Corey Robin's Blog

The writings and posts about 9/11 in the last 48 hours tend to follow an arc. They begin with people’s personal narratives of the day, where they were when they heard the news, how they felt, and then some larger reflections on the 25 years of history that followed. I want to do something similar, only I want to turn the personal wheel of history backward. Twenty-five, or maybe 26, years before 9/11, I had my first encounter with the World Trade Center. My family had recently returned from living in Argentina and Uruguay. We had settled in Chappaqua, a suburb thirty miles north of New York City. Friends from Argentina came to visit. We took them to Manhattan. One […]

One of the things that Leo Strauss does quite well, as a writer, which I never really noticed before, is that when he rehearses the arguments of others—what we today would call a lit review—he provides a genuine sense of drama to his account. That is, lit reviews are often the occasion, in our academic literature, for showing the reader that you have done your due diligence as a scholar or for offering an account of what everyone else gets wrong, thereby setting yourself up for giving to the reader what’s right, what’s correct, what’s true. Strauss doesn’t do that. Or he doesn’t do that in an obvious way. Instead, though he disagrees with all the other accounts that he’s […]

Two of my favorite historians, Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman, are teaching a course, starting in mid-September, at the New York City DSA Academy—yes, an actual socialist school for the left!—that I think will be of interest to a wide range of readers of this blog. It’s called “Red New York: A History of the Left in America’s Most Radical City.” Seems pretty timely and relevant, no? There are just five classes, and having listened to both Josh and Steve for years, I can tell you that there are not two people who know more about the NYC and the left and are better pedagogues than these two! Seems like a real treat. You can sign up here.

Gloria Steinem, who just died, said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” Hear, hear, for the writing life, and for a woman affirming its centrality, above and beyond other goods and values, including motherhood. Incidentally, one of the really nice things about the unjustly criticized Devil Wears Prada 2 is the last scene, where Meryl Streep says to Anne Hathaway, by way of discussing the sacrifices she has made over the years for her career as a journalist and an editor, including sacrifices foisted on her children, “But boy, I love to work, don’t you?” I thought it was a gutsy way to end the movie, particularly […]

The following was from the introduction I’m writing with Alex Gourevitch for a new translation of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. I say was because I just had to cut it. It doesn’t work. But I thought I’d share it here, as a public service. If you’re ever the victim of antisemitic insults and want to know what to do, check out how a master rhetorician—Heinrich Heine—dealt with that kind of abuse, though please don’t use the homophobia he does in response! Heine forges one last weapon for his comic arsenal, which later writers like Kraus and Jewish American comedians will borrow and refine. At the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, the Jewish comedian Lewis Black describes the weapon thus: […]

In a recent post, Jodi Dean offers the most radical analysis of AI that I’ve seen. Using a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and her theoretical smarts and humor, Dean detects a far significance to the loss of reading that Large Language Models are enabling and pushing, far deeper than what we’ve all been fretting about with the decline of reading skills, student literacy, and all that. According to Dean, Lacan tells us that language—and, through language, we might infer reading—is what infants learn through their separation from the mother (the mother in scare quotes; it’s really whoever is the provider of care). Language is how—or a representation of the fact that—the infant learns that its mother has desires independent from […]

It seems like we’ve been going through an epidemic of plagiarism scandals for the last couple of decades. (This is a topic I’ve written about a lot.) You see it in the political elite. Where once upon a time Joe Biden’s plagiarism of Neil Kinnock destroyed his presidential campaign (in 1988), politicians, even Supreme Court justices (paging Neal Gorsuch), routinely get exposed for plagiarism, and it doesn’t affect them at all. Same goes for journalists. For a time, I thought this surfeit of scandal was a sign of a declining ruling class or something. Some loss of a sense of liberal ownership, of the connection between property and self and all that. (Not for nothing, Adam Smith seems to have […]

I don’t have a problem with the idea that what wins in New York City is not the same as what wins in Iowa, that the US is a big country with all kinds of diversity, etc. But when I read an article in the New York Times like this—so prominently featuring a photograph like this—I don’t see Iowa, or what a moderate Democrats needs to do to win in Iowa. I see an Upper East Side Jewish guy’s idea of what a moderate Democrat in Iowa looks like and needs to do. Ben Rhodes, who wrote the article, grew up on the Upper East Side of New York, got an MFA at NYU, was so mobilized by a sense […]

Who was the first to come up with the “wages of whiteness” thesis, broadly construed as a theory of how racism works and functions in a hierarchical society? I’m not referring to Roediger’s book by that title, since the theory predates his book, as you can see below. I’m more interested in the general idea of it, which we can see across Europe and North America and across several centuries. For example, Ludwig Börne, a Jewish convert to Christianity, wrote this about German antisemitism in 1832: The poor Germans! Living on the bottom floor, oppressed by the seven floors of the upper classes above them, they resolve their feeling of anxiety by speaking about people who live even further below […]

I hesitate to give this issue any attention, lest it suck out more oxygen than it already has from Abdul El-Sayed’s inspiring campaign and yesterday’s victory in Michigan. But here goes. This morning, in his victory speech, El-Sayed stated: To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters. Usually, campaign rhetoric doesn’t tell us much. But in the context of other conventional political statements about American Jews and Israel, what El-Sayed says here speaks volumes. Simply compare it […]