Arthur Hertzberg
“Why don't you stay in Israel? Why didn't more Americans come to fight? Why don't you send us more money? What are you American Jews like anyway?”
George Lichtheim
In deciding not to hold a general election during 1949, the Labor government has defied the combined pressure of the Conservative opposition, the Liberals, and its own left wing, all of whom, though for different reasons, had been pressing for an early appeal to the electorate.
Israel Knox
It is by now hardly news that there is a reviving interest among younger Jewish thinkers and writers in religion, as such, and in Judaism, in particular.
Hal Lehrman
One Sunday morning last October, on a street in Istanbul, which ordinarily dozes through every seventh day, the flag of modern Zion broke out officially for the first time under the Turkish sky from the mast of the newly-recognized State of Israel's Consulate.
William Schack
There is a kind of artist we all know whose last will and scrapbook contains no appreciation of his work as long as his obituary in the New York Times.
Edgar Johnson
Agitation about the film version of Oliver Twist and its release in Berlin has given widespread currency to a belief that Charles Dickens himself was anti-Semitic, and that Fagin was conceived as “a savage racial caricature.”
Harry Feltenstei Jr.
A Story.
Heinz Politzer
The death sentence pronounced (though never carried out) on Rudolf Borchardt by the Nazis (most incompetent of judges) recalls the tragic irony that hovers over some of Shakespeare's fools.
Louis Zara
Promptly at five minutes to six each evening Papa Kramer pushed open the gate to the yard, came wearily down the broken walk, climbed the porch stairs, opened the screen door, set down his lunch-box, and asked, “Supper ready?”
Reader Letters
The Aggada is made up of stories, dialogues, homilies, sayings, proverbs, fables, and riddles scattered through the Mishna and the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, as well as other sources.
Chemjo Vinaver
One of the interesting effects of the creation of the State of Israel has been the sudden and frantic search for a “re-orientation” and a “new program” for Jewish life in America.
Gertrude Himmelfarb
At the close of 1820, a year of rebellion in Spain, Portugal, and Naples, of political assassination in France and conspiratorial activity in England, Prince Metternich composed a “Confession of Faith.”
Reviewed by Franz Borkenau
Reviewed by Martin Greenberg
Hal Lehrman
Behind closely guarded walls somewhere in the broad but sparsely populated territories knit together by King Abdullah's British-trained Arab Legion, emissaries of Jordan and Israel are currently parleying for a treaty of peace.
Edward N. Saveth
Most American Jews continue to react to discrimination in the universities with a sense of outraged hurt and despair—a reaction that some observers find excessive.
James Rorty
The fact and the fear of hunger have ruled the world as long as human creatures have walked it.
Hans Joachim Schoeps
There are, today, many weighty reasons for supposing that the Jewish and Christian communities that have traveled side by side through history for almost nineteen hundred years should wish to understand each other.
David Frankfurter
Of course a plan like this, standing in the sharpest contradiction to my nature, my education, my general beliefs and religious attitudes, the kind of project that must always be the exception that negates all maxims, could not have developed in a straight line. . . .
Herbert Howarth
When interpreted by Gentiles, the commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image. . . .” is usually attributed to the Israelites' hatred of the idolatry of neighboring nations.
Ruth Gruber
Israel is at peace. That is the thing a traveler feels most keenly in this year-old war-scarred state.
Alfred Kazin
When I was fourteen, and lived in Brownsville, the drugstore on our corner was bought one day by a strange little man named Solovey.
Hayim Nahman Bialik
Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), the foremost poet of the Hebrew renaissance, treats a problem that has assumed particular relevance not only in modern literature, but in modern culture as a whole.
Joseph H. Gumbiner
My invitation to spend a week at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, came as an emergency request from the Jewish Chautauqua Society.
Sherry Mangan
A remarkable phenomenon about France has for several decades passed relatively unnoticed, save by the practitioners of psychoanalysis themselves.
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
Reviewed by Samuel J. Hurwitz
Reviewed by David Daiches
Reviewed by Martin Diamond
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
David C. Williams
Europeans used to remark on the fatality by which, between the wars, governments of the Left in France confronted governments of the Right in Great Britain.
Dorothy Thompson
There exists a famous American document to which reference is often made, but which few people read.
Oscar Handlin
Dorothy Thompson's fears are groundless.
Karl Jaspers
No one questions the immense significance of modern science.
Morton M. Hunt
A few miles north of Philadelphia on route 611 is the Township of Abington, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
David Baumgardt
Goethe credited himself with having put a good deal of mystery into his Faust.
J. J. Trunk
When my Uncle Yosel left Kutno for Lublin, he wanted to have nothing to do with the Hasidim there, but he did bring with him his enthusiasm for Haskalah [enlightenment] and literature.
Wallace Markfield
He started west from the Lower East Side and then reached a point beyond which he could not pass; this was Seventh Avenue and he settled there.
Reader Letters
This the third of a series of translations from the Bialik-Ravnitzky Sefer Ha-Aggada.
Heinz Politzer
In a review of Franz Werfel's poems, 1908-1945, Erich Kahler wrote (COMMENTARY, February 1948): “Franz Werfel was a bad author and a great poet. . . ."
Nathan Glazer
The sociology of Jews—like a good part of sociology in general—has developed out of the ideological and practical needs of various social and political tendencies.
Reviewed by Granville Hicks
Reviewed by Samuel Koenig
Reviewed by S. Lane Faison
Golo Mann
Of late it has become customary to consider the United States a conservative country—even the most conservative, the one remaining conservative country.
Brian Faulkner
Fifteen months have now gone by since Egypt—the first of the Arab League countries to negotiate with the new Jewish state—signed an armistice with Israel at Rhodes.
Will Herberg
There is a religious revival under way among American Jews today.
Sidney Hertzberg
We have fallen flat on our faces in China.
Heinz Politzer
On a cold winter's day at the end of 1944, as the war was drawing to its close, we buried Else Lasker-Schueler.
Betty Sigler
Montreal is Canada's largest city: but to be a Jew there is to live in a small town.
Robert Weltsch
In the protracted struggle within the United Nations for the securing of a Bill of Rights for all human beings, wherever they live, the Jews have been recognized as an interested party, and Jewish organizations accorded a special status.
Joseph M. Proskauer
In Mobile during the ante-bellum days, a strikingly large proportion of the population was foreign born.
Y. L. Peretz
Three songbirds successively occupied the same cage, and each in turn succumbed to the cat.
Samuel Gringauz
Since the touchstone that Jewish thought has not infrequently applied to any political or social movement is the movement's attitude toward anti-Semitism, the appearance at this time of a distinct anti-Socialist bias among certain Jewish thinkers is not surprising.
Dennis H. Wrong
The “break-up” of the family has become a perennial theme of American sociologists.
Reviewed by David Daiches
Reviewed by Richard Hofstadter
Reviewed by Wallace Markfield
Reviewed by Emil L. Fackenheim
Scott Fowler
At 3:15 am on February 23, the House of Representatives held its sixty-third roll call of the present session.
Jean-Paul Sartre
We in France hear it said all about us that French culture is being threatened.
Solomon F. Bloom
Chaim Weizmann has attained the distinction of an elder statesman of the world.
Norbert Muhlen
On the badly bombed campus of the University of Freiburg, the American Friends' Foreign Service Committee has built a barracks where students can read foreign magazines, take home English or German books from the circulating library, listen to free lectures—or just talk.
Nathan Glick
John Phillips Marquand is, alas, our most accomplished novelist of manners.
Ephraim Shtenkler
In Bialisk my family was rich and we also had a shop and life was pleasant.
Emil L. Fackenheim
Any Jewish religious thinking that would do justice to both its Jewish sources and to the spiritual and intellectual condition of modern man will have to begin with the recognition that Judaism is not a system of ideas, but a form of religious existence.
William Poster
In the 1920's, when I was very young, every New York Jew could feel certain about one thing: he was superior to anyway living in Brownsville.
I. J. Singer
“The Messiah will come in the year 5666 [1906]”—that was the idea afloat among the Jews in the small town of Leczyna in Russian Poland. It
Heinz Politzer
Gian-Carlo Menott's “musical drama” The Consul has been received with great acclaim.
S. M. Lipset
In recent years it has been the fashion among American sociologists to belittle or more commonly to ignore the work of the earliest American sociologists/
Reviewed by Richard H. S.
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
Reviewed by Agnes McCrea Davis
Reviewed by Sidney Liskofsky
Reviewed by Francis Fergusson
Lewis S. Feuer
There had been rumors during the 30's of the communal settlements in Palestine.
Harold Rosenberg
Few of us are duplicates of our grandfathers, in either thought, feeling, speech, or appearance.
Peter Meyer
To paraphrase the opening sentences of a century-old political pamphlet: A specter is haunting Communist Europe—the specter of Titoism.
Alfred Kazin
If you love the theater.
Bernard Sachs
Two developments have in recent years drawn attention to the Jews of South Africa, who had previously lived, worked, prospered, and encountered problems in a twilight zone outside the ken of most other Jews.
James T. Farrell
A Story.
Alfred Werner
In the early years of this century there was an impecunious young Jewish sculptor who kept a dingy little studio on the Left Bank in Paris, worked hard, and rarely appeared in the cafés.
Alfred Polgar
The scene is a middle-sized room with two windows.
F.S. Grosshut
Klaus Mann died on May 22, 1949 of an over dose of sleeping tablets.
Donald Paneth
The shops of New York City's second-hand clothing dealers crowd the bottom of Elizabeth Street on the rim of Manhattan's Lower East Side, in the block below Canal Street.
Moshe Leib Halpern
A Poem.
Martin Buber
There is perhaps no better way of clarifying our own sense of the myth, than to ask how Plato understood the meaning of this word.
Eugene Borowitz
If the purpose of the Institute on Reform Jewish Theology, held at the Hebrew Union College on March 20-22, was to formulate a declaration of belief, then it was a failure.
Nathan Glazer
Four years ago, this department reported on an approach to the study of prejudice which, it was predicted, held great promise for the future.
Reviewed by Robert Gordis
Reviewed by Harry Feltenstei Jr.
Reviewed by Sholom J. Kahn
Reviewed by Daniel J. Boorstin
Richard H. S.
One of the queerest phenomena of the 20th century has been the cult in America and Britain of “internationalism.”
J. L. Teller
The presence and predominance of Israel's youth is overpowering.
Simone Weil
A method of education does not amount to much if it is not inspired by an idea of human perfection.
David Ignatow
After the Storm and Summer.
Robert Gordis
The problem of the structure and form of the American Jewish community of the future is being widely discussed today from almost every conceivable point of view.
Mortimer Slaiman
A Story.
Kurt List
Romantic music, most fully developed in the work of German composers of the mid-19th century, remains a favorite with modern audiences.
Cecil Roth
The fate of the Jews of Salonica at the hands of the Nazis is an episode of recent history that for some reason or other has been relatively overlooked.
Anatole Broyard
Recently, in a night club, I heard—or rather watched—a Negro entertainer do a song about racial discrimination.
S. L. Blumenson
What St. Stephen's Plate was to Vienna, Rutgers Square was to New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century.
Reader Letters
In the beginning (b'reshit) created God (Gen. 1:1).
Irving Howe
Sherwood Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, is a direct reflection of his personal problems at the time he wrote it.
Samuel Yellen
We now find it hard to believe that the recent disaster came upon us so fast.
Reviewed by Arthur Hertzberg
Reviewed by David Daiches
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
Reviewed by Milton R. Konvitz
Reviewed by Herbert B. Ehrmann
Herbert Luthy
Between the totalitarian fortress of the French Communist party and an untenanted liberal-socialist house of cards in which the remnants of the “third force” have been trying to set up housekeeping, there lies a vast no-man's-land in which the groups and group-lets of the French Left wander about in search of a position.
L. Poliakov
Though full equality is a mirage or a hope for the future, the problem of human equality in the face of famine had long ceased to confront Western society until it was raised again in all its nakedness by the Nazi terror in Europe.
Ludwig Lewisohn
It takes no long reflection to make it clear that no important aspect in the life of an ethnic or religious group can be soundly discussed or interpreted without some definition of the group, the aspect in question, the precise present situation of both.
Julius Horwitz
The first doorbell I rang was answered by an old widowed Negro woman who lived alone on the top floor of a red-brick office building in the financial district of Manhattan.
Isaac Rosenfeld
There has probably never been another “great man” who has written so simple and direct a book as Gandhi's Autobiography .
Herbert Howarth
It might be said that a fourth generation of writers is just rising in Israel.
Chandler Brossard
There is a new Alienated Man around.
Milton Kaplan
Westward from Crotona Park, the Bronx drops so precipitously that a sled, unimpeded, can start at Fulton Avenue and hurtle past Bathgate, Washington, Park, and finally come to rest at the bottom of the valley on Webster Avenue.
Reader Letters
THIS is the fourth of a series of translations from the Bialik-Ravnitzky Sefer Ha-Aggada. Previous selections ("Men and Women," "The Creation," and "Adam and Eve and the Serpent") appeared in...
Hermann Broch
Elisabeth Langgässer's novel Das Unauslöschliche Siegel (“The Indelible Seal”), published last year in Hamburg, belongs among those contemporary works of art that make one wonder whether they are decadent products of a fading age, or harbingers of a new aesthetic mode.
Walter R. Goldschmidt
It is a primary function of any religion to explain and justify society to the population, and in societies where religious belief is wanting, it falls to popular philosophy to discover some rational order in social relationships and institutions.
Reviewed by Stephen Spender
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
Hal Lehrman
At the dedication of a synagogue not long ago in a certain American city, a community leader prominent in overseas philanthropy arose and smote the congregation hip and thigh.
Irving Kristol
In Philipp Frank's biography, Einstein: His Life and Times, we read the following anecdote.
Elliot E. Cohen
Meine Damen und Herren: I must tell you that the words I am about to say are painful words—painful for me to utter, painful for you to have to hear.
J. K. Galbraith
Few actions by an American Chief Executive ever produced a more whole-souled response than President Truman's call in January 1949 for a “Bold New Program” to help the undeveloped areas of the world.
Morris Freedman
About sixty miles from New York City, in the flat, unspectacular pinelands of central New Jersey, there exists what would seem to many a double paradox/
Francois Bondy
In the last week of June the Congress for Cultural Freedom convened among the ruins of what had been the capital of the Third Reich.
Ernst Simon
The question of Jewish-Arab relations has seldom been in the foreground of official Zionist thought.
Shlomo Katz
I had almost forgotten Miss O'Keefe.
Reader Letters
And he called his name Noah, saying: This same shall comfort us in our work and in the toil of our hands (Gen. 5:29).
Harold Rosenberg
Spouting liquid fire at anyone who may dare disagree with them, two psychoanalytic doctors have gone over the top with books just published into an area of the human spirit which their master had declared a scientific No Man's Land.
H. L. Ginsberg
It can reasonably be said that there have been only two periods of true, scientific Bible research.
Reviewed by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Reviewed by Morroe Berger
Irwin Ross
Three years ago, during the initial agitation over the Taft-Hartley Act, New York City's Mayor William O'Dwyer proclaimed an official, city-wide day of protest against the measure.
James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush
In August, a year ago, the papers headlined a story that tightened the nerves of Jewish readers from coast to coast.
Karl A. Wittfogel
The great debate on American foreign policy in Asia still continues, even while the Korean war is being fought.
Hannah Arendt
In less than six years Germany laid waste the moral structure of Western society, committing crimes that nobody would have believed possible, while her conquerors buried in rubble the visible marks of more than a thousand years of German history.
Urie Avnery
“Hallo—Hager—Boaz—Shamir—one-five: Hallo—Hager—Boaz—Shamir—one-five . . .” a monotonous voice kept droning through the wireless.
Barnet Litvinoff
If you were to take a walk down East London's Whitechapel Road today, starting by Woolworth's at the corner of Commercial Road and gazing at your reflection in the big furniture shops and the little haberdashers and the dingy restaurants and sour-smelling pubs, you might well ask yourself, “Is this the Whitechapel of story and legend?”
Earl Raab
“There is no city like San Francisco,” the Jews of the Golden Gate say with some conviction.
Reader Letters
I had formed a close friendship with Sholom Aleichem during his two visits to England in the summer of 1906.
Leslie A. Fiedler
No one can write about William Faulkner without committing himself to the weary task of trying to disengage the author and his work from the misconceptions that surround them.
Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites
No Way Out, the latest film on race prejudice, revolves around the difficulties of a young Negro interne in a county hospital of a large Northern city.
Reviewed by Arthur Hertzberg
Reviewed by Miriam Reimann
Herbert Luthy
THE Communist aggression in Korea has acted as a catalytic agent in Western Europe. Almost overnight one sensed a new climate of moral unitythe indispensable prerequisite for any effective...
Grace Goldin
MY FRIEND Reuben Saberski used to say, "There are certain things Jews mustn't do, just because they're Jews. Let them break religious lawslet them not observe. I suppose it's their...
Clement Greenberg
ONE looks into oneself and discovers there what is also in others. A realization of the Jewish self-hatred in myself, of its subtlety and the devious ways in which it conceals itself, from me...
Joseph Wood Krutch
THE most important inventions for the zoth century may well turn out to be, not the automobile and the atom bomb, but the moving picture and the radio. Few would deny that the printing press...
L. Poliakov
IT IS an indisputable fact that during the difficult years of the Nazi occupation, the Catholic faith in Europe gained new vigor. Today, after vying with Communism during the years of...
Mark Raven
OUR world narrows around us as we grow older, and so it should not have seemed so startling to receive on one day the news of Malcah's violent death in Palestine and a letter from my old...
Howard O. Sackler
THRERE were sad, yet certain, rustlings Of the frosted Boston curtain When Poe, Having re-emptied Pandora's box, Was ushered out forever And buried in it. For years, however, A "hideous...
Jacob Picard
ON OCTOBER 26, 1941, a Jewish woman in Berlin wrote a letter to a relative who had reached a haven of safety outside Germany. At that time the deportation of German Jews to the extermination...
Ruth Gruber
IT IS no small thing to take the tongue of Solomon's love songs and Moses' laws and make it the language of a new state, of bus drivers and farmers and statesmen, to make it so alive that it...
Louis Zara
THEY could afford to pay for three rooms. However, flats were hard to find, so they took the six-room flat and closed off the big living room, the dining room, and the front bedroom, and lived...
Vladimir Medem
VLADIMM MEDEM, born of assimilated Russian Jewish parents in Minsk in 879 and baptized at birth in the Greek Orthodox Church, devoted his life wholly to the cause of the Jewish labor movement...
J. L. Teller
THE owner of the Skazka, a Russian night club on West 4 6th Street in New York, recently gave his patrons food for thought, with no extra charge. He effaced the ferocious-visaged...
Lillian Blumberg
IN 1892 a woman, since known as Elisabeth v. R., was treated for hysterical lameness by a young Viennese physician. Maladies of this type, which were more common in the past century than now,...
Avraham ben Yitzhak
HAPPY are they that sow and shall not reap, For they shall journey far. Happy are they that are liberal, whose young splendor Compounds the light of days and their diffusionWho disburden...
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
"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...
Reviewed by Hal Lehrman
EVIDENCE has been publicly accumulating for some time that a large part of the Russian people were ready and eager to trade Joseph Stalin in for any non-Soviet regime at the beginning of their...
Reviewed by Judah Goldin
IT is not hard to understand why there is a growing preoccupation with the theme of East European Jewry, why these days there is so much eagerness to recover something of the character and...
Reviewed by Roger Jospe
THIS book emphasizes that Francis Bacon was more than "the Father of Inductive Philosophy." He was not a philosopher immersed solely in scholarly concerns, but a man sensitive to the...
Reviewed by Moshe Decter
THE poet Eliakum Zunser lived through some of the most exciting decades of modern Jewish history. Born in Vilna in 945, died in New York in 1913, he grew up during one of the early phases of the...
Richard H. S.
ONE COMMON characteristic of the British and American approach to politics is the illusion that no problem is really insoluble. If only people will be reasonable, we fondly believe, if only all...
Hal Lehrman
BY ROUGH but fairly sound computation, the total of all the funds raised during the past three years for Jewish development in Israel from all sources in the United States-philanthropy,...
Robert Shaplen
THE community of Scarsdale, which lies approximately forty minutes north of New York City in fashionestchester County, likes to refer to itself, somewhat coyly, as "just a dormitory to...
Will Herberg
THERE is hardly an aspect of Jewish life and thought that Franz Rosenzweig did not touch with his creativity. But there is one achievement of his that seems t me to be of imperishable...
Hamlen Hunt
IN Cambridge, Massachusetts, an industrial city of some size (products: soap, books, clean laundry, some machinery), Harvard University is also situated. Housing for undergraduates is...
Linda Weinberg
By Merton's darkening walls I sat, Brushed by the fall of summer's rain, Feeling the eternal Jew, Homunculus, starting in my veins. Now in the garden of the mind Blooms the dark vintage of my...
A. A. Davidson
The Lads from Casablanca TWELVE noon to 3 PM in Israel ... the government offices which opened at nine, and which will close at five (with a half hour from ten to ten-thirty and another one...
Heinz Politzer
AN ALMOST constant division runs through the works of Delmore A I~Schwartz. There is the world of his own experience, as constituted by his biography, memories, and immediate feelings. This...
Cecil Roth
THE curious story of "Beckey" (born Mary) Wells starts in humdrum enough fashion. In the x8th century, the English stage was not yet recruited from the nobility, and Mary Davies was...
Harry L. Golden
REVIVAL FIRES ARE BURNING, AND THE LORD IS POURING OUT HIS BLESSINGS ON THOSE WHO ARE READY TO RECEIVE THEM, EVEN HIS MATCHLBSS GRACE. IN THE MEETINGS WHICH ARE NOW BEING HELD IN CHARLOTTE, THE...
Israel Abrahams
ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, one of the most distinguished of modem scholars of Judaism in the English-speaking countries, was born in London in 1858, the son of a rabbi who had come to England from...
Kurt List
NOW that Ernest Bloch has passed his seventieth birthday, many musicians look back on his career with a sense of unfulfilled promise, expressed most clearly, and with a touch of cruelty,...
Joseph Wood Krutch
THERE are some of us who tend to bristle irritably when a sociologist uns to discuss character or personginative literature, we say, has ever dealt revealingly with such subjects whose very...
Nathan Glick
BETWEEN them, the social scientists and the business market "researchers" have bred a cultural behemoth: the interminable questionnaire. Merely to read the hundred-odd, several-barreled...
Reviewed by David Daiches
MR. SAMUEL has written a fascinating and provocative book. In the framework of an autobiographical discussion of his own intellectual development, he discusses Jewish history and ideals, the...
Reviewed by Monroe Engel
THE publication of Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy in one volume is a long overdue act of justice. Read together in this way-as one novel really and even at that a somehow incomplete onethese four...
Reviewed by Isa Kapp
"THE very rich are different from us," said F. Scott Fitzgerald, and was right at least in the sense that wealth creates Lebensraum for particular qualities of character. Benevolence,...
Reviewed by Marvin Meyers
IS THERE a dominant style of "Man Thinking" in America which organizes thought and character, art and popular taste, prophecy and history into a meaningful union? To its interpreters,...
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
THE exact statistical data may not be available, but there is little reason to doubt that, per capita, more books continue to be written about the Jews than about any other comparable group. All...
1950
Back to Top 
