In addition to what I wrote earlier today, I want to make three other observations about Mamdani’s inauguration speech. First, Trump was almost completely absent from the speech. He came up, by name, only once, when Mamdani referenced the voters who cast their ballots for Trump in 2024 and then for Mamdani in 2025. He came up, by act, only once, when Mamdani made a reference to ICE raids. I don’t think anyone believes Mamdani is not aware of Trump or what Trump can do to New York. So we have to ask why he refused to make Trump a feature of his speech. It’s not because Mamdani was only interested in going positive and being hopeful; he referenced all […]
On July 15, at a congressional hearing, New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik subjected CUNY’s chancellor, Félix Matos Rodríguez, to a humiliating round of questions about the alleged views of the CUNY faculty and staff. The chancellor, unfortunately, did little to defend the people at CUNY who work to make the institution what it is. Instead, he ritually intoned the need to fight antisemitism. When asked about specific people and institutions at CUNY, he deflected, feigned ignorance, or threw his employees under the bus. I particularly remember one moment of the exchange between Stefanik and the chancellor (start at 4:45). Stefanik: Are you familiar with CUNY CLEAR? This is the clinical arm of CUNY School of Law. Rodríguez: CUNY CLEAR. I’m not […]
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll once again be working with my friend and co-author Alex Gourevitch on a new writing project: an introduction to a new edition of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. The translation will be done by the excellent Paul Reitter, who did that new translation of Capital, and will be published by NYRB Classics, which has issued so many wonderful translations since its founding. It’s hard for me to think of a more timely text than On the Jewish Question. Despite his traffic in antisemitism, Marx is trying here to get us to think about religion, identity, and politics outside the framework of culture war, which had engulfed so many intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Instead of […]
Last Friday, I spoke on a panel at NYU on political theorist Alyssa Battistoni’s new book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. The room was packed, somewhat unusual for an academic book of political theory. But if you’ve read Battistoni’s book, or know of her work, you’ll understand why. The book is not only a remarkable synthesis of a variety of literatures on the environment, climate change, work, Marx, feminism, and the politics of care—if you were just looking for an excellent account of the last 50 years of political theory, plus Marx and a lot of twentieth-century economics, this would be your book—but also a brilliant intervention in these debates. It has given me all sorts of […]
-
Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, The Left, The State
-
Tags Alyssa Battistoni, David Ricardo, Grotius, Karl Marx, Plato, Pufendorf, Sianne Ngai
Why did the Democrats cave in on the shut down? It seems clear that the main issue was not electoral backlash, since most of the senators who caved are not up for reelection, and the politics were trending in the Democrats’ favor, or at least not against them. The main issue was the filibuster. There was growing pressure from Trump on the Republicans to get rid of it, and the Democratic leadership had every reason to fear its elimination. Why? It has very little to do with preserving their power while they are in the minority; that ship has obviously sailed. The Democratic leadership doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster for the same reason the Republican leadership doesn’t […]
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 […]
For a long time now, I’ve thought that you’re never really a grownup until you realize that there are no grownups. We all have a fantasy, inherited from childhood, that somewhere, someone, is truly in charge and knows what they’re doing and has got things under control. I remember the moment when I realized that’s not true. There is no such person. It’s on you, me, us, to try to be a little wiser than we are, which involves, as a first step, giving up the fantasy that anyone in the actual world knows entirely what they’re doing. I was thinking about this last night as I watched Andrew Cuomo repeatedly try and fail to belittle Mamdani as a kid, […]
One of the elements of Du Bois’s argument in Black Reconstruction that surprised me most the last time, or maybe the time before that, that I taught it, was just how much attention he pays to the Radical Republican’ vision of congressional power and congressional government over and against a Constitution based on presidential power and presidential government. Du Bois even suggests that had the Radicals won, we might have had a system more like the parliamentary democracies of Europe, or at least of Britain, where the chief executive is simply the leader of the party in parliament, and not an office completely apart from that party and that parliament. For Du Bois, that vision of parliamentary government, as opposed […]
Reading this morning’s report on a meeting of the Northwestern faculty with its interim president Henry Bienen, I was struck by the language Bienen uses to set out his stance toward Trump: I want to do a deal with the federal government. I don’t want to get into suits with the federal government. Set aside the substance of what he’s saying. I’m more startled by the effluence of such Trumpian language—not just “deal” but “I want to do a deal”—from the mouth of a university president. Not, “I think we might come to a prudent arrangement with the federal government.” Not “I think a path of compromise is always more productive than one of confrontation.” Not “the law and the […]
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 […]
I understand the impulse, at moments like these, for politicians and public spokespersons to say that we need to talk across the divide, to acknowledge our similarities amid our differences, that we need leaders who understand there is no red America, no blue America, just America. It’s not my way of writing or speaking, but it runs deep in our political tradition. So it’s not surprising that people would turn to it. Looking for precedents, people will often invoke Lincoln, particularly his First and Second Inaugurals (or least the conciliatory part of the Second). The leader who bound up our wounds, who bore malice toward none and charity for all. But Lincoln is an instructive case for a different reason. […]
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 […]
-
Categories
Education, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
-
Tags Brooklyn College, CUNY, Ellen Schrecker, James Milliken, Judith Butler, McCarthyism, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of California, Zohran Mamdani
In shul yesterday, as we headed into the second half of Deuteronomy, we happened on some of those passages that contain one of the invocations of Amalek that Netanyahu made famous after October 7: “Remember what Amalek did to you.” “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek.” These and another passage were mentioned by Netanyahu and a great many other right-wing Zionists to justify and explain the slaughter of Palestinians that ensued in response to the attacks of October 7. But there are two fascinating wrinkles in the Parsha that complicate that simple story. First, the injunction to destroy Amalek comes after a whole series of other injunctions that are designed to turn the Israelites into a civilized, moral […]
I’m about to say something that may not land well with my usual readers who are opposed to the State of Israel. But I think it’s true. We often compare Israel to settler colonial states. Increasingly the comparisons have been made to fascist movements and states, even Nazi Germany. I’d like to suggest a different comparison, which may help make better sense not of Israel itself but of its supporters, particularly the ones I know best, here in the United States. I’d compare those supporters to the true believers on the left, who supported the Soviet Union between the 1930s and 1950s, often even afterward. I’m not the first to make this comparison; Tony Judt did before his death in […]
A cantor in Canada recently denounced what Israel is doing in Gaza as genocide. This is what ensued: Many colleagues, friends, and loved ones have gone from praising my recent award as a ‘Rabbinic Human Rights Hero’ for my efforts to mobilize the Jewish community against the death penalty, to vilifying me for what they claim is parroting anti-Semitic canards….I thought I knew of vitriol and recrimination; I was wrong. For years, proponents of the death penalty have lodged heinous verbal attacks against me for my public activism as the co-founder of ‘L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty.’ Even that could not have prepared me, however, for the deluge of hate and ridicule I have received throughout the Jewish world […]
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] […]
-
Categories
Economies, Jews, Law, Palestine and Israel, Race, The Left, The Right, The State
-
Tags Arkansas, Jewish National Fund, Return to the Land, The Forward
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 […]
-
Categories
Foreign Policy, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, The State, Violence
-
Tags ethnic cleansing, genocide, Idi Amin, Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam
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 […]
-
Categories
Economies, Education, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State
-
Tags Aeschylus, Arendt, Columbia, Maistre, Wendy Brown, Yale
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 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 […]
-
Categories
Jews, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, The Left, The Right, The State
-
Tags Andrew Cuomo, Brooklyn College, Edith Wharton, Hakeem Jeffries, Kirsten Gillebrand, Margaret Litvin, Peter Beinart, Zohran Mamdani
Gazillionaire Bill Ackman says that he is “gravely concerned” by the possibility of Mamdani getting elected mayor because rich people are going to flee New York and the city will become “economically unviable.” Paul Krugman says this kind of talk is nothing more than “hysteria” from “the moguls of madness.” I know Krugman only won the Nobel Prize in Economics while Ackman is a rich Trump supporter whose major achievement is getting the first Black woman president of Harvard fired, but who are you going to believe? But here’s the really creepy thing about Ackman’s position. According to Forbes: Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman said he and his wealthy associates are ready to pour “hundreds of millions of dollars” into the […]
I want to talk about Zohran Mamdani’s being Muslim and South Asian/Ugandan, but before I do, I want to say that I support him simply because’s a democratic socialist with a once-in-a-generation political talent. Ghouls like Andrew Cuomo and his supporters seem to think political talent is making social media clips rather than the oratorical and forensic skills Mamdani has and that we traditionally associate with democratic leadership. I’ve been delighted to see Mamdani explain his positions and platform in language that is clear and complex. I’ve been delighted to see what a happy warrior he is, in the style of FDR, taking genuine pleasure in the give and take of adult argument and debate, speaking like a grownup, giving […]