email from an organization called outlawbds. They informed me that because of my activism around BDS, I had been put on a “blacklist”—yes, they used that word, twice—and that I had a limited window of time to change my tune on BDS in order to get my name removed from the blacklist and avoid the legal consequences of my advocacy. “You have been marked,” the email warned me. “You have been identified.” Turns out the whole thing was part of an operation of an Israeli intelligence firm called “Psy-Group.” Whose activities have now been exposed in The New Yorker. Here are just a snippet of the items that might be of […]

Last spring, in response to claims and complaints of several pro-Israel groups, CUNY hired two attorneys, a former federal judge and former federal prosecutor, to investigate alleged anti-Semitism at CUNY. After six months of investigation—and God knows how many billable hours (partners at the firm where the two investigators work charge up to $1,000 an hour)—the investigators have issued their report. Among their findings: what anti-Semitism there is at CUNY (and some of the incidents documented here are genuinely anti-Semitic) has nothing to do with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Given that accusations against SJP were the main impetus for the complaint—the Zionist Organization of America, along with 35 New York elected officials, called for SJP to be suspended or banned from all CUNY […]

On Twitter tonight, The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, whose book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century I discussed on Memorial Day, was tweeting about the protests that greeted the Met premiere of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer. Here are just some of Ross’ tweets.   Giuliani concedes that John Adams is “one of our great American composers” but declares that his opera “supports terrorism.” #Klinghoffer — Alex Ross (@alexrossmusic) October 20, 2014 Ben Brafman says, “This may not be Auschwitz, it’s Lincoln Center,” but suggests that another Holocaust could happen. #Klinghoffer — Alex Ross (@alexrossmusic) October 20, 2014 Melinda Katz, Queens Borough President, says that she is “personally offended by the play.” #Klinghoffer — […]

The New York State Legislature is readying to pass a bill that would make it illegal for any college or university in the state to use public monies to fund faculty membership in—or travel to—academic organizations that boycott the institutions of another country. The clear target of this legislation, as the Speaker of the State Assembly has made clear, is the American Studies Association. The bill has already passed the NYS Senate; it is going to be voted on some time this week in the Assembly. As the Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York chapter of the National Lawyers Guild state in this letter, the bill raises a host of constitutional red flags. Boycotts are time-honored expressive activities, […]

New York City Councilman Lewis Fidler, the assistant majority leader who led the charge against my department’s co-sponsorship of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) forum in February, is back in the saddle. This time, according to The Jewish Week, he—and four other members of City Council—are demanding that the CUNY administration develop a plan to “level the playing field” at Brooklyn’s political science department by endowing “a chair in the department for a visiting professor from Israel who reflects a more sympathetic view” about the country’s future. Hardcore supporters of the State of Israel, off and on campus, have been gunning for my department for some time. Last month, The Jewish Week reported that the campus Hillel group and the […]

Glenn Greenwald will be delivering the Brooklyn College political science department’s 39th annual Samuel J. Konefsky Memorial Lecture this year.  The topic of the lecture: “Civil Liberties and Endless War in the Age of Obama.” The lecture will be held on Monday, March 4, at 1 pm.  In the Gold Room (6th Floor) of SUBO, which is the student center building, located at Campus Road and 27th Street. The lecture is open to the public. Like Alan Dershowitz, a previous Konefsky Lecturer, Greenwald will be speaking alone. Like the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Greenwald will balance himself.

City Council Speaker—and leading mayoral candidate—Christine Quinn is one of the signatories to that “other” letter about the Brooklyn College BDS panel from the “progressive” government officials and politicians. In that letter, Quinn and four members of Congress, Bill de Blasio, and many more, call upon my department to rescind our co-sponsorship of the BDS panel at Brooklyn College because, well, read it for yourself: We are, however, concerned that  an academic department has decided to formally endorse an event that advocates strongly for one side of a highly-charged issue,  and has rejected legitimate offers from prominent individuals willing to simultaneously present an alternative view.  By excluding alternative positions from an event they are sponsoring, the Political Science Department has […]

As some of you know, more and more of my commentary now appears on Facebook rather than on this blog. If you’re not averse to joining Facebook, you can catch it there; I encourage you to do so, as the conversations can be quite lively and good, involving lots of different folks. I’m maxed out on friends, but you can follow me. But since a lot of readers don’t want to join Facebook, I’m going to try to make it a regular feature—monthly or semi-monthly—to catch you up to speed on what I’ve been saying there. I’m going to collect various Facebook posts and post them here as a kind of regular journal or diary. Some will be out of date […]

1. About a month before the election, I found myself—don’t ask how or why—in an audience listening to a speech by Jeffrey Wiesenfeld. For those of you who are not CUNY insiders, Wiesenfeld is a former member of the CUNY Board of Trustees. He’s also an ultra-right Zionist who’s got a lot of nice things to say about Meir Kahane (“misunderstood”) and who’s been behind or involved in pretty much every dustup over Israel/Palestine that we’ve had at CUNY these last ten years or so. His most notable effort was trying to deny an honorary degree to Tony Kushner. (I was pleased to find out from his lecture that our massive pushback against him led him to lose a bunch […]

For the last two weeks or so, I have been trying to stay focused on my work on Clarence Thomas, but all the liberal commentary on the Democratic primary has gotten me so irritated that I keep finding myself back on social media, posting, tweeting, commenting, and the like. So I figured I’d bring everything that I’ve been saying about the election campaign there, here. In no particular order. 1. Clintonite McCarthyism According to The Guardian: The dossier, prepared by opponents of Sanders and passed on to the Guardian by a source who would only agree to be identified as “a Democrat”, alleges that Sanders “sympathized with the USSR during the Cold War” because he went on a trip there to […]

Next week, I’m proud to announce, the political science department at Brooklyn College, of which I am chair, will be co-sponsoring two events. The first, which is being put on by the Wolfe Institute of the Humanities at Brooklyn College, is a talk by Nation columnist, poet, and essayist Katha Pollitt. Katha has just published a book called Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, and that is the title of the talk she will be giving next Tuesday, November 18, at 2:25 (yes, 2:25), in Woody Tanger Auditorium at Brooklyn College. The second, which is being put on by the Students for Justice in Palestine at Brooklyn College, is a conversation between Steven Salaita, who needs no introduction on this blog, and Columbia […]

Steven Salaita spoke today at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to the YMCA, where the event was held, some 400 students, faculty, staff, and supporters turned up. Salaita opened with a statement. Here are some excerpts: My name is Steven Salaita. I am a professor with an accomplished scholarly record; I have been a fair and devoted teacher to hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students; I have been a valued and open-minded colleague to numerous faculty across disciplines and universities. My ideas and my identity are far more substantive and complex than the recent characterizations based on a selected handful of my Twitter posts. … Two weeks before my start date, and without any warning, I received a summary […]

Does the American Studies Association (ASA) boycott of Israeli academic institutions violate academic freedom? According to the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Indiana University (see my comment on that university at the end of this post), and numerous other universities across the United States, the answer is yes. The question is: Why? I asked my Facebook friends that question. A bunch of people—some in favor of the ASA boycott, others opposed, others undecided—answered. I thought the discussion was worth reprinting here. Fair warning: it is a fairly narrow discussion. We were not considering the pros and cons of the boycott or where justice lies in the current Israel-Palestine conflict. We were simply trying to figure out whether and how the boycott […]

Political theorist Marshall Berman, who was my colleague at the CUNY Graduate Center, died yesterday morning. When I heard the news last night, my first thought was the date: 9/11. There’s no good day to die, but to die on a day so associated with death—whether the murder of nearly 3000 people on 9/11/2001, most of them in his beloved New York, or the 9/11/1973 coup in Chile that brought down Allende and installed Pinochet—seems, in Marshall’s case, like an especially cruel offense against the universe. For as anyone who knew or read him knows, Marshall was a man of irrepressible and teeming life. The life of the street, which he immortalized in his classic All That’s Solid Melts Into […]

There’s a long profile of NYC Councilman Jumaane Williams in BKLYNR, a new Brooklyn-based magazine, by Eli Rosenberg. It’s a fascinating read of a fascinating politician, who played a less than fascinating role during the Brooklyn College BDS controversy. Williams is a former student of mine, and he and I wound up in a heated Twitter argument about his role. In his piece, Rosenberg discusses the Williams and the BDS controversy at length. You should read the whole article, but I’m excerpting the BDS part here: The perils of navigating the dual worlds of politics and activism were resoundingly clear earlier this year. Two leaders of a movement critical of Israel — pioneering gender theorist and activist Judith Butler and […]

More news on the Brooklyn/BDS controversy: 1.Yet another signatory to the Lewis Fidler letter, which threatened to punish CUNY by withholding funds, has rescinded his signature. Today on Twitter, City Councilman Stephen Levin announced: I have withdrawn my name frm City Council ltr on funding 4 BK College. I maintain my criticism of BDS & impression of BK College endorsement — Stephen Levin (@StephenLevin33) February 5, 2013 With Letitia James, two out of the 10 signatories have now removed themselves from the Fidler letter. 2.  I have it on a very good source that yet another member of the New York City Council who signed the letter is going to make a public statement tomorrow, distancing him/herself from its contents. […]

So much has happened today it’s hard to keep up.  So a quick round-up of the news (and some items from yesterday). 1. The major development of the day is that City Councilwoman Letitia James has publicly retracted her signature to that Fidler letter, which threatens to cut off funding to Brooklyn College and CUNY, a point Fidler doubled down on in an interview tonight. 2. This morning, Brooklyn College President Karen Gould delivered a powerful defense of our department and of academic freedom. 3. That defense has now been endorsed by the New York Times. In a strong editorial, the Times writes: We do, however, strongly defend the decision by Brooklyn College President Karen Gould to proceed with the […]

This morning, Karen Gould, the president of Brooklyn College, issued an extraordinarily powerful statement in defense of academic freedom and the right of the political science department to co-sponsor the BDS event. I don’t have a link yet (will post when I do) but this is the critical part of her statement: First, however, let me be clear: Our commitment to the principles of academic freedom remains steadfast.  Students and faculty, including academic departments, programs, and centers, have the right to invite speakers, engage in discussion, and present ideas to further educational discussion and debate.   The mere invitation to speak does not indicate an endorsement of any particular point of view, and there is no obligation, as some have […]

My department at Brooklyn College—political science—is Ground Zero of a controversy over Israel/Palestine, academic freedom, and free speech. Early in January, we were asked by a student group, Students for Justice in Palestine, to co-sponsor a panel discussion on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). The panel features Omar Barghouti and world-renowned philosopher Judith Butler. We agreed to co-sponsor. Since then, things have exploded. The usual suspects—people like Alan Dershowitz and Dov Hikind—have weighed in; we’re being called anti-Semites, comparisons to the Holocaust are being made, and I got this lovely bit of hate mail: “Just writing to wish you and your family the worst…You are being a piece of f*cking trash, and you’re on the side of the […]