Is There a Jewish Art?

Is there a Jewish art? First they build a Jewish Museum, then they ask, Is there a Jewish art? Jews! As to the question itself, there is a Gentile answer and a Jewish answer.

Psychoanalysis Americanized

In addition to being practiced by professionals, psychoanalysis is used to some degree by most of us to explain things to ourselves.

The Trial and Eichmann

Can one really believe that the trial of Adolf Eichmann will deter mass murderers in the future, or that it will advance international relations?

Six American Poets

Ginsberg's "Kaddish" is a take-off on the Jewish prayer for the dead, not as it is printed in the prayer book but as it might occur in the mind of a contemporary mourner.

The Study of Man: Community, Values, Comedy

SOCIOLOGICAL studies expose their areas of inquiry as under a huge searchlight. There is an absence of shading, but this only makes the image presented by systematic research seem...

The Watch, by Carlo Levi

EVERY place has its own kind of time. This includes the pace of its people in their work, entertainment, action-the rate of speed at which things move and happen there. But the time of a...

The Nice American, by Gerald Sykes

SYKEs's novel has hit on something that seems to be budding among American intellectuals: the impulse to join in the leadership of United States society as it is-or, at least some would say, as...

On the Horizon: The Psychoanalysts and the Writer

Spouting liquid fire at anyone who may dare disagree with them, two psychoanalytic doctors have gone over the top with books just published into an area of the human spirit which their master had declared a scientific No Man's Land.

Jewish Identity in a Free Society:
On Current Efforts to Enforce “Total Commitment”

Few of us are duplicates of our grandfathers, in either thought, feeling, speech, or appearance.

The Communist:
His Mentality and His Morals

The Englishman of Gilbert and Sullivan's era may have been born either a Liberal or a Conservative, but no one was ever born a Communist.

Does the Jew Exist?
Sartre's Morality Play About Anti-Semitism

In Considering Sartre's conception of the Jew and his relation to anti-Semitism we must not forget that Reflections on the Jewish Question (published by Schocken as Anti-Semite and Jew) was written immediately after the downfall of the Nazis. It was a moment of intense confusion as to the meaning of the terrible events that had just taken place and of uncertainty as to the attitudes and groupings that would now emerge in liberated France. The Occupation had enlivened the current of anti-Semitism among Frenchmen of all classes. With the return of those Jews who had escaped the German hangman everyone was most anxious that this “question” should not once more stir up hidden rancors. Thus, as Sartre tells us, in the midst of the general greeting of returned prisoners and deportees not a word about the Jews, for fear of irritating the anti-Semites. This testimony is supported by André Spire's account, in his preface to Bilan Juif, of the difficulties experienced in finding a publisher in Paris by those who wished to speak of what had happened. “There has been too much hate,” they were told. “Let's have a love story.”

The Herd of Independent Minds:
Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture?

The basis of mass culture in all its forms is an experience recognized as common to many people.

Moses, by Martin Buber

East River, by Sholem Asch

Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, by Martin Buber; and The Story of the Baal Shem (Tov), by Dr. J. L. Snitzer

In Time and Eternity: A Jewish Reader, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer

Pledged to the Marvelous

"Tell me where all lost years are . . ." -John Donne MY dear Herberg: Your confession of faith in the ability of Judaism to go beyond Marxism in solving the problems of the oth century...

Island in the Atlantic, by Waldo Frank

The Perennial Philosophy, by Aldous Huxley; and Vedanta for the Western World, by Christopher Isherwood

David the King, by Gladys Schmitt

The Inner World of the Hasid

Nothing could be more difficult for the modern mind to grasp than the reality of Hasidism—the mystical movement that flourished in Poland in the 18th and 19th centuries and still exercises a far-flung influence on Jewish religious thinking and culture today.

The Tables of the Law, by Thomas Mann

Joseph was the last of the Fathers, and after his time the children of Israel were no longer a family of epic individuals but a nation, a mass.

Now, while an individual forms himself by imitating in his own way the actions and moods of other individuals, real or partly real or wholly imagined, a mass is given form by the acknowledgment of universals and obedience to laws.