Oscar Handlin
The agonizing difficulty of finding loopholes in existing law through which to draw into this country even a few survivors of Europe's disaster offers a pitiful commentary upon the reversal of the historic American attitudes towards immigration.
Stephen Spender
In September of 1946, a meeting of European intellectuals was held in Geneva.
Leo Srole
Allied troops sweeping across Germany early in 1945 reacted to Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, with incredulity, revulsion, and fury.
Will Herberg
Until nine or ten years ago, I was a thoroughgoing Marxist.
Alvin Johnson
Life, Mr. Justice Holmes used to say, is made up mainly of problems that can never be solved.
Milton R. Konvitz
Early last January a letter was found in Brooklyn near a house that had just burned down.
Nathan Glazer
If some of my best friends are right, and the big thing right now is to show that the Jew is as common a common man as the next, Arthur Koestler's Thieves in the Night is the finest thing that has happened to the Jews since Benny Leonard.
Sidney Hertzberg
The meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York in the fall of 1946 was the most revealing international gathering since the end of World War II.
Louis Berg
The publication of Gerald Johnson's full-length, heavily documented biography of the late Adolph S. Ochs, “the man who built the New York Times,” affords us an excellent opportunity to study one of the key figures of our era and the social surroundings that produced him.
Martin Buber
Ahasid who was traveling to Mezbizh in order to spend the Day of Atonement near the Baal Shem was forced to interrupt his journey for something or other.
Daniel Bell
The resources of the social sciences are called upon more and more frequently to deal with everyday problems of our society, particularly those arising from conflict and friction between groups.
Reader Letters
Letters on “I Wish They Wouldn't Do That,” from the October Commentary.
Reviewed by David T. Bazelon
Reviewed by Heinz Politzer
Reviewed by Theodor Gaster
Reviewed by Mordecai S. Chertoff
Robert Weltsch
THE twenty-second Zionist Congress met in Basel against a background of tension and violence in Palestine, with the Jewish DP's still waiting in the detention camps-and with a sense of the...
Karl Polanyi
THE first century of the Machine Age is drawing to a close amid fear and trepidation. Its fabulous material success was due to the willing, indeed the enthusiastic, subordination of man to...
N. A. Pelcovits
THAT many Jews who reached intellectual maturity in the age of Hitler reject and despise the fact of their Jewishness is a family secret we can no longer keep either from the children or the...
Raymond Rosenthal
FOR almost two decades, Isaak Babel maintained a place in Soviet literature as an obsolete but durable survivor of a moment of romantic elan that came with the revolution and quickly...
Isaak Babel
ALL the men of our circle: brokers, shopkeepers, employees of banks and shipping companies, had their children take music lessons. It was a regular mania. Our fathers in their impotent...
A. H. Raskin
AMERICAN unions, grown strong under fourteen years of protective legL 1 islation fostered by President Roosevelt, enter Year One of the Republican Resurgence with no clear-cut program...
Milton Kaplan
We have tried words before-always in vainTo strip the growing tumor from the brain, And still we pick and probe with words to find The fingered root of madness in the mind. Perhaps if we used...
Harold Rosenberg
"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...
Meyer Levin
TWENTY years ago when I was fresh out of college I came to Palestine during a wanderyear, and was excited by the spirit of the Jewish pioneers, the halutzim who were rebuilding the land. I was...
Sidney Hertzberg
Stirring on the Left IN THE United States, which matured industrially and politically later than Europe, it was inevitable that progressive forces should mature later too. The kind of...
Jacob Sloan
I was this screaming boy, screaming (this was no dream) against the barber's crawling clip, the shorn-hair-plastered hands waving a two-bladed, crisscross knife at my childhood, that fell on my...
Marcella Tow
THE day Lefty Louie was executed, sorrow descended upon our neighborhood like a fog. Leftv was a Jew. He had committed a murder, and he was being punished. Lefty was one of the neighborhood...
Martin Buber
The Baal Shem said: “I owe everything to the bath. To immerse oneself is better than to mortify the flesh. Mortifying the flesh weakens the strength you need for devotions and teaching, the bath of immersion heightens this strength.”
Nathan Glazer
THE recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Society in Chicago (Hotel Stevens, December 2730) brought together perhaps ,ooo people who call themselves sociologists-mostly...
Reader Letters
Letters on Louis Berg's "The Americanism of Adolph S. Ochs."
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
IN THE eyes of the British public, Victor Gollancz is probably one of the outstanding Jewish laymen in the country. When one considers the fact that he is neither especially active in Jewish...
Reviewed by Kurt List
Really The Blues is the life story of the jazz clarinetist Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow, written by Mezzrow himself with the help of Bernard Wolfe. Born of a lower-middle class Jewish 192BOOKS IN...
Reviewed by Bertram D. Wolfe
IN FORM, Louis Fischer's new book seems to be one more in the flood of journalists' distillations of wartime adventures. This is unfortunate because Mr. Fischer's journalistic practices do...
Reviewed by Irving Howe
PAUL GOODMAN must be granted two excellent qualities: breadth of interest and ready identity. He assumes simultaneously the roles of novelist, moralist, politician, literary critic, and...
Reviewed by Mordecai S. Chertoff
Norbert Muhlen
“Give me two weeks and the proper machinery and I will change the so-called mind of the American people on any given subject.”
Sidney Hook
The terms “transition” and “crisis” are two great semantic beacons of our times.
James Wechsler
Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death his name has been taken in vain by friends and foes alike.
Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein
Spelling reform and the cleaning of icons are, to some members of the older Russian generation, the two unforgivable sins committed by the Bolsheviks.
Hayim Nahman Bialik
A Poem.
J. L. Teller
Two Arab armies, Najada and Futuwah, have been sharing the limelight of Palestine news dispatches with Hagana, central Jewish resistance movement, and the two Jewish dissident groups, Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern group.
Moses Lasky
It is a discouraging commentary on the world's sanity and its obtuseness to history that the question whether America is home or exile need even be asked.
Herbert B. Ehrmann
Dr. Israel Knox's thoughtful article, “Is America Exile or Home?” asks whether Jews in America can develop “The Good Jewish Life.”
David Scheinert
In all simplicity the Shulamite confesses to the daughters of Jerusalem: “But mine own vineyard have I not kept.”
Sidney Hertzberg
The problem that the British Labor government faced was whether it could establish a viable socialist state in the inadequate area of the world known as the United Kingdom.
Ethel Rosenberg
My Aunt Yetta examined the display of cookies on the counter.
Solomon Maimon
My return journey to Hamburg was agreeable, but here I fell into circumstances of the deepest distress.
Jerome Himelhoch
In digging down to the roots of prejudice, social scientists have long been dissatisfied with the conception of the individual as a bundle of separate likes and dislikes.
Reviewed by Diana Trilling
Reviewed by Harold Rosenberg
Reviewed by William Petersen
Reviewed by Harold Kaplan
Reviewed by Alvin Johnson
Malcolm Ross
A year has passed since the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee ended active operations.
David T. Bazelon
Henry A. Wallace is the “uncommon man” whom many liberals propose as leader of the well-known Common Man, whose century is supposed to be the present one.
Samuel H. Flowerman
Prophetic voices are again warning American Jews that their economic position spells trouble for them—especially if there is a major depression.
Solomon F. Bloom
Moving from one continent to another is a confusing experience.
Stephen Spender
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco) exists under the charter of the United Nations, which called upon the members of UN to create an organization to promote the cause of peace by means of international cooperation in science, education, and culture.
Heinz Politzer
In 1772, Issachar Falkensohn Behr published his Poems of a Polish Jew in the German language in Mitau and Leipzig.
Meyer Levin
On flat lands bordering the Huleh swamp, at the northern end of Palestine, the kibbutz Cfar Blum is being built by a collective group known as the Anglo-Baits.
Sidney Hertzberg
The new Truman policy was not simply a policy for Greece and Turkey.
Henry Steig
My Father, who was born in Lemberg, now better known as Lvov, in Austrian Poland, came to New York in 1903, at the age of twenty-eight.
Simone Luzzatto
. . . Our soul is compounded for the most part of divers and dissimilar pieces, each of which upon varying occasions presents its peculiar semblance; whence it arises that to describe the nature and condition of one single man is a thing most arduous and difficult, the more so if we insist upon referring all his acts to one Criterion and Idea.
Nathan Glazer
If, as Sidney Hook wrote recently, the two great semantic beacons of our time are the terms “transition” and “crisis,” then a third term is perhaps necessary to capture the special quality of this transition and this crisis.
Reviewed by Mordecai S. Chertoff
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
Reviewed by Milton R. Konvitz
Reviewed by Jacob Glatstein
Reviewed by William Barrett
Reviewed by Diana Bernstein
Ziviah Lubetkin
The Ghetto was burning. For days and nights it flamed, and the fire consumed house after house, entire streets.
Elliot E. Cohen
Perhaps the best way to approach our subject is to set down the points upon which the articulate in the Jewish community seem to agree.
Charles Abrams
The day after Lincoln's birthday last, a New York court upheld a compact among property owners in Queens County forever barring sale of their houses to Negroes.
Kurt List
At the moment, Jerome Kern seems destined to be remembered as a primal source of tuneful ballads for the All-Time Hit Parade—indeed, this is his role in Hollywood's technicolor canonization of the composer, When the Clouds Roll By.
Paul W. Massing
What reasons prompted the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis?
Mark Raven
It is strange (returning after a long visit to America) to rediscover how closely knit is British Jewry.
Ernest Aschner
If Uncle Sam is now very much the man in the middle in the Middle East, it is not solely because Britain has cried out for help.
Milton Klonsky
When my grandfather was alive he could walk up and down six thousand years as though it were a little narrow room; for him, all history could be contracted to the span of memory; and, since the Jews were the People of History, the memory of each one was a monad which represented the history of all.
Sidney Hertzberg
In Moscow, a council of foreign ministers wrangled hopelessly to write a peace treaty for the common German enemy.
Simone Luzzatto
In Philosophical Questions and scholastic debates, once arguments and counter—arguments have been marshaled and exhausted, it is customary to resort to the arms of inexorable and sometimes invincible authority.
Milton Himmelfarb
As the first encyclopedic contribution of a school of Jewish learning relatively new to these shores, the publication of volume one of The Jewish People: Past and Present is an event of some magnitude in one area of the social sciences.
Reviewed by Harold Rosenberg
Reviewed by Alfred McClung Lee
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
Leo S. Baeck
Why are Jews and Judaism in the world? No one would dare to say that either is a comfortable thing for the world.
Milton Hindus
I recently read The Great Gatsby for the first time, and it struck me that in all the praise of the book I had heard from both Jews and non-Jews, something important had been omitted—that viewed in a certain light the novel reads very much like an anti-Semitic document.
Franz L. Neumann
It is difficult to educate; it is more difficult to re-educate; it is well-nigh impossible to re-educate a foreign nation.
Meyer Levin
From the observations of this magazine's editor on Jewish culture in America, I conclude that a large number of American Jews are now developed far enough in their consciousness as Americans to consider themselves as Jews.
Uri Zvi Gruenberg
A Poem.
Benno Weiser
The family of Ecuadorians who in 1938 invited me to spend Christmas with them were surprised when I rose to leave after dinner instead of waiting to go with them to the misa de gallo (Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve).
Franz Landsberger
The synagogue, as is well known, was not the earliest abode of Jewish worship.
Ely Jacques Kahn
After reading Mrs. Wischnitzer-Bernstein's article on synagogue architecture and pondering her conclusions, one realizes anew what a baffling task faces any temple committee entrusted with the mission of deciding upon the character, design, and spirit of a proposed edifice.
Eric Mendelsohn
In this time of troubles, all religious denominations are more or less aware that services on Sabbaths and Holy Days cannot suffice to base our total life on the great moral principles underlying the religious edifice, that a church or a temple must remain a mere symbol unless faith is supported by ever-present spiritual guidance and the permanent education of the entire congregation.
Percival and Paul Goodman
As Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein has adequately shown, there is no living tradition of construction and style in the architecture of synagogues.
Sidney Hertzberg
After two-and-one-half weeks of intensive lobbying and tactical maneuvering by all interested parties, the Special Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations emerged with a resolution.
J. M. O'Neill
One does not have to go far in civil liberty activities to realize that the whole field is confused by categorical slogans and historical myths.
Harry Gersh
Behind organized labor's rise to power in the 30's were vast economic movements and tides, government laws, and mass pressures. But, also, there were the organizers.
Nathan Nata Hannover
It is said in Tractate Aboth: “Simon the Just was one of the last survivors of the Great Assembly. He used to say: Upon three things is the world based: upon the Torah, upon divine service, and upon the practice of charity. Rabban Simeon, the son of Gamaliel, said: By three things is the world preserved: by truth, by judgment, and by peace.”
Arnold M. Rose
Books on race prejudice and anti-Semitism have shown a significant shift in the past few years.
Siegfried Kracauer
Books on race prejudice and anti-Semitism have shown a significant shift in the past few years.
Reviewed by Harold Rosenberg
Reviewed by William Phillips
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
Joel Carmichael
The collapse of Western Europe as a decisive international factor, now seen to be an astonishingly persistent postwar condition, has come about on so grandiose a scale that it is difficult to avoid falling into bombastic hyper-generalization to describe it.
Malcolm Ross
The city of St. Louis lies at the geographical center of the United States.
Will Herberg
“Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky-high, or rob a British bank. . . .the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.”
Mario Rossi
Italy today is one of the very few countries in Europe where almost no trace of anti-Semitism is to be found.
Mark Raven
When Arthur and I met Vic in 1945, soon after his election as one of the new young Labor members of Parliament, it was inevitable that one of us should say: “Wouldn't old Tubby have been delighted?”
Alfred Werner
Early in the morning of July 21, 1944 all German radio stations suddenly interrupted their programs, and Hans Fritsche, Chief of the Radio Division of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda, came to the microphone to announce that the Fuehrer would address the nation.
Waldo Frank
One wintry day in 1886, a lecturer on International Law and South American Diplomacy in Columbia's School of Political Economy sat at the window of the university building on Madison Avenue, and against the background of St. Patrick's Cathedral watched the striking horsecar men parade in the snow and mud.
Gerda Luft
With the end of the wartime boom, the perennial problems of the Jewish economy in Palestine return to the center of the stage.
Sidney Hertzberg
Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a flash of realism, had called it a war of survival. In this sense it was a war won.
Morris Freedman
During the early 1930s, my brother and I contributed considerably to the litter of Crotona Park.
Israel Abrahams
Men leave their homes because they must, or because they will.
Hans Kohn
The late Professor Cassirer in his last study, The Myth of the State, which he had almost completed before his death, describes as the most alarming feature in the development of modern political thought the appearance of a new force: mythical thought.
Reviewed by David Baumgardt
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
Reviewed by Sidney Morgenbesser
Reviewed by George Becker
Reviewed by Maurice Goldbloom
David Bernstein
When you come back from Europe in the summer of 1947, it is not the plentiful food nor the well-stocked stores nor the undamaged cities that startle you most.
Elliot E. Cohen
We see by the papers that Hollywood is to give us a cycle of movies on anti-Semitism.
C. Hartley Grattan
Any aspect of British foreign policy must, to be understood, be viewed as part of a complex network whose ultimate purpose is to support the security of the United Kingdom, its empire, and the British Commonwealth.
Martin Thomas
“My life resembles a vaudeville act with many changes of costume, but I am not a ham. .I am only trying to be obedient.”
Lewis Corey
The crisis of the individual arises out of the crisis of liberal democracy, a form of society built on the recognition of man's right to liberty, personal identity, and moral responsibility.
Leo Lowenthal
Why did Heine become a Christian?
Sidney Hertzberg
The division of the world into two parts, long plain for all to see, was formalized.
Carl Dreher
Is the time not far distant when Jews must decide to “fight political nationalism uncompromisingly and on principle, inside Jewish life, as well as outside”?
Solomon F. Bloom
Nothing about the Jews is fixed, not even the reactions they evoke.
Reader Letters
Jewish Prayers.
Samuel J. Hurwitz
It is understandable that we should have a flood of books on German history, all bearing the imprint of a kind of compulsive urgency.
Reviewed by David T. Bazelon
Reviewed by Sidney Hertzberg
Reviewed by Meyer Schapiro
Reviewed by Mordecai S. Chertoff
Mary McCarthy
A visiting Existentialist wanted recently to be taken to dinner at a really American place.
Artur Schnabel
The time was autumn 1945, the place an auditorium of the University of Chicago.
James Wechsler
Third party talk is rising again.
Irving Kristol
The stigma: “Anyone who is not instinctively disgusted by the Synagogue is unworthy of a dog's respect.”
L. H. Grunebaum
As a father I should be pleased with our religious school, and as a member of the Board of Education of our Reform temple I should be proud of it.
Hans Bendix
The Danes are the most homogeneous national group in Europe.
Karl Frucht
When the convoys arrived the first truck always carried the women prisoners.
Nathan Halper
My parents had a small basement restaurant.
Sidney Hertzberg
The imperialist network that had once fanned out of Western Europe and encircled the globe was falling apart.
Reader Letters
These folk tales and legends from Yemen—the land known in Biblical times as Sheba—are a unique part of Jewish cultural history.
Ben B. Seligman
Most American economists—60 per cent, if we are to believe a recent Business Week survey—think that a serious economic collapse will take place within the next five years, and a large proportion of these believe the collapse unavoidable.
Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal
Reviewed by George Becker
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
Reviewed by Thomas A. Cowan
Francois Bondy
It is inevitable that the political question of finding a home for Europe's displaced Jews should claim the center of discussion.
Joel Carmichael
Perhaps the most striking thing about the Marshall Plan was the spurt of galvanized enthusiasm with which it was greeted in Western Europe.
Heinz Politzer
The poet Heinrich Heine once called himself un romantique défroqué, an unfrocked romantic.
Saul Steinberg
FIVE DRAWINGS SAUL...
Cecil Roth
As a Cisatlantic, I obviously lack a principal qualification to discuss “Jewish Culture in America,” but I am fortified by the consideration that our problems in England and yours in the United States are not really dissimilar.
The news, last February, that Britain would refer the “Palestine question” to the United Nations, came against a background of increasing violence, ineffectively met, in the absence of a policy from London, by political improvisation by the Palestine Administration.
Dore Schary
To begin with, and not as apology but because the credit must go where credit is due, let me say Crossfire was produced by Adrian Scott, directed by Edward Dmytryk, and written by John Paxton.
Artur Schnabel
One day in spring—I think it was May—I took a train for Berlin.
Maurice Goldbloom
The majority of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine was able to claim, with some show of justice, that it was not dividing Palestine by any Solomonic sword but merely recognizing the fact that it had already been divided by the swords of Jews and Arabs.
Harry Gersh
My mother was a bad cook.
The vocation of these philosophers is at once made clear from their title of Therapeutae and Therapeutrides.
John Dewey
In the last year or so COMMENTARY has published a number of articles on recent work in the social sciences, under the heading “The Study of Man.”
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
Reviewed by Clement Greenberg
Reviewed by Siegfried Kracauer
Reviewed by Harold Rosenberg
Richard H. S.
When Mr. Bevin made his decision to refer the Palestine issue to UN, the sceptics talked about “the political atmosphere” of the United Nations and prophesied that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would commit themselves to support a clean-cut decision.
Carey McWilliams
With few exceptions, leaders of American Jewry seem to regard “social discrimination” as an insignificant manifestation of prejudice, hurtful, annoying, vexatious, but not really important.
Julien Benda
It would seem to me that what, in their inquiry, the editors of Commentary call the crisis of civilization could be called with fair exactness the crisis of Hellenic-Christian morality, and more exactly still the crisis of Socratic-Christian morality.
David Baumgardt
It is not only Jews who are too often tempted to consider culture the mere “marmalade added to the bread and butter of daily life.”
Hannah Arendt
Culture, as we understand it today, made its appearance rather recently and grew out of the secularization of religion and the dissolution of traditional values.
Jacob B. Agus
Mr. Cohen's article, it seems to me, fails to touch upon the core of the problem.
Benjamin Ginzburg
I cannot for the life of me see any sense in the idea of promoting a Jewish culture in America, any more than I can see any sense in the idea of promoting a Ginzburg culture or a Cohen culture.
Erwin R. Goodenough
I plan to quote a good many of the sentences in “Jewish Culture in America” in what I am writing on Hellenistic Judaism and its art, especially the protest against the isolation of cultures.
Leslie A. Fiedler
A Story.
A. H. Raskin
Among the songs that enjoyed a great vogue a year ago was a sprightly little number called “Accentuate the Positive.”
Sherry Mangan
To a sympathetic onlooker, it had seemed the nightmare was over.
Moshe Leib Halperin
A Poem.
Artur Schnabel
It was in 1921, just before Christmas, that I first came to the United States.
Maurice Goldbloom
It was not far from the meeting-place of the United Nations Assembly at Lake Success to the atomic experimentation station at Brookhaven, Long Island.
Charles Reznikoff
Captain Nichols was right, perhaps, when in answer to Ezra Stiles' question he said, in 1762, that there were no Jews in New Haven, although the Pintos had then been living there for at least three years.
Martin Buber
Martin Buber's introduction to Ten Rungs.
Arnold M. Rose
Today public opinion research is accepted as a respected branch of the social sciences.
Reviewed by David Daiches
Reviewed by Solomon F. Bloom
Reviewed by Edward N. Saveth
Reviewed by Charles Abrams
Samuel Gringauz
As we withdraw our attention from the events of the day, and a certain distance in time permits us a more general and stable view of things, it becomes increasingly clear that the years 1939-1945, together with the after-effects directly following the liberation, constitute the “great catastrophe” of Jewish history.
Jon Kimche
The Labor party had been for twenty-eight years among the staunchest advocates of the Balfour declaration, and among the severest critics of British failure to see it fully implemented.
Karl Jaspers
Europe's situation in the world has undergone a radical and rapid change, both outwardly and inwardly.
Kurt List
The recent concern with creating Jewish culture in America has finally led to a long overdue interest in Jewish music.
Reader Letters
For the anti-Semite, there is no escape from the Jewish “problem.”
Robert S. Warshow
For most American intellectuals, the Communist movement of the 1930's was a crucial experience.
Herbert R. Northrup
As Malcolm Ross accurately predicted in the April COMMENTARY, the Republican leadership of the eightieth Congress exhibited no greater zeal for fair employment practice legislation than the Democratic leadership in previous sessions.
Maurice Goldbloom
Harry Truman, like Andrew Johnson, had inherited the Presidency in time to face an era of disillusionment, and to be confronted with problems not of his own making.
Ethel Rosenberg
Sometimes it's hard to realize my Uncle Julius is past eighty.
Edward C. Baldwin
Matthew Arnold's famous distinction between “Hebraism and Hellenism” is misleading, and rests upon a fundamental misconception of the spirit of the ancient Hebrews.
Ethel Goldwater
The victory of 19th-century feminism—it won for women such goods as higher education, birth control, legal rights, and self-support—has not, it appears, solved the “woman problem.”
Reviewed by George N. Shuster
Reviewed by Clement Greenberg
Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal
Reviewed by Theodor Gaster
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
1947
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