Norbert Muhlen
LET us imagine a German Rip Van Winkle escaping for a day the drumbeat monotone of Nazi boots, and stretching out for a nap along a brook in East Ger- many's Harz Mountains. He now awakes....
David Riesman
IT WAS not so long ago that Jews sought to defend themselves against anti-Semitism by discreet and persuasive apologetics and by the quiet intercession of their "best people" with the...
Franz Borkenau
A COMMON and increasing disillusionment with technology today marks contemporary thinkers of the most divergent tendencies. A classic expression of this feeling was Aldous Huxley's Brave...
Robert Bendiner
TO THE average citizen of the Republic, the elections of 95o are already embalmed in history and hardly more a matter for general discussion than the rout of the Whigs a century ago. To the...
Harold Norse
Et esultavit . . . no, Johann Sebastian, not in the weak magnificat we (sickly) weave, a minor banner of our praise. That is not for us. Suscepit Israel.... He hath received us O with cruel...
Leslie A. Fiedler
"CAST aside all beliefs that serve to fill up emptiness or sweeten what is bitter: the belief in immortality; the belief that good somehow comes of sin, etiam peccata; the belief in...
George Barker
AND just by crossing the short sea To find the answer sitting there Combing out its snakey hair And with a smile regarding me Because it knows only too well That I shall never recognize The...
Gerard H. Wilk
FORTY years ago a man collapsed on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side and subsequently died in Mount Moriah Hospital, of starvation and cheap liquor. The Rivington Street congregation...
Alfred Werner
NOT long ago the head of the Biological Institute on Mount Carmel in Israel received letters warning him to remove its collection of "unclean" animals that were being kept for experimental...
May Natalie Tabak
HERBERT SAND set the last of the breakfast dishes away in the cupboard, hung the towels up to dry, turned to his wife Katy and said, "I guess that's all now. I'd better get to work, don't you...
Louis Zara
THE dressmaker's dummy, headless and buxom, with an iron wire-skirt and a tripod foot, stood in a corner near the icebox. Because there were small children in the house, Mama Kramer covered the...
Immanuel of Rome
IMMANUEL BEN SOLOMON of Rome, called Manoello, the greatest Hebrew poet of medieval Italy, was born in Rome, about I270. For a time, he served as a dignitary in the Rome Jewish community; but...
Chemjo Vinaver
ONCE upon a time the publication of a book was considered an important matter. Among Jews it was the accepted custom for an author to submit his manuscript to the rabbinical authorities...
Miriam Reimann
A GROUP of seven-year-olds at a progressive school were reporting what A 1 they had done over their Thanksgiving vacation. A dark-skinned Negro boy, one of the most popular children in the...
Reviewed by Max Beloff
THE present book consists mainly of a reprint of Professor Friedrich's The New Belief in the Common Man, originally published in 1942, to which has been added a prologue and an epilogue that...
Reviewed by Golo Mann
THE TWENTY-FIFTH HouR comes to America heralded by a considerable European fame. This must be a result of the theme of the novel, its pretension, its vast gesture; it is not justified by what...
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
BY COMMON acceptance, Jewish history begins in the United States with the landing of the first handful of Jews in New Amsterdam in I654. As the 3ooth anniversary of that event approaches, its...
Reviewed by Robert Langbaum
ANzIA YEZImRSXA achieved fame during the 20o's with a novel called Hungry Hearts about Jewish immigrants on New York's Lower East Side. The novel passed almost unnoticed until Samuel Goldwyn...
Reviewed by Emil L. Fackenheim
IF THIS book succeeds, in barely I30 pages, in portraying the religious thought of the great Jewish sage of the Middle Ages, it is the result of three virtues: the author's thorough knowledge...
George Lichtheim
THE new year has begun with a meeting of the British Commonwealth Prime Ministers in London, and with another United Nations retreat in Korea. The two events have an important bearing on one...
H. R. Trevor-Roper
IN SEPTEMBER 1945 the circumstances of Hitler's death or disappearance had been for five months dark and mysterious. Many versions of his death or escape had become current. Some stated that...
David Daiches
SOON after I came to Ithaca to take up my present position at Cornell, I was asked by the local rabbi to talk to his congregation one Friday evening. He suggested that I might talk from the...
T. R. Fyvel
WHILE reading and pondering over some recent essays in COMMENTARY on Jewish "authenticity" (and the relation between Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals), I found my thoughts taking me back...
J. L. Teller
ISRAELI newspapers and periodicals have recently been full of excited and anguished discussion of Israel's "moral crisis." By this they mean the marked relapse from the rigorously high-some...
Martin Greenberg
EUROPE has never been able quite to make up its mind about America, perhaps because it has never been able quite to make up its mind about itself; lauding America in the spirit of Rousseau for...
Milton R. Konvitz
AFTER almost fifty years, the famous Berea College decision, which closed A Ithe door on equal education for white and Negro, has been legally undone, and a chain reaction has thereby been...
Eva Rosenfeld
JANET had arrived late in the afternoon, was introduced to the manager and some of the tutors, saw the children walking around the camp, had supper in the big wooden shack, and after a little...
Saul Touster
CONCERTED winter holds back spring, But nothing holds great thaws rumbling Under our desultory feet, And under the earth we know that still, Remembering, time must hesitate until The unction of...
Donald Paneth
IN THE declining afternoon, Mrs. Gertrude Litofsky, a Bronx housewife, likes to sit at her bedroom window and watch e young children playing in the apartment house courtyard below. She has...
Milton Kaplan
IMPATIENT with the awkward Ear, Who cannot keep the pace of plan, Eye rides the rim of mind's frontier To scout intent with outstretched scan. Lagging behind, inept and shy, Uneasy partner of...
Solomon Ibn Gabirol
THE history of contacts between peoples has few pages brighter than the Jewish Golden Age in Moorish Spain. Under the impress of Arab culture, not only new forms but new attitudes and sympathies...
George Ross
A THOROUGHLY satisfying translation is a rare thing in the theater, and even rarer in the Yiddish theater. However, if Toyt fun a Salesman at the Parkway Theater in Brooklyn...
Reinhard Bendix
A PARADOX rends the social sciences today. Two contradictory views of the nature of man are asserted simultaneously. On the one hand, we are told that it is possible to know and understand...
Reviewed by Arthur Hertzberg
IN THE concluding pages of this autobiography, Meyer Levin tells a story about himself as a very young man: "Once in Paris, in a general talk about aims in life, Marek Swarc asked me 'What do...
Reviewed by Hazel Whitman
MEN like Gandhi do not happen very oftenno oftener perhaps than men like Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed. Unhappily, the lives of such great spiritual leaders are too often shrouded in the aura...
Reviewed by Solomon F. Bloom
Two Yiddish writers have supplied us, from a wide experience and observation, with the best introduction to Jewish life in Poland before the Extermination. In The Brothers Ashkenazi, the late I....
Reviewed by Hannah Arendt
ANTI-SEMITISM is a deplorably neglected area of modern history, and every contribution that does more than simply add another title to the formidable library of apologetics, anti-Semitica, or...
Reviewed by Saul Bellow
MR. RIBALOW is convinced that the two dozen stories in his collection make up "a definitive composite portrait of American Jewish life." Certainly the variety of subjects is large enough to make...
Reviewed by Ralph Marcus
IN Jesus in the Jewish Tradition Rabbi Gold- the positive stein claims to have given an accurate, complete, ity of the and up-to-date account of Jewish views con- Althougl cerning the career and...
Herrymon Maurer
IN THE beginning, the issue was sharp, clean. There was invaded South Korea to rescue from the evident danger of Russian-prompted conquest, and there were frightened countries in Asia and...
Leo S. Baeck
IN THE previous issue of this magazine there appeared an impressive article by Professor David Daiches, an article that was a spirited confession of his faithful unbelief. We should be...
Emilia Liss
But, behold they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice.-ExoDus rT HE two NKVD men called for me a little before two in the morning. I was waiting for them. They had been arresting...
Hal Lehrman
TWO years ago this spring, when the Economic Department of the Jewish Agency put out its New York shingle, a flood of prospectors poured up the high brownstone stoop and into the...
Norbert Muhlen
THE motion picture Jud Siiss ("Jew Siiss") was first shown in German and foreign theaters in 940, shortly after Hitler began his war and took the first large steps to his "solution of the...
Saul Bellow
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.... H 'ARD work? No, it wasn't really so hard. He wasn't used to walking and stair-climbing, but the physical difficulty of his new job...
Mark Raven
THE JEWISH CHRONICLE of London has published a centenary history of itself, celebrating its continuous publication since 84I. One senses in reading it not only a quiet satisfaction at the...
David Ignatow
The Junknan THE odds and ends, the leftovers, slightly rotted, too big or too short, too thin or too wide, he gathers them up, dumped upon his land; no sign reading, "Dumping Forbidden." He...
Sarah C. Schack
ISRAELI canned gefilte fish is good, its chocolate is good, its oranges are famous, even its canned sabras (prickly pears) are fine-if you can get them. You can get them on Fifth Avenue for...
M. Tsanin
IT CAME about that the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, gave us a sovereign state, , and now when we sit down to eat by ourselves, it turns out we must begin from the beginning to learn how to...
Annie Nathan Meyer
"YOU get a Democrat in the White House," Papa used to say gloomily, "and you'll see." The very vagueness of what was foredoomed seemed to add to the dire quality of the catastrophe. Less than...
Charles Reznikoff
THIS is a rearrangement and versification of parts of the Fourth Book of Ezra-so designated in the appendix to the Vulgate-or 2'Esdras of the Protestant Apocrypha. I have based...
Henry Popkin
ELMER RICE'S work, as represented in a new volume of selected plays, repeats the familiar pattern of most successful American dramatists of our day: the painstaking mastery of...
Paul Kecskemeti
THE logic of God, it may be said, is: to become actual, a thing must have been possible. While the logic of the devil is: to become possible, a thing must have been actual. To most people, the...
Reviewed by Allen Mandelbaum
THE Philosophical Library has published an imposing volume in The Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization. Over nine hundred pages, seventeen contributors, eighteen essays, a moving dedication...
Reviewed by Isa Kapp
WITH few exceptions, American writers have introduced us to American wealth only in its public aspect: the clubs, limousines, and broken engagements that are the province of the rotogravure....
Reviewed by Earl Raab
ROOTLESSNESS was all right in its time, but men who fifteen years ago were fleeing from traditions are now hot in their pursuit. In this connection, Charleston offers a special...
Reviewed by Will Herberg
FOR thirty years, off and on, Monsignor Ronald Knox, distinguished Catholic chaplain at Oxford, has been working on a book telling the story of "enthusiastic" movements in Western Christendom....
Reviewed by Nathan Halper
ONE day, the first sergeant came out to watch us on the drill field. We were green. Being green, we were mortally afraid of non-coms. Especially of top kicks. This one was tall, bony, with...
G. F. Hudson
THE war in Korea is certainly one of the oddest wars in history. Four out of five of the recognized Great Powers of the world are engaged in it on one side or the other, yet military...
Theodor Gaster
WHEN the average Jew sits down to the Seder, he has a number of ideas about what he is doing. Unhappily, the ideas are, on the whole, quite fallacious. Yet they have become so widely accepted...
Granville Hicks
LAST December the Nation celebrated its eighty-fifth birthday by publishing an outsize issue of the sort that has become almost obligatory for such occasions. Many prominent persons,...
Herbert J. Gans
IN NOVEMBER I949, the author of this article completed a study of the Jews of Park Forest, Illinois. The study had one especially intriguing aspect: under its very eyes-in the midst of answering...
Peter Viereck
NOT even Ezra Pound's most intolerant belittlers have ever been able to deny his trail-blazing function, whether or not one likes his trails. Therefore one wonders what his feelings must...
Charles Abrams
MY GOLDEN dream fulfilled Would be a small table," an immigrant in an Israeli camp told this writer. "For eight years we have eaten with thousands of others at long tables -four years in a...
Babette Deutsch
FOR all its busy joy, the hill, Where now noon sits in stillness, grows A living monument to leisure. Here something less than animal Yet more than human seems to take Its pleasure. Earth and...
Bernard Malamud
THOUGH the street was somewhere near a river, it was landlocked and narrow, a crooked canyon of aged brick tenement buildings. A child throwing a ball straight up saw a bit of pallid sky. On...
Anatole Broyard
GET HOT" was once the Negro reveler's favorite exhortation; now, in Harlem, the key word is "Be cool, man." The difference between these two expressions is more than a mere matter of slang:...
Ella Mae Linsley
LET us call the client, harassed by certain department and fish store bills, X., for of course it is myself. Who else? The scene is an old-fashioned office building in Pemberton Square,...
Ralph Gordon
A Judgment of Solomon's THE Mouse Deer's little tail stood pert: "I can't deny, your Majesty, The Otter's little ones were hurt, Indeed, were damaged mortally. I simply say it's not my...
Sidney Alexander
VENICE was, of course, the tourist's Venice-the open ballroom of Piazza San Marco, the black swans of gondolas (twelve times the first day!), the spun tracery of palaces. For us, Venice...
Hubert Creekmore
IN A hot noon on the room shores of this house, the radio god empties all oceans in a spread plain where the mind has forfeit its hills: not the sun flash on the wave curl, nor the tumbling...
Morroe Berger
AS THE scale of international wars has grown, styles in the analysis of their causes have shifted. In the era before World War I, wars were said to have been caused by rival governments...
Reviewed by David Riesman
A SCIENCE-FICTION tale of some years back tells of a young man who gets the idea that the world he lives in is arranged especially for him. If he walks into a drug store and orders an...
Reviewed by Alfred Kazin
THE AGE OF LONGING is a highly sophisticated talkfest on "these messy times," its scene Paris in "the middle nineteen-fifties," on the eve of war with the "Commonwealth of Freedom Loving...
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
WHEN Lincoln Steffens, after his trip to Russia, announced "I have seen the Future and it works," he coined an epitaph that may appropriately be inscribed on the tombstone of zoth-century...
Reviewed by Howard O. Sackler
JouRNEY TO THE DAWN is a painful case of memory sent forth to wander through a novel with only warmth, sympathy, and nostalgic prejudice to direct it. In a rocking-chair way, of course, such a...
Reviewed by S. Niger
NAHUM STUTCHKOFF, who collected, classified, and divided into more than six hundred conceptual categories about one hundred and fifty thousand Yiddish words, phrases, idioms, and proverbs...
John Cleveland
SO MUCH has recently been written of the friction between the United States and Britain that the man in the street could be forgiven for believing that the two countries have never been at such...
Herrymon Maurer
ALMOST as soon as it began, it became clear that the inquiry into the loyalty of Anna M. Rosenberg and her fitness to be Assistant Secretary of Defense would have to become an inquiry into...
Milton R. Konvitz
DEAR DAVID DAICHES: Had your article in the February 1951 COMMENTARY been only an exposition and defense of agnosticism, it would have awakened in me echoes of Thomas Huxley and Bertrand...
Ralph Gordon
GRANDMOTHER has a hole dug in the earth; U She brings her great brass basin, her mortar and pestle, Her kettle, knives and forks; her oaken girth Bends at the hole; she lets the hard things...
Hal Lehrman
THE threat of socialism-nightmare of ultra-rugged individualists-ranks high among the discouragements blamed for dampened enthusiasm among potential foreign investors in Israel. How real is the...
Herbert Howarth
PROBABLY, as the phase of revaluation of the work of the first decade of this century comes round, James Elroy Flecker's rating will rise and he will be seen more clearly along with...
Howard Singer
THE Tenenbaums' apartment paralleled ours; the windows faced one another across the U-shaped airshaft, our windows were three feet higher and about ten feet away from theirs. I had an...
George Barker
THERE was that Jew making love to a chair. 1What did it do? O avatar of Love It turned back first of all into a tree Then to the seed, then to the hand that planted. He ran his brush down the...
Ian Mikardo
THE princes and politicians of the Arab states are slowly learning to recognize, and to face, the facts of life. They are beginning to understand that the State of Israel can't be treated as a...
Bela Fabian
TWO correspondents of an American news agency called on Deputy Prime Minister Rkosi of Hungary in the summer of I945. At the very outset of their conversation, one of the newspapermen...
Jacob Sloan
Once I was walking about in the black of night and in darkness, and saw a blind man walking with a torch in his hand. I said to him: My son, why the torch? He said to me: So long as this torch is...
Irving Pfefferblit
AMID the more and more open scandal A of what American know-how has A Idone to American bread-white, whole wheat, rye, or vitaminized-that tasteless, flavorless, bodiless miracle of...
Reader Letters
THE study group which young Moses Hayyim Luzzatto founded in Padua, the regulations of which are here presented in a translation prepared for Schocken Books (the original Hebrew text was...
Chemjo Vinaver
FIFTY-FIVE concerts of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra-Israel's most impressive item of "cultural export" to date-in American cities throughout the land have given us the opportunity to...
Robert Gorham Davis
IN 1946 the Central Committee of the Russian Communist party called upon Soviet psychology "to expose the reactionary character of psychological theories now current in America and Western...
Reviewed by Saul Bellow
DREiSER is not very popular now, unfortunately, and Professor Matthiessen's book will not restore his popularity though it defends him with some real feeling against the usual charges of crude...
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
AT LEAST since Paradise Lost, it has been a commonplace of literary criticism that the villain of the piece, against the will of the author and to the discomfiture of honest folk, finds it all...
Reviewed by C. Hartley Grattan
THE operative word in Stephen Spender's autobiography is "guilt." It appears in various contexts in the book and, separately and collectively, the references make clear that his sense...
Reviewed by Harold Rosenberg
SYKEs's novel has hit on something that seems to be budding among American intellectuals: the impulse to join in the leadership of United States society as it is-or, at least some would say, as...
Reviewed by Moshe Decter
THIS book is the story of the conversion of a Jew to Catholicism. The author, a German Jewish psychiatrist presently residing in Montreal, has not given us his complete life story because, in...
Reviewed by Moses Hadas
A REcoRD of the proceedings of a body of zothcentury rabbis, no matter how determined they might be to maintain distinctiveness in outlook and language within the general American culture,...
William D. Grampp
Each one for himself and God for us all, as the elephant said when it danced among the chickens. T IS often said that economic inequality is one of the besetting problems of capitalism. In...
Sol Stein
Mine enemy comes with the frequency of death. The eye in unexpected quarters catches Silent hushes, akimbo-armed, standing stock And watching, winding grinding ratchets. The grate of time is...
Theodor Gaster
TO THE average Jewish father, his son's Bar Mitzvah is scarcely less important than his daughter's wedding. However far he may himself have strayed from the ancestral fold, he usually...
David Ignatow
THEY nest in the building cornices swept by rain and the city's store of dust. They have picked straw to bed on from wood cases machinery is packed in, and for the nest itself splinters off the...
Peter Schmid
DJAKARTA, on the island of Java, is one of the most melancholy capitals of the world. Yes, sigh the Dutch, it was different before the war. But even before disaster overtook the Europeans in...
Oscar Handlin
BETWEEN 1913 and 1920, in that portentous period that brought so many other changes to the United States and to the world, anti-Semitism became, for the first time, a significant force in...
Herbert Howarth
FRANKLY, the cult of Churchill as a writer, with the acclamations and awards as his successive volumes appear, is not likable. Many of his devotees worship him blindly; few really expose...
Hans Kohn
MODERN Jewish nationalism arose, like other national movements, after the traditional and rigid texture of medieval life gave way before two new forces: a religious revival through pietism...
Malcolm Cowley
IN THE literary world as in the country at large, 1930 was the strangest year of the century. It was the beginning of an age and the end of an age and the country was living as if by two...
Eliot L. Wagner
DEBORAH said to her brother, who remained alone with her at the long dinner table after her son-inlaw and daughter had gone to their own room, "Some performance, eh?" Ben raised his brows...
Ernest Stock
AT A PARTY given by a New Jersey Jewish community, a Princeton undergraduate mentioned that he knew Professor Einstein. "Tell me," one of the community leaders asked the young man, "is Einstein...
Reader Letters
"Beneath the Ashes Glow the Coals" SECULAR Hebrew poetry in Italy, after Immanuel of Rome (1270-1328), never equaled Immanuel's exuberance or his excellence. But the following poems, drawn...
Mark Khinoy
THERE is no insight into a nation's way of thought like a copy of its chief work of reference. Equipped only with a ruler-to measure the lengths of articles-we may discover what is considered...
Ruth Ludwig
WHEN we hear about exporting American "know-how" to Israel, automatically we envisage dams, new machinery, new methods of distribution and merchandising. However, it is in a special field...
Reviewed by William Barrett
THE war gave Norman Mailer a very good novel in The Naked and the Dead. This is not meant to be any reflection upon his talents, which showed themselves in that book to be extraordinary, but...
Reviewed by Alfred Jospe
ONLY a man of courage could offer a streamlined version of living Judaism in one hundred pages, and only a wise man ought to try. Rabbi Philip Bernstein possesses enough of both qualities to...
Reviewed by Norbert Muhlen
THE catastrophe which overtook European Jewry between 1940 and 1945 has understandably caused many Jews to see in every manifestation of anti-Semitism a step on the road to new Auschwitzes...
Reviewed by Will Herberg
WE are fast becoming a "laboristic society," Sumner Slichter tells us; he may exaggerate, but 609COMMENTARY ation of Community," and the rest of the book is given over to working out this...
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
THIS book grew out of questions asked by young persons of seventeen to twenty-five as to why their parents were so impossible, and was written by a young woman who was graduated from ollege in...
Robert Langbaum
THE dismissal of General MacArthur has brought the Western policy of "containment" into question in this country. MacArthur wanted to force an immediate military showdown with the...
Robert Bendiner
RARE is the traveler who returns from Europe or Asia these days without a full complement of gloomy tales about the anti-American sentiment he has encountered-in all countries and among...
William Barrett
A MID all the hubbub a few years ago about the Existentialist movement in France, it seems that nobody, not even the Existentialists themselves, took the trouble to make one cardinal point...
S. D. Goitein
ONE of the miracles of the new State of Israel was "Operation Magic Carpet," by which forty thousand Yemenite Jews were transported almost overnight by airplane from a primitive physical...
Constantine Poulos
A SUCCESSION of droughts and the growing exclusion of Jews from urban trades had something to do with the decision of the Yemenite Jews to leave a land where they and their forebears...
Cecil Hemley
Porphyry's Journey IT IS not enough that the spring returns, That lilac and daffodil again Rise from the nothingness of death, Last year's purple is not upon the bush, The yellow that delights...
Robert Misrahi
The first sign of a knowledge in birth is the desire to die. This life seems unbearable, another inaccessible. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one wishes to be transferred from...
G. F. Hudson
IN JANUARY 1944, just after the Teheran Conference, President Roosevelt recorded his impressions of Iran in a memorandum to Cordell Hull that ran in part as follows: "Iran is definitely a...
Jacob Sloan
FRANZ KAFKA has left a fragment of a story, which I here paraphrase: Amalia and Hans, the butcher's two children, were playing marble near an old warehouse when a man peered out through one of...
Meyer Levin
WE HUSBANDS have our game every Wednesday night while the girls are holding their Hadassah committee meeting. In fact it was my idea for the winners to contribute their haul to Hadassah as...
Ruth Glazer
IN THE new religious revival, the theologians and philosophers have it easy; they can battle about the nature of revelation endlessly in the pages of COMMENTARY. Parents and householders, on...
Peter Viereck
1. It is a curse. Our fingers fade away, And no one thanks us that the rhythms stay. For this we earn your mean and daily No. Some perchers safely grace the wrists of kings. We sing the tumult...
Hermann Broch
THE sudden death of HERMANN BROCH in New Haven on Memorial Day cut short the life of a writer who, despite his years, still had an infinite amount left to say. Broch was a unique. phenomenon...
Nathan Glick
IN TWO recent films-the American Teresa and the German The Last Illusion -America's legendary innocence and optimism are again contrasted with Europe's intimacy with evil and immersion in...
Irving Layton
As the afternoon wore on, The wind rose like an American tariff; I, more credulous than my parents, Sat on my gardenstool, hoping for signs; Something perhaps to fall out of the skyAn...
Gertrude Himmelfarb
IT WAS the mark of his age, John Stuart Mill once wrote, that "men may not reason better concerning the great questions in which human nature is interested, but they reason more." Mill was...
Reviewed by H. R. Trevor-Roper
AN INTERESTING study could be made of the fertilizing effect of error in the intellectual world. What a revolution has been caused in historical studies by the enormous errors of those misguided...
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
ONE by one, our young novelists are moving from considerations of war and its aftermath to considerations of politics. Irwin Shaw has selected a narrower canvas than Norman Mailer, but he...
Reviewed by Paul Kecskemeti
THE argument with which this book starts is familiar enough: The scientific method has been immensely successful in the investigation of natural processes and technological problems, and it is...
Reviewed by Theodor Gaster
WHEN the prophet Nathan addressed to David the famous words, "Thou art the man" (II Sam. 12:7), he could-little have suspected, for all his prophetic powers, that some three thousand years later...
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
THIS study will be of enormous value to any future scholar who may wish to rewrite the story of Central European Jewry in the light of 20th century experiences. Earlier historians, seeing all...
Ray Alan
THERE are three stars on the Syrian flag: one stands for Hashish, one for Bakshish, the third for Maalesh -or so any American or British official in the Near East will assure you. If this...
Leslie A. Fiedler
You will either aid in moulding history, or history will mould you, and in the case of the latter, you can rest assured that you will be indescribably crushed and maimed in the process.......
Mark Raven
HOW many of us, I wonder, are going to fast this year on the ninth day of Av-August ii, but this being a Sabbath the fast day is the 12th-or even give much thought to this solemn anniversary,...
J. K. Galbraith
"TO UNDERSTAND my state of mind," Keynes wrote George Bernard Shaw in 935, "... you have to know that I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will...
Allen Mandelbaum
"Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar that thy nakedness be not uncovered thereon." WE, THE meek, approaching the altar with faltering steps, take heed of the bareness and evil...
Hamlen Hunt
THE hundred or more guests invited to Sylvia Saroff's wedding, in Brookline, Massachusetts, felt no strangeness, thought Mrs. Forbes. They entered the Plantation House like a relative's...
Eleanor Clark
NOW that the pressures and processions of Rome's mid-century jubilee, or Holy Year, have joined the many others of the kind in the past, the whole show begins slowly to be visible, as...
Rita Hinden
IN THE spring of I950, world opinion was gripped by the story of an African chief who had married a white woman and was then exiled by the British government from his "kingdom." This episode...
Barnet Litvinoff
FOR many years to come the country folk of Arusha, Tanganyika, will have their most exciting bit of gossip to tell since Stanley met Livingstone high up in the Great Lakes and took the dying...
Alfred Werner
All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful. -Wilfred Owen MUNICH was where the first Nazi putsch took place, in 1923, and twenty years later that same...
James Yaffe
I WAS using Grand Central Station as a short cut the other day when I came upon a dozen young men, new draftees, all around nineteen or twenty years old, huddled together at the entrance to...
Reader Letters
FROM the traditional sources, JOSEPH GAER has made a new collection of legends which grew up around the events narrated in the Hebrew Bible; the following selections are from his forthcoming...
Sidney Alexander
AS YOU approach Oxford, Mississippi, the first thing that greets you, floating on the horizon, is the silver bubble of the water tower, on which, as you draw closer, you may read painted...
Nathan Glazer
SINCE I948, public opinion polls have not been much in the public eye. The Great Miscalculation of I948 drove them from their favored places in the daily newspapers, and the experts in opinion...
Reviewed by Morroe Berger
THAT prophetic and quotable observer of American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, remarked over a century ago that "wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the Government in...
Reviewed by Jeanne Wacker
THE Daily Worker recently reported that toy manufacturers in the Soviet Union had been reprimanded for making green rabbits and unrecognizable ducks, thereby departing from the principles of...
Reviewed by Marvin Fox
IN THE fundamentally secular environment of contemporary American Judaism, in which almost every conceivable kind of activity is given precedence over Torah and worship, Professor Heschel has...
Reviewed by Richard Hofstadter
THIS edition of The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, to be completed in eight volumes, is second in importance among current editorial enterprises in Americana only to the great collection of...
Reviewed by Henry Popkin
ALTHOUGH Douglas Reed's writings are represented as journalism, they will bear scrutiny only as fiction of a very weird and original sort. Reed writes in his latest book, "It is a feature of...
Herbert Luthy
LET me begin with a heresy: the mechanism of representative democracy is in rather poor working order. This is more true of Europe than of the British Commonwealth and America. But, to...
Bruno Bettelheim
BEHIND much of the effort to build up a Jewish cultural life in this countrythe establishment of schools, synagogues, and community centers, as well as the production of Jewish books, music,...
Joseph Wood Krutch
BEFORE I settled in the Sonoran desert I spent a few days in the foothills of New Mexico's Sacramento mountains. From a height we looked down on Alamagordo and, beyond that, across...
Bogdan Raditsa
SINCE the end of World War II, the United States-rather to its own surlargeprise-has become the haven for a large flock of political refugees, "sweating out" in America the eventual liberation...
Lester Seligman
THE political leadership of underprivileged groups - working-class parties, oppressed national groups, Jews and Negroes in the United States-has often, it has been observed, been drawn...
Milton Kaplan
Now in the spring of the year When the maples ripple green In wind-swept water images, I walk a landscape grown Desolate, and read the trees Black on the winter pages. On the baseball field...
Julius Horwitz
THE building stood, crumbling at its sides, rooted by iron spikes and oak beams, the red paint chipped, peeling, covering red bricks laid before the Civil War. He saw the four windows...
Phinn Lapide
IT WAS in 943, while serving in Italy with a Palestinian unit of the British Eighth Army, that I came upon the new Jews of San Nicandro, a small village near the southern tip of Italy. These...
Leslie A. Fiedler
THERE are certain books in a tradition which, after a while, everyone stops reading, but which no one can stop writing; the less aware a novelist is of the book's existence, the more he...
Jacob Glatstein
I Who can bear The wail of a young orphan? Or the tears of a needy widow? Who can endure The loneliness-like a stone'sOf a woman who is barren? Or the shame of an ugly wife Whom a husband...
Donald Paneth
SATURDAY night is going out night. And Queenie Jones puts on her best print dress and lipstick. She curls her hair, and paints her nails. Queenie Jones carries a navy-blue purse with a gold...
Joseph Leftwich
AMONG the most poignant relics of the European catastrophe are the literary remains of the men and women who lived and died in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps: the poems and...
M. L. Rosenthal
IT SEEMS a long time now since the first "Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life," in which Mortimer Adler lashed out at the...
Roberta S. Sigel
MOST studies of German public opinion made since the end of the war seem to point to this conclusion: after living under the Nazi dictatorship and scrabbling among the ruins of total war, all...
Reviewed by Bertram D. Wolfe
THE most persistent of all the legends which have served to obscure the true outlines of the Soviet system is the notion that Lenin and Stalin have given a new, attractive, and completely...
Reviewed by G. F. Hudson
Books and articles about the Far East may be divided into those written before 1943 and those written since that date. To read anything 294BOOKS IN REVIEW of earlier date is to find oneself in a...
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
RABBI KoRN has gathered in this volume the fruits of years of earnest research. Wisely abandoning the familiar ground others have covered again and again, particularly the chronicle of...
Reviewed by Will Herberg
JAMES HASTINGS NICHOLs' Democracy and the Churches is really two books in one-a serious, often profound theologico-social analysis of the implications of the Protestant and Catholic traditions...
Reviewed by Heinz Politzer
FORCEFULNESS was never the forte of the progressive literati of the Weimar Republic. Except in the case of Berthold Brecht, with his South German temperament, which drew its strongest...
Reviewed by Joseph Gallant
SCIENCE fiction is one aspect of the romanticism of a technological society. Within the idiom and 303COMMENTARY ideology of an industrial culture, and without importing foreign or archaic...
Morris Freedman
IN 1895 Morris Raphael Cohen passed his entrance examinations to the College of the City of New York, receiving a gold medal for having made the highest mark of all the candidates. He...
Peter de Mendelssohn
IN MARCH of this year there appeared in Western Germany a new monthly called Europiiische Sicherheit ("European Security"), subtitled "A Review of the Military Sciences." The first magazine...
Midge Decter
IN THE 20's and 30's, the American Jewish community began to take stock of its educational facilities and program. The compelling life of America had taken its toll. The Talmud Torah (the...
Bela Fabian
"STALIN will succeed where Hitler failed: he will finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe," came the warnings from my friends behind the Iron Curtain in 949. "If the West does...
Will Herberg
THIS year's fiftieth anniversary of the Socialist Party of America will hardly be celebrated with high heart by the members of either the party or its "rightwing" offshoot, the Social...
Martin Buber
The Hasidim and the Holy Land RABBI NAHMAN OF BRATZLAV, great-grandson of the Baal-shem-tov, the founder of Hasidism, has become the symbol of everything that the generations living in...
Sylvia Rothchild
IN THE morning Kaminsky's candy store in East Flatbush was a sleepy place. Samuel Kaminsky silently handed his customers their newspapers through a small opening in his glass window without even...
Irving Howe
THE world of William Faulkner is neither social photography nor historical record; it is rather an appropriation from a communal memory, some great store of half-forgotten legends, of...
Babette Deutsch
The loping in the darkness, here, now there, As the wild scents whispered, the roadside beckoned, while Things without heads roared past, their smell not vile But meaningless-and the loping on,...
Harold Dessler
I REMEMBER the night my uncle died. Of course he really didn't die; but for me he died just as wholly as if he had been buried from the Riverside Memorial Chapel, as was customary for the New...
Abraham J. Heschel
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL, associate professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, is the author of Maimonides, Die Prophetie, Studies in Ibn Gabirol's...
Harry L. Golden
FOR all his huge bulk, his diabetes, and his addiction to twelve black cigars a day, Judah P. Benjamin certainly got around. Born in the Virgin Islands, he emigrated to South Carolina,...
Reuel Denney
IN EVERY American decade we say goodbye to a landmark or a character we had grown used to. A generation ago we said goodbye to the five-cent stein and the Uncle Tom Negro. Today we seem to be...
Reviewed by Judah Goldin
IT IS noteworthy, it seems to me, that the spirit of the heralded modern's return to religion continues to be cast in the keys of tentativeness and nostalgia. There is a craving for myths...
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
AT THE height of the struggle around Palestine, in 947-49, it was a constant marvel to the more clear-headed observers how the British officials, with all the cards in their hands and all the...
Reviewed by Isa Kapp
IN THE last decade, apart from sentimental writing, we have come to expect stories about Jews to be stories of victims, or, by inverse logic, of opportunists. It is a new thought to place Jewish...
Reviewed by Allen Mandelbaum
THE tribe of visionary-poets, especially in English, where imagination must often work against a prudential language, is small. America offers four such poets in Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, and...
Reviewed by Kurt H. Wolff
KARL MANNHEIM, the Hungarian-born sociologist who became famous in Germany and who died in England in I947, held in fascination a wide intellectual circle ever since the appearance of his...
Reviewed by Edward N. Saveth
JUST a few months ago Jacob Coxey died at the ripe age of ninety-seven. Coxey, in the depression days of 895, led the Army of the Commonweal, composed of the unemployed and vagrant, from its...
Charles Abrams
ON THE 18th of September, 1951, a Cook County grand jury, investigating the recent housing riot in Cicero, Illinois, handed down a curious indictment. Instead of indicting the...
Hal Lehrman
IT IS well known that not all Frenchmen have waxed mustaches, not all Englishmen wear monocles, and not all Italians are tenors. But it required the creation of an independent Jewish state,...
Stephen Spender
IT IS well to remember that the intellectual life of a country such as Britain is a whole composed of many parts. Someone like myself tends to judge the position of British intellectuals by...
Irving Kristol
IT IS known that the surest way of killing a joke is to explain it, and humor has, in self-defense, made an especially comic figure of the man who would earnestly analyze it. Thus humor and...
Samuel Yellen
THE place is the corner of Empty and Bleak, The time is night's most desolate hour, The scene is Al's Coffee Cup or the Hamburger Tower, The persons in this drama do not speak. We who peer...
Peter Schmid
I FOUND it no easy matter to gain admittance to the reception at which the Italian Ambassador was to present his credentials. Franco is one of the most inaccessible men in contemporary...
Judd L. Teller
THE 23rd World Zionist Congress this past summer should have been a triumphal convocation. Here were the representatives of world Zionism meeting for the first time in Jerusalem, fifty-four...
L. Poliakov
THE author remembers very clearly the time when, some years younger than he is now, he played at hide an seek with the German and Vichy police, as did the large majority of the Jewish...
Bernard Malamud
EARLY one morning, during a wearying hot spell in the city, a police car that happened to be cruising along Canal Street drew over to the curb and one of the two policemen in the car leaned...
William and Sarah C. Schack
IN THE summer of 1882, the first performance of a Yiddish play in this country -Abraham Goldfaden's Koldunya, sometimes titled Die Bube Yachne ("The Witch")-was given at the Turn Hall...
Charles Reznikoff
BROWNSVILLE is now well within the city of New York. The subway runs through Brownsville; it has at least a hundred streets and all are paved; almost all the houses are of brick. Then it was...
Reader Letters
ETHIOPIA'S "Black Jews," the Falashas, have been an object of speculation and curiosity since the late 8th century, when Europeans first became aware of their existence. Nothing is known with...
Jackson MacLow
READING the Hebrew bible (Frightening book of my people) I learned of the See of Knowledge And the shameful brew of the vintage. The sea that flooded with being And the tree that drowned with...
Chemjo Vinaver
THE premiere of David Tamkin's operatic version of The Dybbuk, presented by the New York City Opera Company this past October 4, comes a quarter of a century after the Habimah troupe from...
Isa Kapp
A GENIAL anarchist, S. G., whom I came to know suddenly and intimately during I95 o , has reached the age of one year, and can be dimly recognized in Dr. Arnold Gesell's profile (in his Infant...
Reviewed by Everett C. Hughes
PROFESSOR MILLS had fun writing this book about the ever-increasing proportion of us who wear suit jackets and neckties at our work and who are paid salaries rather than hourly base rates plus...
Reviewed by Will Herberg
MILTON STEINBERG, who died on March 20, 195o, at the age of forty-six, was a man of notable gifts. He possessed a penetrating mind and a most varied culture, a warm heart and great capacities...
Reviewed by Milton Klonsky
THERE is a cartoon by Carl Rose in this Album which, by self-reflection, reflects the situation of the New Yorker as well. It shows the divine interior of the Radio City Cathedral (on...
Reviewed by William Phillips
OF THE six essays in this book about America's influence on European culture-one by an American professor, one by an Irish writer, the four others by Englishmen-at least three find the influence...
Reviewed by Granville Hicks
"THIS book," Mr. Howe tells us, "is partly an outgrowth of an involved and intimate relationship I have had with Sherwood Anderson's writings, a relationship I believe not unique to myself....
George Lichtheim
ELECTORAL post-mortems, in this Age of Gallup, tend to be an affair of evaluating not personalities but percentages. In a homogeneous and politically mature community such as Britain, where...
Reader Letters
IT IS not surprising that 'The Jewish College Student: 951 Model" by Morris Freedman, in the October COMMENTARY, has provoked wide discussion. The inner resources and the future quality of...
Franz Borkenau
THE government of the United States seemingly has decided that, to secure the military defense of Europe against Communism, it is essential that Spain play a role in its plans, and that...
Alfred Werner
ONE bright spring day of 939 two odd-looking men walked down from the Munich Central Station toward one of the restaurants on the other side of the square. With their battered hats, unshaven...
Elizabeth Hardwick
THE muddy waves of American selfreproach beat upon the European shores again. Nothing seems to have happened in thirty years. The postwar generation of young Americans is back in Europe,...
Judd L. Teller
ISRAEL'S treatment of her Arab residents, today numbering 70,oo000 or more, has been the subject of press and Knesset discussion almost from the day the new state was born. This...
Albert Halper
THE first big snow of winter was falling as my pal Joey Pisano and I came walking from Ashland Avenue and turned into Lake Street. The large flakes sifted past the black Elevated in the...
Emil L. Fackenheim
"NOW Mt. Sinai was altogether on smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly . . . and the...
Charles Reznikoff
I "THE lamps are burning in the synagogue, I in the houses of study, in dark alleys...." This should be the place. This is the way the guide book describes it. Excuse me, sir, can you tell...
Margaret Blocher Anavi
MY PARENTS moved around a great deal during my childhood. Every place we lived, my brother and I were sent to Sunday school. If the Baptist church happened to be nearer our home than the...
Saul Touster
"And do not call it fixity...."-Burnt Norton SOMEONE has been playing with the spheres And the sky is left open like a cracked skull And from the sun magnificent tears Fall on the earth, final...
Reader Letters
THE writings of the Falashas, the "Black Jews" of Ethiopia, strongly reflected the influence of the Ethiopic-Christian environment in which they lived. This description of Heaven and Hell, which...
William and Sarah C. Schack
FOR years they've been comin' 'round The Mountains (Catskill)-those Jewish storytellers, mimics, singers-to entertain the overfed guests with numbers not always so Jewish as the dishes; and...
Will Herberg
A RECENT report by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan indicates that the American people rank labor unions second in influence on national affairs, immediately after the...
Reviewed by Allen Mandelbaum
THE present work by A. M. Klein is novel, travel book, personal memoir, history-biography of the Jew as wanderer, confession of faith, and work of love. This multiplicity marks the...
Reviewed by David Daiches
ALFRED KAZIN writes about the Brownsville of his childhood and youth, about the "urime Yidn," the poor immigrant Jews and their families who led there their warm, shabby, picturesque,...
Reviewed by Harold Rosenberg
EVERY place has its own kind of time. This includes the pace of its people in their work, entertainment, action-the rate of speed at which things move and happen there. But the time of a...
Reviewed by Herbert Howarth
WHATEVER view you hold, or may have held, of terrorism and its place in the Israeli national struggle, you will probably be disappointed with the book in which Menachem Begin has now told his...
Reviewed by Golo Mann
WHEN J. B. Bury published his Idea of Progress just thirty years ago, he noted the "prevalent feeling that a social or political theory or programme is hardly tenable if it cannot claim that...
Reviewed by Lucy S. Dawidowicz
SOMETIME in the middle of September 941, an NKVD colonel named Aron Arkady Volkovsky, right-hand man to Lavrenti Beria, visited Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter in their hotel room in Moscow....
1951
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