George Lichtheim
It is becoming a truism that for Britain much more than the Labor government's fate is at stake in the present struggle to deal with the country's economic problems.
Sherry Mangan
On the morrow of the recent French municipal elections, an arrogant and impatient voice was heard in France.
Thomas Mann
When at the beginning of the year 1889 the news began to spread from Turin and Basel of Nietzsche's mental breakdown, many of those, scattered throughout Europe, who already possessed a measure of understanding of the fateful greatness of this man may have repeated to themselves Ophelia's lamentation: “O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!”
Irving Kristol
Rabbi Milton Steinberg's little book, Basic Judaism, is in good part addressed to me, as one of those who “are groping to establish rapport with the Jewish tradition, standing at the synagogue's door ‘heart in, head out.’”
Josephine Ripley
Europe's DP's are not a drug on the market.
John Dewey
In his article, “The Attack on Western Morality” (COMMENTARY, November 1947), M. Julien Benda chose to include what he regards as pragmatic philosophy as a leading figure in that attack.
Elliot E. Cohen
Life being what it is, last year's publicity out of Hollywood to the effect that Twentieth Century-Fox was “lavishing its all” on its super-production of Gentleman's Agreement could not help but arouse a certain apprehensiveness.
Maurice Goldbloom
The delegates to the Assembly of the United Nations hurried from Lake Success to catch the ships and planes which would take them back to the countries in whose names they had spoken to an attentive world.
Harry Gersh
A delicatessen store man is different from a candy store man or a merchant, but not much.
Lord Macaulay
Mr. Warburton,—I recollect, and my honourable friend the Member for the University of Oxford will recollect, that when this subject was discussed three years ago, it was remarked, by one whom we both loved and whom we both regret, that the strength of the case of the Jews was a serious inconvenience to their advocate.
Gertrud M. Kurth
For hours,” says Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, “the black-haired Jew boy, diabolic joy in his face, waits in ambush for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood. . . .”
Reviewed by Martin Greenberg
Reviewed by Stephen Spender
Reviewed by G. Levi Della
Reviewed by Herbert B. Ehrmann
Reviewed by Samuel J. Hurwitz
David Horowitz
A World of dreams has come true against the background of twenty Centuries of martyrdom and a tenacious struggle for survival—this was the first, the emotional reaction to the United Nations decision on Palestine.
Oscar Handlin
Probably Columbus was not a Jew, but, then again, there is a possibility that he might have been.
Edmund Wilson
The death of Paul Rosenfeld has left me not only shocked at the unexpected loss of a friend, but with a feeling of dismay and disgust at the waste of talent in the United States.
David Bernstein
Sooner or later everyone, I suppose, succumbs to the urge to rediscover his own land.
Harry Schwartz
Outside the United States, the Soviet Union has the largest number of Jews living in any one country today.
Joseph H. Gumbiner
One of the more agreeable novelties of these dreary times is the series of interfaith meetings that go on in every American city, reaching their climax during Brotherhood Week.
Thomas Mann
As far as I can see, there are two mistakes that warp Nietzsche's thinking and become fatal to it.
Maurice Goldbloom
With the breakdown of the London Conference of Foreign Ministers, the struggle between Russia and the Western powers for control of the world entered a new phase.
James Baldwin
Harlem, physically at least, has changed very little in my parents' lifetime or in mine.
Ferdinand Gregorovius
A poem by Ferdinand Gregorovius.
Bruno Bettelheim
One of the major handicaps in com-batting anti-Semitism is the tendency to create in the mind's eye a single, simple, and unchanging type who represents The Anti-Semite.
Reviewed by George Becker
Reviewed by Milton Klonsky
Reviewed by N. A. Pelcovits
Reviewed by R. Travers Herford
Sidney Hook
Today philosophers are being asked to develop a philosophy that will make for peace, safeguard democracy, preserve the classical tradition, reinforce religious belief and practice, diminish the divorce rate, justify free enterprise, or strengthen the United Nations.
Hal Lehrman
Conflict over Kashmir filled the Security Council's agenda in the second week of February, but the corridors buzzed with Palestine.
Jon Kimche
There are few things more deceptive than large-scale maps of the Middle East.
Siegfried Kracauer
Psychiatry and particularly psychoanalysis are now enjoying an amazing vogue in this country.
Leslie A. Fiedler
A Story.
"Returned Chaplain"
This is the story of one who underwent a common experience, but found that it changed the trend of his life.
C. Wright Mills
The most impressive thing about the United Automobile Workers union is the spectacle it affords of ideas in live contact with power.
Jacob Sloan
The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's poorer plays.
Maurice Goldbloom
Mohandas Gandhi lay dead, and the world was a poorer place.
Grace Goldin
We had quite a Simchas Torah in Iowa City last year.
Reader Letters
These are the things which my sons and daughters shall do at my request.
Erwin R. Goodenough
Religion provided assertions which civilization in the past accepted as final answers to such basic questions as “Where do I come from?”
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
Reviewed by John Berryman
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
Reviewed by Heinz Politzer
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
G. E. R.
I am standing on a great square before a vast Gothic building—the city hall—in the heart of a medieval city.
Hal Lehrman
In a show of strength some months ago, thousands of Communist partisans paraded the streets of Milan dressed in American uniforms.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The Jews have one friend, the democrat. But he is a feeble protector.
John Marlowe
In the desperate search for a solution of the Palestine problem, one of the most vital elements of that problem remains an unknown factor—Arab nationalism.
Robert Weltsch
The only possible and sensible object of Jewish policy on Palestine at the present moment must be to avert war.
George Becker
One of the most exciting aspects of writing in America since the First World War has been what may be called the Great Inventory.
Fritz Becker
San Nicandro Garganico is a little town on the peninsula which forms the spur of the Italian boot.
Maurice Goldbloom
In 1939, when Hitler's troops marched into Prague, they did so ostensibly at the invitation and with the consent of the legal government of Czechoslovakia.
Florence Lowe
Along with other depressing phenomena of middle age I have developed what is known as “trombone eyesight,” an affliction that necessitates sliding a letter out to arm's length before being able to read it.
Ahad Ha'am
If the heathen of the old story, who wished to learn the whole of the Torah while he stood on one foot, had come to me, my reply would have been: “ ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness’—that is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary.”
Daniel Bell
The weakness of democratic leadership in a mass society is a persistent theme in contemporary political discussion.
Reviewed by James Baldwin
Reviewed by George N. Shuster
Reviewed by Heinz Politzer
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
Jean-Paul Sartre
If it is agreed that man may be defined as a being having freedom within the limits of a situation, then it is easy to see that the exercise of this freedom may be considered as authentic or inauthentic according to the choices made in the situation.
Hannah Arendt
When, on November 29, 1947, the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state were accepted by the United Nations, it was assumed that no outside force would be necessary to implement this decision.
Carey McWilliams
In The late 1920's the Yale News published an anonymous letter from a Jewish student criticizing the social discrimination practiced by the junior and senior societies.
Abraham J. Heschel
In our endeavor to shape a cultural pattern for American Jewish life, we might do well to look for some orientation that will help us determine our position in the stream of Jewish history.
Robert Bendiner
Gone are the days when only the so-called butcher-paper magazines printed articles about threats to civil liberties.
Alfred Werner
When the painter Chaim Soutine failed to turn up after the liberation of France, many of us believed that he had shared the fate of another artist of Jewish origin, the sculptor Moise Kogan, who had been deported from France and killed by the Nazis.
J. Glenn Gray
The sound of a wood-saw filled the winter air as I left the Ludwig Strasse and entered the grounds of the University.
Norman Bentwich
The charred shells of the burnt-out buildings of the Jewish boys' school and girls' school along the main street of Crater (oldest part of the colony of Aden and in fact the crater of an extinct volcano) are a symbol of the destruction which last December befell one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world.
Maurice Goldbloom
Many times since the end of the Civil War, the Democratic party had seemed on the verge of disappearing.
Earl Raab
Except for being mildly affronted by its logical perversity, we accepted Saturday morning attendance at what was called “Sunday school,” like everything else, as part of the inscrutable pattern of our days.
Meier Dizengoff
I want my death to be “with a kiss.”
Moses Kligsberg
Over the years in the American saga, the Jewish immigrant has become a well-worn character.
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
Reviewed by Elizabeth Hardwick
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
Reviewed by Stephen Seley
Reviewed by Joseph H. Gumbiner
Hal Lehrman
This inquiry, aimed at assessing the present tendencies of United States policy on Palestine, began only one brief week-end after the Friday of President Truman's thunderbolt recognition of Israel.
Richard H. S.
The longer I live in the world of practical politics, the more wary I become of attributing rationalistic calculation to the actions of governments and politicians.
Maurice Samuel
It is useless to try to explain why the rules of good English forbid you to say: “He made himself a non-perishable name by inventing an imperishable food.”
Samuel Gringauz
Almost as tragic as the story of the extermination of the Jews, is that of the surviving Jewish remnant.
Paul Tillich
Although we met late in our lives, Martin Buber and I soon realized that there were many points of agreement in the deepest levels of our thought and spiritual passion.
Jean-Paul Sartre
It is also as an attempt to escape that we must interpret the attitude some Jews assume toward their own bodies.
A. H. Raskin
Two of America's prime weapons in the cold war against Communism are the vitality of our democracy and the efficiency of our productive machinery.
J. L. Teller
How can one forget one's dread of the forest of Tarnopol, although removed in time by a quarter of a century?
Maurice Goldbloom
On May 15, 1948, Great Britain surrendered the mandate over Palestine which she had held for a quarter of a century.
Irving Howe
For some time I had heard fragmentary reports from several friends whose childhood was spent in Spruceton.
Saul Tschernichowsky
Saul Tschernichowsky was born in 1875 in the village of Michailovka, in the Russian Crimea, a birthplace that set him apart from most Hebrew writers of his generation, who grew up in the towns and larger cities of the Pale, in an atmosphere saturated with urbanism and pious orthodoxy.
Harold Orlansky
In recent years there has grown up a new theory of human behavior, based principally on certain aspects of psychoanalytic theory.
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
Reviewed by Martin Thomas
Reviewed by Theodor Gaster
Reviewed by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Ernst Simon
If one traces Jewish educational ideals back to the source documents of the Tannaitic period at the beginning of the Christian era, one inevitably meets many statements stressing the value of manual labor.
Robert Weltsch
Eyes are now turned towards the Aegean island of Rhodes, with its medieval Crusaders' fortress, and men ask: will the history of Palestine record a “Peace of Rhodes”?
Arnold W. Green
Many contributors to COMMENTARY have examined what they regard to be the psychological plight of the modem Jew.
Irving Howe
Only a handful of devotees still remember the three novels Daniel Fuchs wrote in the mid-30's.
George Weltner
It is almost two years now since Goering committed suicide in Nuremberg.
Jon Kimche
Oil is to Iraq what sex-appeal is to a woman; without it Iraq would have little attraction for the outside world.
Edward N. Saveth
A combination of diligent effort by alert citizens' groups with some happy accidents of politics has yielded a state university system in New York.
Alfred Kazin
For six weeks I lived with some hundred and thirty Europeans and Americans in a “castle” just out of Salzburg, Austria—Schloss Leopoldskron—which had been built for an Archbishop in the 18th century and acquired by Max Reinhardt in the 20th.
Maurice Goldbloom
On Friday, June II—four weeks after the proclamation of the State of Israel—peace of a sort descended on Palestine for the first time since the General Assembly's adoption of the partition resolution on November 29.
Jacob Glatstein
You're traveling from New York, so I'll try to give you a slight description of what it's like where I live.
The entire House of Israel is commanded to sanctify the Great Name, for it is written: I will be sanctified among the children of Israel; and they are warned not to desecrate it, for it is written: You should not desecrate my holy name.
Oscar Handlin
In the brief period of the past quarter-century we have seen a tragic succession of horrors—Smyrna to Auschwitz to Nagasaki—challenge the essential brotherhood of all people, and the assumption, upon which modem civilization rests, that personal dignity is inherent in the condition of human beings.
Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
Reviewed by Heinz Politzer
Reviewed by Milton R. Konvitz
Sherry Mangan
The failure of the average American “political observer” to predict postwar Europe's sudden electoral shifts has had one chief cause.
Pinchas Goldfeder
I was born in Riga in the year 1907 of respectable parents, and my father, a small merchant ambitious for his children, early directed me towards study that I might make some name for myself in one of the professions.
Israel Knox
The recent convention of the Zionist Organization of America, coming less than two months after the birth of the Republic of Israel, felt itself obliged to consider seriously the relations between American Jews and the new state.
Felix S. Cohen
For the first time in our history, it has been decreed by Congress that a government bureau may seize the possessions of Americans solely because they belong to a minority race.
Paul Weiss
Great literature is a universe framed in words.
Heinz Politzer
Since their arrival in Palestine in 1928, the Habimah Players have functioned as “State Theater,” though at that time the Jewish state was a vision rather than a reality.
Melvin J. Lasky
Several days after the anti-Semitic Kristallnacht outburst of November 8, 1938, a high Nazi conference was called in Berlin.
Maurice Goldbloom
There were many who saw in recent developments the beginning of a political realignment in the United States.
Harry Gersh
I was having a drink with this guy recently and he told me about his experiences in the war.
Gedaliah of Siemiatycze
Our master, Rabbi Judah the Pious, arrived together with his followers in Jerusalem on the New Year's Day of Marheshvan 5461 [1700].
Edward N. Saveth
The Civil War is a theme of unfailing attraction to the American historian; and if the sales of such books as Gone With the Wind and House Divided are an index of popular appeal, it is no less fascinating to the layman.
Reviewed by David T. Bazelon
Reviewed by Theodor Gaster
Reviewed by Maurice English
Reviewed by Ruth F. Boorstin
Reviewed by Sholom J. Kahn
Aubrey S. Eban
The peace on Israel's borders may be no more than the peace of a quiescent volcano; and the crisis of the state in its immediate external relationships remains unsolved.
Robert Pick
One day in the late 1930's, so the story goes, a newly-arrived refugee couple entered the grocery store of a small New England town and asked for oranges.
Hal Lehrman
Despite surface indications of ultimate victory over the Arabs, the friends of a Jewish state in Palestine still walk in dread of some sinister diplomatic maneuver to undermine or reverse the happy ending of the first chapter in Israel's brave new history.
Maurice Samuel
Of man's first disobedience, of the dark corners of the human heart, of the small beginnings of great transgressions—of these and of similar things Yitzhak Leibush Peretz sang at length in his folk tales.
Guenter Reimann
One of the more urgent mysteries, in a world where mysteries are becoming all too common, is the motive power behind the great expansionist drive of the Soviet Russian state.
Paul Goodman
I have no lively awareness of the Jewish community and its problems (their impact on me is unconscious).
Harold Rosenberg
The basis of mass culture in all its forms is an experience recognized as common to many people.
Maurice Goldbloom
In Lake success and Belgrade and Berlin, the pattern of conflict was the same.
Israel T. Naamani
When gold was discovered in California in 1848, adventurous men from every corner of the world came swarming in, and almost overnight transformed the land of somnolent missions and indolent presidios into rowdy mining camps and bustling boom towns.
S. Y. Agnon
Said Rabbi Kruspedai, in the name of Rabbi Yohanan: Three books are opened on Rosh Hashanah: one for the wholly righteous, one for the wholly wicked, and one for the intermediates.
Irving Kristol
Before the war, discussion of the “nature of of Nazism” threw up many intensely held and sharply conflicting viewpoints.
Reviewed by Daniel J. Boorstin
Reviewed by Anatole Broyard
Reviewed by Oskar Seidlin
James Wechsler and Nancy F. Wechsler
One year ago a presidential commission headed by General Electric's Charles E. Wilson produced a document that has no exact parallel in American history.
John Marlowe
At this writing there appears to be little danger of the renewal of large-scale fighting in Palestine during the next few weeks.
Solomon F. Bloom
Number has always had a fascination for man.
Siegfried E. Van
After a great war, some men return to their country to find its cities and towns in ruins—but the people are still there.
Martin Buber
Biblia, books, is the name of a book, of a Book composed of many books.
George Orwell
It is characteristic of our age that at the time of the 1945 General Election one could see fairly clearly what problems the Labor government was facing, and that it is just as difficult today as it was then to predict either success. or failure.
Ralph de Toledano
A Poem.
Milton Klonsky
For the tragic life of this poet, clipped at the age of twenty-three, an apology is required—but from whom?
S. L. Blumenson
Herrick's cafe—then situated on Division Street at the junction of Canal and East Broadway—was, in the last days of the 19th and the early years of the 20th centuries, the gathering place of the East Side “intelligentsia” and literati.
Martin Buber
Many heads of families of Berditchev complained to the rabbi of Rizhyn that their sons-in-law had left wives and children in order to become his disciples, and when they asked him to persuade the youths to return home, he told them about a young man who had lived in the days of the Great Maggid.
Robert S. Warshow
Probably no evidence will ever be sufficient to make us fully understand the experience of Europe's Jews in the past fifteen years; but all evidence is immensely important.
Myron Kaufmann
We now have the confession of a “liberal” Gentile that even he may like to relax now and then with one of his unreconstructed kinfolk who takes white-Protestant superiority for granted.
Arnold M. Rose
Students of prejudice have usually analyzed it from the standpoint of the objective outsider: they note that prejudiced beliefs deviate sharply from fact, and they try—by pointing out fact—to bring belief closer to fact.
Reviewed by Stephen Spender
Reviewed by David Baumgardt
Reviewed by Maurice Samuel
Reviewed by Norbert Guterman
IN THE summer of 1943, when it seemed that within a short time no Jews would be left in France, a group of Jewish leaders founded a documentation center in Grenoble, to collect and preserve the...
David and Adele Bernstein
Washington is a delightful capital, if you do not look too far under its glistening surface.
Robert Weltsch
The first document from Palestine to reach the UN Assembly in Paris after Bernadotte's Report—or testament—was a cable from Dr. Bunche, the acting Mediator, charging the government of Israel with responsibility for the Count's assassination.
David Riesman
The “nerve of failure” is the courage to face aloneness and the possibility of defeat in one's personal life or one's work without being morally destroyed.
T. C. Robertson
Slowly but surely a racial self-consciousness, a collective resentment, is being forced upon the Negro, not only in South Africa but throughout the world, and South Africa seems the...
Karl Jaspers
Philosophy strives to interpret history as a single totality.
Chaim Tchernowitz
When you entered “Grandfather” Mendele's house you passed through several long, dark, almost empty corridors and rooms without meeting a soul until a tall, lean woman emerged from the haze.
Ernest Aschner
Typical of the official Israeli attitude toward oil are two recent statements dealing with the questions of the Negev and the internationalization of Haifa.
Hayim Nahman Bialik
A Poem.
Milton Klonsky
Once last summer I was crossing north on Sheridan Square, thinking of nothing.
Reader Letters
There is the written law—in Judaism it is the Bible—which is supposed to govern all of life.
Kurt List
A survivor of Warsaw, which Arnold Schoenberg completed about a year ago, is a cantata in a new form, telling the story of a Jew who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto.
Irving Kristol
Robert Ingersoll once caused a public commotion by defying God, if he existed, to strike him dead on the spot.
Robert Cobb Myers
Bored with election forecasting, both George Gallup and Elmo Roper, the two leading personalities in public-opinion polling, are seeking new worlds to conquer.
Reviewed by Martin Greenberg
Reviewed by Isaac Rosenfeld
Reviewed by David Daiches
Reviewed by William Poster
Reviewed by Benjamin Engel
Alfred Kazin
Ever since the war ended, a great many literary GI's, all of them haunted by the example of Hemingway and Dos Passos, have been trying to turn their war experience into novels that would be distinguishable from each other and yet not betray the fact that their authors learned nothing new about the war, since they could not see it for their countrymen.
Paul Friedman
It seems altogether incredible today that when the first plans for the rehabilitation of Europe's surviving Jews were outlined, the psychiatric aspect of the problem was overlooked entirely.
Elliot E. Cohen
If the villain of the Truman “miracle” was the pollster, the hero, by common consent, was not Mr. Truman, but the Truman voter.
Emil L. Fackenheim
Rightly or wrongly, I have always thought highly of Abraham, the first Jew.
Jon Kimche
For more than eighteen centuries the Jews had believed that one day Messiah would come and lead them back into the Promised Land.
Heinz Politzer
Leopold Krakauer's drawings and Mordecai Ardon-Bronstein's paintings have one thing in common: although both are conditioned by Palestine, they can hold their own in any metropolitan exhibition.
George Lichtheim
What should be the place of the British colonial empire in a planned socialist economy?
Hortense Perell
In September when the autumnal haze descends on the cliff dwellings of the Bronx, and the temple seats go on sale for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I get the urge to buy a round-trip ticket to Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Nathan Glazer
The most careful observer might have been thrown off recently by an announcement of a mass meeting on Palestine at the St. Nicholas Arena, in New York, to be sponsored by Hashomer Hatzair and the Progressive Zionist League.
Alfred Werner
The factual background of the new Austrian film—The Trial: In the Name of Humanity—is the story of a sickly and neurotic peasant girl named Eszter Solymosi, fourteen years old, who on April 1, 1882 disappeared from the small village of Tisza Eszlar in Hungary.
William F. Albright
ARCHAEOLOGICAL undertakings come into being in as many different ways as there are archaeologists and expeditions. But all, including Biblical archaeology, share one common feature-the call of...
Reviewed by Leslie A. Fiedler
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
Reviewed by Eric F. Goldman
Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal
Reviewed by James Luther Adams
1948
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