Corey Robin

Tag: antisemitism

Who’s scared and unwelcome at Harvard?

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Harvard today released two reports about the state of life on campus. One is on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias at Harvard. The other is about what has come to be called antisemitism, but which often includes or is nothing more than pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist sentiment and action. Before I say anything else, and because I might lose you as I get into this more, I want to highlight two critical paragraphs from the New York Times article on the two reports. The paragraphs get buried almost two-thirds of the way into the piece: The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 […]

Full Speed Ahead

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Last summer, long before the election and inauguration of Trump 2.0, I wrote a piece in The New Yorker, arguing that American Jews were returning to a form of politics they had perfected in Europe but abandoned in the United States. Surveying what happened on college campuses during the last year of Biden’s presidency, I warned that we were reverting to a kind of politics from the Middle Ages and early modern era that betrayed the democratic traditions of Jewish politics in the United States: Instead of organizing or joining democratic movements to fight racism, defend immigration, and build social democracy, Jewish leaders and donors supplicate sovereigns or would-be sovereigns who are antisemitic, or aligned with antisemitism, yet promise special protection for the Jews at home or in Israel. The […]