In 1753, Britain considered a bill to allow the naturalization of the country’s 4,000 foreign-born Jews. Formally titled “An Act to permit Persons professing the Jewish Religion to be naturalized by Parliament,” the bill was widely known as the “Jew Bill.” Though it initially passed both houses of Parliament, it was repealed after a vicious campaign of antisemitism and nativism, led by the Tories. Today’s Republican Islamophobes in Congress are more brazen. They don’t wait for the public to do their dirty work of name-calling. They have actually titled a bill that would, among other things, strip Muslim citizens of their citizenship, the “MAMDANI Act.” When people say that the historic Jewish Question, which was about whether Jews could ever […]
On Thursday, my daughter, who’s a high school senior, won first place for the best paper in the National History Day competition for all of New York City. The title of her paper is “Drop Dead University: The Fight for Free Education at the City University of New York.” She worked hard on it, dug deep into the municipal archives about the 1975 Fiscal Crisis and the decision to end free tuition at CUNY, read widely in the secondary literature, and, though I’m obviously not objective, did a good job. Now she goes on to the New York State competition, which will be at the end of April. Aside from proud-parent bragging, I’m posting about this tonight because I just […]
The literary critic George Steiner often mused, almost perversely, on the fact that some of the most wondrous works of twentieth-century literature were produced under conditions of extreme censorship. He especially liked to remark upon the Soviet experience and the literature that came out of it, suggesting that great literature emerged not from societies of freedom but from those of domination. Reading the below list of topics that cannot be discussed in Florida classrooms, I wonder if we might not be in for some decades of intense intellectual ferment and creativity. Imagine all the possibilities for scholars and writers and teachers and students, as they struggle to work their way around the censor. Remember the old theory about the Bukharin […]
In The Holy Family, Marx returns to his critique of Bruno Bauer, which he first mooted in his article “On the Jewish Question.” As he did in the earlier essay, Marx again accuses Bauer of a residual idealism, which he traces back to the essential Christianity (and Hegelianism) of Bauer’s thinking. In the following passage, however, Marx breaks new ground, in ways that seem relevant to the left today. It’s a long passage and more than a little confusing, but bear with me (and it). Yet Absolute Criticism [i.e., Bauer-style thinking] has learnt from Hegel’s Phänomenologie at least the art of converting real objective chains that exist outside me into merely ideal, merely subjective chains, existing merely in me and […]
If you’ve ever read Plato’s Republic, you know that one of its central features is the argument, pursued quite sincerely by Socrates, that the state should prohibit the teaching of certain texts, particularly by the poets, by which Socrates (really, Plato) means Homer. Fast forward a couple thousand years and change, and we see the state of Texas discovering what is truly the best way to teach Plato in today’s world: ban him. Back in November, the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System, which is a state body, voted to adopt the following rule: No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and […]
If you were to cast your gaze across the America of a hundred years ago, the America of 1925, you would have had many reasons for despair. That was the year that the Second KKK reached its all-time high in membership. The previous year, immigration to the US from all Asian countries was banned, and immigration from southern and eastern Europe (home of Italians, Jews, Poles, and other undesirables) was drastically limited. And behind all that stood the Red Scare, in which Jews, Italians, anarchists, socialists, communists were drummed out of American life in an orgy of violence, mass arrests, and deportations. Just ten years later, those same forces that had been put on their back feet in the 1920s […]
We’re coming up, in two years, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Some of you may know of Hirschman as one of the main characters in that not-so-good, pulpy Netflix series Transatlantic, which depicts the efforts of Hirschman and others to rescue European Jewish intellectuals from the Nazis in France. If you’re a political scientist or sociologist, you may know of Hirschman for his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. If you’re a theorist, you may know his Rhetoric of Reaction. If you’re an economist or a Latin Americanist, you might know of his work in development economics. But, for me, Hirschman will always be […]
I had a long conversation with Ezra Klein about the current moment, its parallels and divergences from the Second Red Scare of the McCarthy era, and three recommendations for books to read. I chose one book of poetry, which I hope you will all ready, one book of history, and one book of political theory. Klein had nice things to say about my book The Reactionary Mind: “in my opinion,” he said, it’s “one of the most insightful books you can read on the Trumpist right and what is behind it.” He read it twice, and I could see all the notes he had taken on it. The funnest part of the interview happened off-screen. I wore my “city workers […]
I hate to be that guy on the left, but I’m going to be that guy on the left. One of the arguments Republicans are making tonight about the firing of Jimmy Kimmel is that while they’re unhappy and uncomfortable with the head of the FCC’s threatening to pull ABC’s license, they’d be absolutely fine if the network simply made its own decision, sans government pressure, to fire Kimmel. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said to NBC, “Well, my preference would always be to let the companies make economic market decisions.” Senator Mike Rounds, Republican from South Dakota, said, “I understand that right now it’s an employer-employee issue, and that’s the way I would approach it.” As if there were […]
Among the political emotions, vengeance may be the most terrible of them all. On the one hand, vengeance is different than justice. It authorizes those who act in its name to do all sorts of things that they would normally not feel themselves authorized or entitled to do. Vengeance has an extraordinarily permissive licensing structure, freeing the vengeful from any and all restraints. On the other hand, as any reading of The Oresteia will show, vengeance contains a strict and stern element of obligation, even injunction: Whatever else you may do, you are not authorized or allowed not to take vengeance. To not avenge—to forgive or acquit, to do anything that might break the link between the iniquitous past and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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Categories
Education, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
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Tags Brooklyn College, CUNY, Ellen Schrecker, James Milliken, Judith Butler, McCarthyism, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of California, Zohran Mamdani
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 […]
News from the world that Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, are making for us.
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Categories
Economies, Education, Jews, Labor/Workplace, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right
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Tags Andrew Cuomo, Brooklyn College, Eric Adams, John Deere, Lisa Cook, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Northwestern, Zohran Mamdani
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 […]
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Categories
Economies, Education, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Aeschylus, Arendt, Columbia, Maistre, Wendy Brown, Yale
I know this headline and the story it tells are terrible, a sign of how bad things are and how much worse is to come, but, still… But, still, you have to laugh. Here we are, people of conscience everywhere, rallying on behalf of beleaguered universities everywhere, who are fending off this extraordinarily tetchy administration, so quick to take offense at the slightest untoward remark, and what do the leaders of NYU do? Freak out about this student, their commencement speaker, who had the audacity to refer to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine,” and, so, naturally, is having his diploma revoked. Just in case that wasn’t clear enough, NYU issued a statement. Of course. NYU strongly denounces the choice […]
According to the Yale Daily News, nearly 900 faculty at Yale have signed a letter calling on the president and provost to protect academic freedom at Yale. It’s a strong letter, organized by the faculty senate and a local chapter of the AAUP, but I couldn’t help noticing a glaring omission in it. The letter identifies four threats to academic freedom at Yale (and calls upon the university to take two affirmative steps for academic freedom), but all four of the threats come solely, in the letter’s formulation, from the government. This seems like an odd position, to me, because since Trump’s second ascension to power, the most severe violation of academic freedom at Yale has come from the University […]
The United States Navy announced tonight that, following Trump’s anti-DEI orders, it has purged 381 books from the US Naval Academy Library. The press coverage focuses on some familiar titles: Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and so on. I went through the entire list, and noticed something quite different. First, to call this a DEI purge is to miss the forest for the trees: This is a wholesale assault on knowledge as we know it. Charles Mills’s book is purged. Two books on Henry James are purged. A book on Eliot, Joyce, and Proust is purged. Books on Elizabeth Bishop, on Thomas Pynchon, on Richard Wright: purged. Barbara Fields’s and Karen Fields’s Racecraft is […]
Everyone’s waiting for that one person to stand up to Trump. Not just that one person. There are a lot of such people. You can read about them in every newspaper. But that one person with real power who’s willing to risk something costly in defiance. That one university president who’ll say, fuck you and your money. That one Democrat who’ll say, fuck you and your threat to my reelection or that of my party. Everyone’s looking for our Tank Man, staring down a column of tanks, all by himself, in Tiananmen Square. Why don’t we see that person? Where is our Tank Man? (And, no, I don’t think Cory Booker doing a marathon-length filibuster counts.) The reason we see […]
Earlier this week, Yale professors Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley announced that they were leaving the United States to take up academic positions in Canada. Ordinarily, this would not be considered news. Academics move all the time. Sometimes from the United States to other countries. But since both Snyder and Stanley have been, since 2017, the two leading proponents of the thesis that the United States is sliding precipitously toward fascism or authoritarianism, if we’re not already there, their announcement has attracted a considerable amount of attention. Snyder’s reason, and the timing of his decision, has been somewhat murky. But Stanley has been forthright: He’s moving his family out of the country because the political climate has grown intolerable, and […]
One of the big mistakes we make when we think about fear is to oppose fear to hope. Hope against fear, that’s the credo. And it’s badly mistaken. Nadezdha Mandelstam was one of the great writers on Stalinism. Her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was murdered in 1938. She survived the purges and went on to write a miracle of a memoir titled, aptly, Hope Against Hope. This is what she had to say on the topic of hope and fear: Until a short time before, I had been full of concern for all my friends and relatives, for my work, for everything I set store by. Now this concern was gone—and fear, too…Having entered a realm of non-being, I […]
Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, May 13, 1953: You probably know a lot [about the Second Red Scare] from the papers. Can you see from them how far the disintegration has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred? And up to now hardly any resistance. Everything melts away like butter in the sun….It is essentially impossible to consider any specific parts of the society as set apart from it, for even where the Congressional investigating committees aren’t sticking in their dirty noses, an extremely effective self-censorship takes place. The editor of a newspaper or a magazine, for example, or the director of a business or the professors at a university will quietly conduct a purge….It all functions without […]
“The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.” That was historian Ellen Schrecker’s devastating conclusion in her classic study, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, which came out in 1986. Columbia University, while not the worst in Schrecker’s account, was certainly not the best. Today, as the New York Times has revealed, it’s probably the worst. At the height of the Second Red Scare, just as HUAC was beginning its first of many hearings on the threat of communism in higher ed, a group of 37 university presidents, from the nation’s most prestigious and elite institutions, including Columbia, gathered to make a statement of principles on academic freedom and the Cold War. The year was 1953. The […]
After reading my interview in n+1 on “Muskism and McCarthyism,” the producers at On the Media, the weekend show on NPR hosted by Brooke Gladstone, contacted me for a follow-up conversation. It’s airing this weekend. We ranged widely, from the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil to how Humphrey Bogart betrayed himself to HUAC, from why the term McCarthyism is so misleading to what kind of people and institutions a regime of fear can create. At the end of the interview, Brooke reminded me of a conversation we had had, on her show, during Trump 1.0 on the question of fascism and authoritarianism. She asked me where I stood on that question today. You should have a listen. Speaking of having a […]
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Categories
Jews, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Right, The State
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Tags Brooke Gladstone, fascism, HUAC, Humphrey Bogart, Mahmoud Khalil, McCarthyism, Michel Martin, Muskism, NPR