Joseph Robert Starobin was born in New York City in 1913, the son of Polish immigrants. From 1929 to 1936 he attended the College of the City of New York and New York University. He earned a B.S. in chemistry in 1936. During his undergraduate years Starobin was very active in student politics, particularly in the National Students League and in the Young Communist League. From 1934 to 1937 he worked as a chemist for a New York City firm, and in 1936 he married Norma Rosen. The couple had one child, Robert Saul Starobin (1939-1971), who became a noted New Left historian and social activist.
Starobin joined the Communist Party in 1934 and began work as editor of Young Communist League publications in New York City. From 1939 to 1942 he was the foreign editor of The New Masses. He held several positions at The Daily Worker from 1942 to 1954: foreign editor, European editor, and United Nations correspondent. In the early 1950's Starobin traveled extensively in the U.S.S.R. and eastern Europe, and he lived in the People's Republic of China in 1952 and 1953. While living in China he visited North Vietnam. In 1954, dubious about the applicability of communism to the American situation, Starobin left the Communist Party and worked until 1956 as a freelance correspondent for the Western European communist press. He was employed as an editor by the professional journal The Dental Times from 1958 to 1963.
In the 1960's Starobin began devoting more and more of his time to academic pursuits. To fulfill requirements for a doctoral degree he attended classes at Columbia University from 1963 to 1965. He was a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution in the summer of 1966, and a senior research fellow at Columbia University's Research Institute on Communist Affairs from 1965 to 1967. In the spring of 1968 Starobin taught at Yale University as a visiting lecturer, and later that year he became an instructor of political science at York University in Toronto. In 1969 he attempted to arrange peace talks between North Vietnam and the United States. Starobin obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1970 and continued teaching at York until his death in 1976.
Starobin wrote numerous books and articles throughout his life, and among his published works are Eyewitness to Indo-China (1954), Paris to Peking (1955), and American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957 (1970, based on his doctoral dissertation at Columbia). He was an acquaintance or friend of many political and intellectual figures in the United States and abroad, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who directed Starobin's doctoral work at Columbia.
