George Lichtheim
Any inquiry into the present state of relations between progressives in Britain and in the United States must start with the recent presidential election.
Harold Rosenberg
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.”
Hal Lehrman
With the State of Israel an accomplished fact and the peak of the overseas emergency relief program now passed, the Joint Distribution Committee has felt the need to take stock as of 1948, to review the past and weigh the future.
Walter J. Fischel
Of the sixty thousand Jews in Persia, most live in the large cities—Teheran, Hamadan, and others—with smaller groups in many towns and villages.
Marius Bewley
When Isaac Rosenberg was buried in an unmarked grave in France in 1918, he left behind only a slender sheaf of poetry that can be regarded as really important.
Robert Weltsch
The establishment of an innocuous Conciliation Commission by the UN Assembly, with practically no terms of reference (even to its own partition decision of November 29, 1947), marked the abandonment of Count Bernadotte's plan.
Percival and Paul Goodman
Of all branches of culture, the plastic arts have been the last to be cultivated by modem Jews.
Toby Shafter
Although my home town is considered of average size for the state of Maine (population 9,000), I must in all truth admit that it is only another seacoast village masquerading as a metropolis.
Saadya Gaon
After this brief opening in praise and eulogy of our Lord, I will begin this book . . .
Siegfried Kracauer
Within the last few months, several German postwar films have come to us from the Soviet zone of occupation.
Heinz Politzer
It is characteristic of the paradoxical situation in which present-day Jewish culture finds itself that the play with which Maurice Schwartz opened the season of his Yiddish Art Theatre in New York attempted what the Hebrew state theater, Habimah, has so far failed to do.
Norbert Muhlen
Crime is entertainment, and murder a Parlor game,” Viscount Samuel recently said of our times in an address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Reviewed by John Berryman
Reviewed by James Baldwin
Reviewed by Richard Hofstadter
Reviewed by Lillian Blumberg
Arnold J. Toynbee
I fancy it is a rather new idea to think of looking at current affairs in the light of history, at all events remote history.
Solomon F. Bloom
A few years ago a tremendous and extraordinary catastrophe struck the Jewish people.
Charles Abrams
The cause of racial equality has won some impressive victories in recent years.
Leo S. Baeck
Every nation, even if surrounded by deserts or dividing seas, knows of other nations, and its gaze is again and again drawn towards them, willingly or unwillingly.
G. E. R.
John Foster Dulles is only the latest of a number of expert eye-witnesses to be impressed by Austria's economic recovery and growing political stability.
S. D. Goitein
It was not until after World War I that the Arabs became conscious of themselves as a people.
From recent events, we know that the Arab holds an attitude of hostility to the Jew strong enough to produce political impasse and war, together with sporadic pogroms in the Arab countries.
Harry Gersh
In the good old days when my great-uncle Zissel came to America (circa 1904) the word “fix” had two distinct meanings.
Kurt List
Jewish musical life in New York in the past season did not differ markedly from that of the previous one.
L. Hersch
Discussions of the Jewish future: of the Jewish religion, of Jewish culture, of the new Jewish state, become ever more subtle and complex.
Reviewed by Leslie A. Fiedler
Reviewed by George N. Shuster
Reviewed by Isaac Rosenfeld
Reviewed by Theodor Gaster
Reviewed by Bertram D. Wolfe
Daniel Bell
After a decade and a half, an adequate political characterization of the New Deal era is still to be written.
Wolf Leslau
In 1946 I undertook a scientific expedition, under the joint auspices of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Viking Fund, to study the languages, folklore, and traditional history of Ethiopia.
Martin Greenberg
In the 2nd century BCE, after the world triumph of Hellenic culture under Alexander the Great, we come upon Jews in Jerusalem who, in addition to Hellenizing their names, underwent a painful operation to efface the marks of their circumcision.
Carlo Levi
Italian life has that ambiguity peculiar to things alive and beautiful.
Yehezkel Kaufman
It is customary to define the word “anti-Semitism” as “hatred of Jews,” but this definition is not accurate.
George Lichtheim
“What now confronts us is the task of readjusting our Middle Eastern policy to the new realities."
Waclaw Solski
In 1925 I was working for the Sovkino in Moscow, having come to Russia shortly before as an adviser on movie production for the foreign market.
Gottfried Neuburger
It started at once, in the improvised mess hall in the crowded induction center in Grand Central Palace.
Leopold Kompert
And we are not saved! The sun of freedom has risen for our fatherland, but for us it is only the bloody light of the North.
Benno Weiser
“Hablan todo el tiempo de judios—All they talk about is the Jews,” said the man who walked out before the movie was over.
David Scheinert
What is the situation of Jewish culture in Europe since the war?
James Rorty
Is it possible to determine, with even a rough approximation of accuracy, the position of contemporary man in the muddy turbulence of half-understood forces that shape his environment—that shifting complex of soil and water, plant, animal, and mineral wealth, human use and misuse?
Reviewed by George Becker
Reviewed by Mordecai Kosover
Reviewed by Theodor Gaster
Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
Nicolas Clarion
The democracies have apparently won the “battle of Berlin.”
Herrymon Maurer
It would be easy to tell this story of the confrontation of the Yeshiva of Nitra and a top-drawer Westchester County township in the light irony of the current British film comedies of suburbia.
Nathan Reich
By now the future of two segments of the 1,500,000 European Jews who survived World War II (outside of Russia) can be charted with reasonable accuracy; the fate of the third, those living in the Soviet satellites, still hangs in the balance.
Alfred Kazin
Broadway is not usually thought of as the keeper of America's conscience, but among the serious American plays this season a favorite theme has been the American struggle for integrity.
Ernst Simon
Even a superficial observer might notice the three traits in Israel's Jewish youth that still strike me as fundamental after twenty years of experience.
Erich Kahler
The great novels of the 20th century, its essential books, are without exception terminal books, apotheoses of the narrative form.
David Scheinert
In 1690, at the age of forty-four, about a year after the death of her husband, Glückel of Hameln began the writing of what is as much a ledger as the “memoirs of her life.”
Robert Misrahi
I wish I had a new suit to sew it on. This one's all shabby and the patch on the right-hand pocket stands out too much.
May Natalie Tabak
Aladdin had a lamp, the Rothschilds had money, someone's uncle had a candy store—my grandmother had yichus.
Henry George
Each recurring year brings a day on which, in every land, there are men who, gathering about them their families, and attired as if for a journey, eat with solemnity a hurried meal.
William Schack
One June day in 1927 the Americans in Jerusalem, hitherto outwardly respectable, were seen making their way to the open spaces of the city wearing common caps, old pants, and abraded shoes.
Eric Werner
The controversy between traditionalism and modernism in Jewish liturgical music has in the last three or four years stirred many pens.
Oscar Handlin
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.
Reviewed by Isaac Rosenfeld
Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal
Reviewed by Irving A. Sanes
Reviewed by Lillian Blumberg
Leslie A. Fiedler
“Since the Diaspora, and the scattering of the Jews amongst peoples holding the Christian Faith,” T. S. Eliot writes in an incidental footnote in Towards a Definition of Culture, “it may have been unfortunate both for these peoples and for the Jews themselves, that the culture-contact between them has had to be within those neutral zones of culture in which religion could be ignored. . . .”
Robert and Martha Levin
For two months my wife and I had been bicycling through France, cut off from the world.
Juliette Pary
For hours I have been wandering through the port of Haifa, under the broiling sun, looking for an obscure address; finally I meet a passerby who knows his way around.
Franz Borkenau
Marxism presents itself as a science capable of practical application.
L. Poliakov
Hitler's pronouncements on the “Jewish question” were generally regarded as the fantasies of a disordered mind.
Will Herberg
The revival of creative theological thinking is generally recognized as one of the significant events in recent intellectual history.
David T. Bazelon
The figure of the rough and tough private detective—or the “private eye,” as we have come to call him with our circulating library knowingness—is one of the key creations of American popular culture.
Raymond Rosenthal
An old man, Abe Weisman wasn't interested in pleasing any more, so he told his stories for their own sake, for himself more than for you.
Judaism's emphasis on the human nature and human qualities of the prophets was directed against the Christian-pagan notion of a man-God.
William Barrett
“Was the Conference really Communist-dominated?” a woman of my acquaintance asked.
Edward N. Saveth
It is scarcely in the nature of an exposé to point out that American legislation on immigration in the past quarter-century, up to and including the recent displaced-persons act, has pandered to the myth of “Nordic superiority.”
Reviewed by Robert Weltsch
Reviewed by David Baumgardt
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
Reviewed by Milton R. Konvitz
Reviewed by Samuel J. Hurwitz
Hal Lehrman
A short time ago an ex-minister in the Churchill wartime government divulged to a high official in the Ben Gurion wartime government his deep anxiety over the economic problems confronting the infant State of Israel.
Arnold W. Green
The commemorative postage stamp issued in honor of Youth Month (September 1948) depicts a welldressed boy and girl, striding forward, with school books clutched under their arms.
Solomon M. Schwarz
Even among the severest critics of the Soviet Union, it was until recently acknowledged that the “new” Russia had wiped out anti-Semitism.
Wayne Clark
During the past five years we have seen the most rapid construction of a literary myth since the carpentry of the Byronic hero.
Sherry Mangan
The postwar resumption of transatlantic cultural communications brought American Francophiles a series of surprises.
Ralph Weiman
In a sense the most amazing feat of Zionism has been the revival of Hebrew.
Jacob Sloan
I am writing this the evening after the Day of Atonement, and I hope that I shall not be thought facetious when I say that Professor Heschel's words leave me with a sense of combined guilt and indifference.
Ruth Glazer
When the Woodlawn Road-Jerome Avenue express rushes out of the tunnel at 161st Street in the Bronx, the subway rider catches a glimpse of rows of six-story apartment houses flanking the elevated tracks on both sides and extending far back into the hinterland.
This is Mendele the Book-Peddler speaking.
Heinz Politzer
The permanent collection of the Jewish Museum consists largely of liturgical objects, from arks of the Torah to spice-boxes.
Albert Salomon
So great is modern man's faith in the potentialities of science that he takes it for granted that the science of sociology must have much of importance to say concerning religion.
Reviewed by George Becker
Reviewed by David Daiches
Reviewed by Franz Hoellering
Harold Rosenberg
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.
Hal Lehrman
In a moving-picture theater called Kessem (“Magic”), the Parliament of Israel is in session.
Elliot E. Cohen
The word “culture” is again being heard in the American Jewish community—after a decade's absence.
Bernard Wolfe
Aunt Jemima, Beulah, the Gold Dust Twins, “George” the Pullmanad porter Uncle Remus . . . . We like to picture the Negro as grinning at us.
Abba P. Lerner
Parasite, leech, vampire, symbol of unproductiveness and irresponsibility—these are familiar terms for that classic modern villain: the middleman.
Milton Himmelfarb
I used to think I was fooling my father, but now I suspect that he knew all along and did not want to make an issue of it.
Alfred Werner
When Wilhelm Schacht, German newspaperman, gave his newly born son Hjalmar the middle names “Horace Greeley,” it is possible that he was aware of the noble statement once made by the founder of the New York Tribune.
S. L. Blumenson
One sunny spring day in the year 1905, a cloak operator named Friedland (prophetically nicknamed “Columbus” by his fellow workers) pulled a switch that set in motion a train of events which was to wipe out the sweat shop and begin a new era in the garment industry.
Reader Letters
Proverbs from the Aggadah.
Peter Gradenwitz
It was on my first morning in New York City last summer that I came upon Israeli music “Made in the USA.”
Melvin J. Tumin
The belief that the behavior of individuals is a biological legacy passed on from one generation to the next runs tenaciously through all our history.
Reviewed by Diana Trilling
Reviewed by Heinz Politzer
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
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...
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
Reviewed by Anatole Broyard
Reader Letters
The document here printed has a special place in the treasury of literature devoted to Jewish resistance to the Nazis.
Hal Lehrman
As a veteran of Passover Week in Tel Aviv, this writer can testify at first hand to the intervention of religious rites and practices in the private lives of all persons, pious or infidel, Jew or Gentile, inhabiting the infant State of Israel.
Morris Freedman
There is being acted out in New York, in a kind of slow motion, with great gaps between the significant scenes, a public drama with a cast which occasionally reaches into the thousands.
Hermann Goldschmidt
The name of Franz Kafka, scarcely known twenty-five years ago when he died with his most important works still unpublished, today echoes round the world.
Waclaw Solski
David Dubinsky was born David Dobnievski in Brest-Litovsk fifty-seven years ago.
Irving Howe
Most novels about American Jews are afflicted with stereotyped characterizations.
David Scheinert
A Yiddish puppet show, “Hakl-Bakl,” is much talked about in Paris.
Samuel Tenenbaum
Brownsville, you should know, was originally settled by the overflow of people that spilled out of the tenements and slums of New York's East Side.
Reader Letters
A proverb is generally said to be a concentrate of folklore and folk-sagacity, a statement earthy, popular, and with an immediately felt point.
Richard M. Clurman
Home of the Brave is the latest in what by now is a familiar American cultural product: the “problem movie.”
Nicolas Clarion
There is not a single habitué of the Parisian literary cafés, and scarcely a single French intellectual, who is not now aware of the existence of Isidor Isou.
Sophia M. Robison
Closer to the art of divination than to science is the study of the American Jewish population today.
Reviewed by Wallace Markfield
Reviewed by David Baumgardt
Reviewed by Daniel J. Boorstin
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
Reviewed by Samuel H. Flowerman
William Phillips, Paul Goodman, Louis Kronenberger and David Daiches
COMMENTARY has asked a number of Jewish writers to take up this problem in the form of a symposium, reporting briefly on how they deal with it both personally and in their work.
Milton R. Konvitz
There are many who, in a flush of enthusiasm, and perhaps under the influence of the doctrine of the Chosen People, insist that in future years the State of Israel is destined to be the teacher and the rest of mankind its pupils.
A. R. L.
The German federal elections of August 14 marked the difficult birth, thirty years after the promulgation of the Weimar Constitution, of a new German republic in the greater part of a dismembered Germany.
Robert Bendiner
Out of some 140,000,000 people in the United States, at least 139,500,000 are liberals, to hear them tell it, liberal having become a rough synonym for virtuous, decent, humane, and kind to animals.
Gershom Scholem
The six-pointed star known as the Magen David or Shield of David, which is now emblazoned on the flag of the State of Israel, is from every point of view a cause for astonishment.
David T. Bazelon
The avowed purpose of our popular culture is to afford its avid consumers a quick momentary satisfaction of their fantasies
Irving Howe and B. J. Widick
In the1920's Detroit became the unchallenged motor capital and thereby one of the great industrial centers of the world.
Isa Kapp
A New Yorker without too strict a sense of order and tradition can find all sorts of amiable places to live in the reasonable confusion of Manhattan.
These two chapters, translated from the Hebrew by Shlomo Katz, are from the concluding section of the first book of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, written in 1180, ten years before his better known Guide to the Perplexed.
Harold Orlansky
I give you a strictly worm's eye view of London, with no pretensions of raising my head an inch above the ground.
Alfred Werner
The reception given by the New York critics to Yankel Adler's first show in America, at Knoedler's, in the fall of 1948, was rather cool, if not hostile.
Robert Endleman
There is a New Look in anthropology, that omnibus “science of man.”
Reviewed by Martin Greenberg
Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis
Reviewed by Emil L. Fackenheim
Reviewed by William Poster
Reviewed by Marvin Meyers
Reviewed by Joel Carmichael
Daniel J. Boorstin
Apologists of Judaism in recent years, in a frenetic search for identities, have dulled their vision of what is distinctive in either the Jewish or the American experience.
Hal Lehrman
Inside Israel a visitor needs only to look around to persuade himself that it is academic to discuss taking back any large number of Arab refugees or giving away any substantial piece of Israeli-held territory.
Sidney Hook
The current discussion of the question whether members of the Communist party should be permitted to teach in our schools and colleges has been conducted in such a way that it has eclipsed much more important problems concerning the character and direction of American education.
Arthur Hertzberg
My Grandfather was not a Zionist, and yet my first experience of Zionism was an act of identification with him—and rebellion against my father.
Heinz Politzer
On the heels of the Truman election came the publication of Al Capp's Life and Times of the Shmoo.
Norbert Muhlen
In August the world press excitedly reported that the Moehlstrasse in Munich had been the scene of the “worst anti-Semitic outbursts since Hitler.”
Philip Rahv, James Grossman, Martin Greenberg and Harry Levin
The editors of COMMENTARY asked twenty writers to discuss their reactions, as writers and readers, to the continuing presence of the sinister “Jew” in English literature.
Grace Goldin
Reba Grossinger was one of the wealthiest women in Stillwater Falls.
Moshe Leib Halpern
A Poem.
Franz Rosenzweig
Rosenzweig tells us what it is that one sees when one sees with faith—not so much what the faith is.
Isaac Rosenfeld
It is months now that a crowd, several rows deep, has been gathering at the window of an East Side delicatessen store to watch Kosher Fry Beef come off the slicing machine.
John Dewey
Few persons today would deny that philosophy has greatly declined in esteem and influence since the time when it was held to be the Science of Sciences and the Art of Arts.
Reviewed by Granville Hicks
Reviewed by David Daiches
Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal
Reviewed by Marvin Meyers
Oscar Handlin
“These people associate as easily as they breathe,” wrote Fredrika Bremer of the Americans in 1853.
Richard H. S.
Great men are an encumbrance as well as an inspiration to the nations and the parties they lead.
Charles Reznikoff
A Poem.
Charles Abrams
Last July, New York's highest court, by a four to three decision, upheld the J right of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to bar Negroes from its Stuyvesant Town housing project.
Irving Kristol
Psychoanalysis was from its very beginnings disrespectful, when not positively hostile, towards all existing religious creeds and institutions.
Herbert Howarth
“These people can teach us how to live,” said Bill Williams to me in an aside after dinner.
Dora E. Yates
It is more than time that civilized men and women were aware of the Nazi crime against the Gypsies, as well as the Jews.
Milton Klonsky
You don't have to be a millionaire to appreciate our own well-bred, balanced, clean-cut American dollar that, out of its heart of gold, endows and supports the world.
Harry Gersh
My Grandfather Berl, olav hasholem, worried a lot about the younger generation. H
J. J. Trunk
Reb Benjamin was the “idler,” if one may use the term, in this energetic household.
Kurt List
To the casual observer, the 1948-49 season of Jewish music seemed no doubt a remarkably prosperous one.
Nathan Glazer
The ambition of American social science is to arrive at general laws of society and human behavior: laws that shall be as universal, as precise, and as useful as Newton's.
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
Reviewed by Leslie A. Fiedler
Reviewed by H. A. Fischel
Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong
A. H. Raskin
One of the most reassuring aspects of our democracy is the frequency with which constructive results emerge from the most extraordinarily muddled situations.
Hal Lehrman
Ramleh (March 1949)—“Only six months,” a Rumanian at the Bir Yaakov immigrant reception center sighed.
Albert Camus
We are living in a time when men, impelled by mediocre and ferocious ideologies, have got into the habit of being ashamed of everything—ashamed of themselves, of being happy, of loving or creating.
David and Adele Bernstein
Social change is seeping through Richmond, Virginia, as quietly and pervasively as the aroma of tobacco from the mills down near the James River.
Isa Kapp
There was once a time when very few children's books were published and children roamed like explorers through adult libraries, investing Dickens and Defoe with all the credulity and awe of their own fantasy world.
Walter J. Fischel
When I set out to visit Kurdistan I was aware that Jewish communities existed in such towns as Kirkuk, Arbil, and Mosul.
Guenther Anders
Almost insensibly the figure of Franz Kafka has usurped a dominant position in modem literature.
Earl Raab
We are in the “cow business”—permanently, we think—but the Fable of the Chicken and the not down.
Saul Tschernichowsky
A Poem.
Israel Cohen
Rummaging recently among an accumulation of old letters and papers, I came across some letters in Yiddish, written in a small, neat hand, and signed with an elaborate and indecipherable flourish, which immediately evoked a train of pleasant memories.
H. Schmidt
A glance at Jewish Jerusalem today reveals an astonishing variety of social groups that seem to live their lives in more or less separate compartments.
Reviewed by Sholom J. Kahn
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
Reviewed by Meyer Schapiro
1949
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