Irving Kristol: The National Prospect

To commemorate COMMENTARY's 50th anniversary, the editors addressed the following statement and questions to Irving Kristol:

The National Prospect

To commemorate Commentary's fiftieth anniversary, the editors addressed the following statement and questions to a group of American intellectuals:

Countercultures

The counterculture that emerged in the United States in the 1960's—and pretty much simultaneously in all the Western democracies—is certainly one of the most significant events in the last half-century of Western civilization.

Why Religion Is Good for the Jews

If a religious community experiences a very low birth rate and a very high rate of intermarriage—50 percent—what kind of future will it have? Obviously, not much of one.

The Future of American Jewry

For no other American ethnic group has the immigrant experience, including the experience of “Americanization,” remained so vivid as for the Jews.

Liberalism & American Jews

American Jews, in their overwhelming majority, are politically rooted in a liberal tradition. That is presumably why, as Milton Himmelfarb has noted, Jews in this country have the economic status of white Anglo-Saxon Episcopalians but vote more like low-income Hispanics. How to explain this anomaly, unique in the American experience?

American Jews and Israel A Symposium

Never, perhaps, has criticism of the state of Israel by American Jews been so open, so widespread, and so bitter as it is today. Commentary asked 49 American Jewish intellectuals: Have your attitudes toward Israel changed in recent years? To what extent do you believe Israel has fulfilled, or disappointed, the hopes vested in it? How do you feel about the upsurge of Jewish criticism of Israel?

How Has the United States Met Its Major Challenges Since 1945?

Exactly forty years ago, in the first issue of COMMENTARY (November 1945), its found- ing editor, the

Jewish Voters & the “Politics of Compassion”

The Political Dilemma of American Jews

Erik Erikson, in his biography of Luther, defines three critical stages in the life cycle of an individual. The first is a crisis in identity, the second a crisis of conscience, and the third a crisis of integrity. The American Jewish community is in the process of experiencing all these life-cycle crises simultaneously. Let us look at three changes in the American political landscape that were not anticipated, and that are now contributing to these crises.

Ideology & Supply-Side Economics

The terms being applied-by the media, by politicians, by economists-to President Reagan's economic program, and most particularly to the tax-cutting aspect of this program, are "bold," "revolutionary," "a risky experiment," and so on. There is nothing really bold, or revolutionary, or experimental about this program. Nor is it at all difficult to understand.

About Equality

There would appear to be little doubt that the matter of equality has become, in these past two decades, a major political and ideological issue.

Is the Urban Crisis Real?

The following exchange was occasioned by Irving Kristol's "Urban Civilization & Its Discontents" which appeared in July.

Urban Civilization & Its Discontents

It is in the nature of democratic countries that, sooner or later, all serious controversy--whether it be political, social, or economic--will involve an appeal to the democratic principle as the supreme arbiter of the rights and the wrongs of the affair.

I. The New York Intellectuals

Irving Howe's article, "The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique," has so many good things in it that one is loath to enter a dissent.

Deterrence

The following discussion between Irving Kristol and H. Stuart Hughes grew out of Mr. Hughes's article in our March issue, "The Strategy of Deterrence-A Dissenting Statement."

The Constitution of Liberty, by F. A. Hayek

IT IS generally forgotten that Edmund Burke and Adam Smith were both Whigs. In our textbooks of political theory, they are segregated from, and opposed to, one another: the romantic exponent of...

Mark Twain & Southwestern Humor, by Kenneth S. Lynn

There is nothing quite like American humorous writing in the literature of other nations. Nowhere else is humor so central to the literary tradition, so intimately revealing of the national...

The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith

DESPITE all the polysyllabic rhetoric about "social science," about exploratory hypotheses and scrupulous verification and laborious system-building, it is nevertheless the obvious case that...

The Study of Man: Class and Sociology

20th-century America is perhaps the most egalitarian society the civilized world has ever seen, yet nowhere has there been so much brooding over "class."

The Crucial Decade, by Eric F. Goldman

American Politics in a Revolutionary World, by Chester Bowles

The Web of Subversion: Underground Networks in the U. S. Government, by James Burnham

Persecution and the Art of Writing, by Leo Strauss

"BUT this much I can say about all those who have written and will write saying that they know the nature of the subject which is my most serious interest . . . in my opinion it is impossible...

The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy, by J. L. Talmon

“Civil Liberties,” 1952—A Study in Confusion:
Do We Defend Our Rights by Protecting Communists?

Heard ye not lately of a man That went beside his witt, And naked through the citty rann Wrapt in a frantique fitt? THE above tantalizing bit of 7 thcentury verse was quoted recently...

Is Jewish Humor Dead?
The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Joke

IT IS known that the surest way of killing a joke is to explain it, and humor has, in self-defense, made an especially comic figure of the man who would earnestly analyze it. Thus humor and...

Witch Hunt: The Revival of Heresy, by Carey McWilliams

WHEN Lincoln Steffens, after his trip to Russia, announced "I have seen the Future and it works," he coined an epitaph that may appropriately be inscribed on the tombstone of zoth-century...

Classics and Commercials, and The Little Blue Light, by Edmund Wilson

"HE HAS a genuine classical taste, he is not often influenced by fads, and he reads, and writes about what he reads, because he honestly enjoys doing so. Literature is for him not a pretext for...

Einstein: The Passion of Pure Reason:
The Cosmic Religion of the Mathematician

In Philipp Frank's biography, Einstein: His Life and Times, we read the following anecdote.