Jewish Resistance to the Nazis

EVEN AFTER the extermination camps were liberated and the full extent of the Nazi murders began to emerge, the world at first refused to acknowledge that so many millions could have been...

Federal Aid to Parochial Schools:
A Debate

The issue of federal aid to parochial schools is often approached largely in terms of whether such aid is compatible with the separation between church and state. Yet many other questions of social policy are involved here as well. We have therefore invited two writers who take radically opposing views of how federal aid to private schools would affect it, to argue their cases for readers of "Commentary."

Ben Gurion Against the Diaspora:
Three Comments

In an address before the World Zionist Congress, which met last December in Jerusalem, David Ben Gurion reiterated his belief that Jewish life in the Diaspora has a dim future. "Commentary" invited three prominent American-Jewish intellectuals to explore some of the wider implications of Ben Gurion's speech.

Ethics & Eichmann

OscAR HANDLIN, a professor of history at Harvard and a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY, here comments on JACOB ROBINSON'S article, which appeared last month, "Eichmann & the Question of...

Refugees in Europe, 1957-1958, Report of the Zellerbach Commission

THE materials in this document inspire, in the mind of this reviewer, dismal reflections about the general defensiveness and unimaginative inertia of the Western powers...

Nationalism and History. Essays on Old and New Judaism, by Simon Dubnow

ON THE evening of December 8, 1941, the Germans, having taken the Latvian city of Riga, were herding a group of women and aged Jews out of the Ghetto and into buses when one of the guards opened...

Zionist Ideology and World Jewry:
Reflections on a Conference

I began to pull my thoughts together on the beach at Ascalon.

Civil Rights After Little Rock
The Failure of Moderation

A challenge to the moderate approach to the question of Negro rights.

An Intimate Journal of the Dreyfus Case, by Maurice Paleologue

The American Jewish Committee
A Half-Century View

The American Jewish Committee long reflected the intellectual and social views of the community in which it had been established in 1906.

Do the Voters Want Moderation?
The Politics of Evasion

Oscar Handlin discusses election politics.

A Jewish Tourist's Guide to the U.S., by Bernard Postal and Lionel Koppman

America at Mid-Century, by Andre Siegfried

Does the People's Rule Doom Democracy?
Walter Lippman's Diagnosis of Western Decline

On the cover of the February, 1955, Atlantic, the artist has skillfully caught the mood of Walter Lippmann's new book.

The American Jewish Pattern, After 300 Years:
The Recent Decades — the Prospect Ahead

In a simpler past the Jews were able to explain themselves as immigrants passing through a melting pot on the way toward being one with other Americans in all but religion.

Adventure In Freedom: First Chapter:
The Emergence of the American Jewish Pattern

In its brief history, the struggling outpost of the Dutch West India Company on the Hudson had already seen many a curious sight.

The Golden Door, by J. Campbell Bruce

Early American Jewry, by Jacob R. Marcus

America and the Intellectuals. A Symposium

THIS collection of essays evokes immediate surprise. After all, moderation and good sense are not what we have come to expect of intellectuals writing about America. The last few decades of...

Freedom or Authority in Group Life?
Voluntary Agreements Work, Our Experience Teaches Us

IN THE heat of national conflict Americans have often found it useful to turn for insight to the lessons of their history. It may equally be valuable for American Jews to do so in the midst...

Shall We Slow Down on FEPC?: Party Maneuvers and Civil Rights Realities

SPEEDING down in taxis from their Loop or near-Loop hotels to the convention Amphitheater, and especially under a prevailing westerly wind, most delegates were aware that they were coming...

The Immigration Fight Has Only Begun:
Lessons of the McCarran-Walter Setback

The passage of the McCarran-Walter Bill has frustrated five years of effort to reform our immigration laws.

American Jewry and the Civil War, by Bertram Wallace Korn

RABBI KoRN has gathered in this volume the fruits of years of earnest research. Wisely abandoning the familiar ground others have covered again and again, particularly the chronicle of...

How U. S. Anti-Semitism Really Began:
Its Grass-Roots Source in the 90's

BETWEEN 1913 and 1920, in that portentous period that brought so many other changes to the United States and to the world, anti-Semitism became, for the first time, a significant force in...

Pilgrim People, by Anita Libman Lebeson; and A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, edited by Morris U. Schappes

BY COMMON acceptance, Jewish history begins in the United States with the landing of the first handful of Jews in New Amsterdam in I654. As the 3ooth anniversary of that event approaches, its...

Do Israeli Ties Conflict with U.S. Citizenship?: America Recognizes Diverse Loyalties

Dorothy Thompson's fears are groundless.

Jews in Transition, by Albert I. Gordon

Group Life Within the American Pattern:
Its Scope and Its Limits

“These people associate as easily as they breathe,” wrote Fredrika Bremer of the Americans in 1853.

The American Political Tradition, by Richard Hofstadter

FOR the last quarter-century and more, a dull dead hand has rested over the writing of American political history. This aspect of the past is universally accounted important: every schoolboy...

The Study of Man: New Paths in American Jewish History

The low status of writing in American Jewish history has been an open secret for two decades or more, but only recently has dissatisfaction become general and vocal.