Daniel J. Boorstin
After having heard for many years about “Colonial Williamsburg” and having read the attractive advertisements in the New Yorker inviting families to come down for a vacation weekend at Williamsburg Inn and Lodge, I finally had an opportunity to visit the place myself.
Bogdan Raditsa
The Hungarian revolt sent a new type of East European refugee to this country.
Elie Kedourie
Ever since the 19th century, when so-called reforms were introduced in the Ottoman Empire, Western observers have watched Middle Eastern politics with hopeful expectancy.
Walter Schwarz
Like a becalmed ship, Israel's foreign policy stands ominously still. About the dramatic events in and around Syria she can do nothing.
Leonard Plotnik
In the New Lots district, situated in the midst of the East New York, Brownsville, Crown Heights, and East Flatbush sections of Brooklyn lies an enclave with a peculiar character all its own.
Dwight Macdonald
The most alarming literary news in years is the enormous success of James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed.
Martin Braun
IF I may adapt a familiar saying, the slogan "We are all realists now" seems to me to sum up fairly well the presentday position in historical and political thinking. What marks current...
David Boroff
We didn't want him to marry again. Why should he? Certainly not to satisfy the flesh.
Reader Letters
Rabbi Eleazar asked his father, Rabbi Simeon: “Behold, we have learned, ‘It is forbidden to teach the Torah to a heathen’; and the scholars of Babylonia have fittingly drawn our attention to the verse..."
Hans Meyerhoff
A year after the world-wide celebrations of the hundredth anniversary of Freud's birth, Ernest Jones has completed the third and last volume of his biography of his friend and teacher.
Paul Jacobs
For the past ten years sociologists and political scientists have been making intensive studies of trade union organization, a subject formerly the exclusive preserve of radicals, labor historians, and civil libertarians.
Reviewed by Edouard Roditi
Reviewed by Maurice Goldbloom
Reviewed by Milton R. Konvitz
Reviewed by A. V. Sherman
Oscar Gass
Viewed candidly from Washington at the beginning of 1958, there is no prospect that the government of the United States will soon undertake general, systematic participation in the improvement of the economic condition of the poorest peoples.
Oscar Handlin
I began to pull my thoughts together on the beach at Ascalon.
Abba P. Lerner
When the United Automobile Workers International Union (UAW) recently invited the three big automobile corporations to take a first step in checking the inflationary process by lowering 1958 automobile prices, the corporations in effect replied, “After you, Alphonse.”
Frederick P. Bargebuhr
Medieval Jewry in general resigned from the cultural and even more so the political ambitions entertained by the Moslems and Christians.
Robert S. Brustein
In the last eight or ten years Americans have been charmed by a new culture hero, with far-reaching effects upon the quality of our spoken arts.
Stephen P. Dunn
The light of Rome is supposed by enthusiasts to be different from that of any other place on earth.
Sylvia Rothchild
A Story.
David Nieto
Haver: The earth on which we dwell is a planet. On it are seas and rivers, mountains and valleys, human beings endowed with the gift of speech, and dumb animals.
Melvin Richter
Both Arthur de Gobineau and Alexis de Tocqueville must be numbered among the most original thinkers of the 19th century.
Reviewed by Gordon A. Craig
Reviewed by Gerald Reitlinger
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
Reviewed by Joel Carmichael
H. Stuart Hughes
During the past few months, public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic has been stirred by controversies over the best means to break the political deadlock between the Western world and the...
Hans J. Morgenthau
THE decline of political intelligence in the Western world has been demonstrated with particular force by the public outcry in favor of negotiations with the Soviet Union, following the...
Denis Healey
SINCE defeat in war is still regarded as the worst of all possible evils, the West's general posture in a period of coexistence is bound to be determined primarily by the prevailing...
G. F. Hudson
ALL but ten years have now passed since the commencement of the Soviet blockade of West Berlin. That was a crisis which involved the Soviet Union and the Western powers in a more direct and...
Meir Mindlin
THE Israeli intelligentsia are so special and peculiar as to puzzle and disconcert anyone approaching them with preconceptions. A generally knowledgeable foreigner, expecting to find...
Dan Wakefield
"Y los ultimos seran los primeros,...." ("and the last shall ve first")-From a campaign leaflet of Jose Lumen Roman, candidate for the New York City Council. A HALF-DOZEN men wearing wide,...
Wallace Markfield
AS THE train began the long crawl under the tunnel to Brooklyn I thought again of the crazy horse. It was Saturday morning, and all the mothers sat before the stoop on bridge chairs, opening...
Judd L. Teller
THE widespread, although perhaps not too deeply entrenched, antisecularism in vogue in America today is not only promoted by such things as Billy Graham's revivalism and the TV...
Reader Letters
Excerpts from Midrash ans Talmud THE Purim story occupies a surprisingly prominent place in Talmudic and Midrashic literature. Not only does the Talmud supply a wealth of commentary and...
Richard Chase
IT SEEMS clear that the amassing of new knowledge about American civilization in recent years has been accompanied by a general loss of political and scientific intelligence, a new...
Helen Neville
"It doesn't look like her now, but it will." -Picasso, of his portrait. -IT DOESN'T look like her. It's much too new. I She needs to die a little more, to be reclaimed by that which made her,...
Reviewed by Maurice Goldbloom
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
Reviewed by Steven Marcus
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
Ray Alan
THE most powerful political dynamic in Arab history has hitherto been centrifugal-an impulse toward fragmentation and separatism. It is an impulse induced by the very geography of the...
Nissim Rejwan
THE recent moves toward Arab unification, though generally thought to have placed Israel-Arab relations on a new footing, have in reality changed very little. To be sure, the proclamation...
Robert Lekachman
IN THE short history of the Riverside Democrats, an insurgent political club in the Columbia University area, September 10, 1957, was a night to remember. The sounds of revelry which emanated...
Gershom Scholem
THE 19th century, and 19th-century Judaism, have bequeathed to the modern mind a complex of ideas about Messianism that have led to distortions and counterfeits from which it is by no means...
Irving Feldman
WHO holds my book and turns the page? Thinking of my brother Jews I have crossed over the edge And as one dead walk among the dead. Who is it sits to read? Now that I wander like a...
Max Beloff
THE ratification of the "Euratom" and "Common Market" treaties, and the prospect of their coming into force in less than a year's time, has given a new urgency to the problem of the form that...
Eliezer Greenberg
A THIN layer of gray hair, broad forehead, Deeply grooved, eyes eternally in awe, Proud morbidity washed in a sheen of tears (The last an inheritance from my mother's house, From my father the...
Morroe Berger
THE accidents of history have in our time produced another of those fateful confrontations of Jews and Arabs in the Middle East which have occurred at several junctures during the...
Max Brod
DARKNESS fell in the hall of the beautiful country house. The suddenness with which twilight appeared in this part of the world bordering the tropics, and the speed with which it deepened...
Sylvia Rothchild
HOME for Pesach! It has a good sound, like home for Christmas, or for Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July. Where is home? Home is where grandparents live. The children's books still say that...
Abraham Isaac Kuk
THE book of the Song of Songs is read in the synagogue during the Passover and on Friday evenings. The absence of any overt religious references in it, together with its erotic imagery, has led...
Florence Victor
MY WIFE was only fifty when she died, MYI And all the family came to sit with me In sneakers and black dresses; we all tried To think how beautiful she used to be, And held the children closely...
Stanley Edgar Hyman
AT TIMES of upward social mobility, the etiquette books appear, to teach the rising groups how to behave almost indistinguishably from the groups they join or supplant. In the modern world such...
Hans Meyerhoff
LILLIAN BLUMBERG MCCALL, who here takes vigorous exception to HANs MEYERHOFF'S article "Freud the Philosopher" in the January COMMENTARY, has written often on psychoanalysis in these pages. Her...
Leo Haber
(Note: Some of the places associated here with Socrates, Feffer the Soviet Yiddish writer, and the poet's uncle-all killed by their respective statesare unhistorical.) I MY FATHER died in...
Reviewed by Lucy S. Dawidowicz
BEN HALPERN's book is an exciting exception to the dreary journalistic output about American Jews and Israel. Halpern has done several things in this lengthy essay: he has examined the...
Reviewed by Dan Jacobson
THERE are many reasons why one should read, or reread, Goodbye to All That. On the simplest level the book is as informative and as continuously interesting as a good novel, whether it deals...
Reviewed by R. H. S.
"PUTZI's" memories of life with Hitler-told to a dictaphone and then "orchestrated" by Brian Connell-is a jewel of a book: costume jewelry, of course, but, thanks to Mr. Connell's ghostly...
Reviewed by Harris Dienstfrey
THE urban-rural dichotomy and all its variants and examples are the heritage of all of us. The metropolis and the town, the city slicker and the country hick, the city's excitement and...
Reviewed by Robert S. Brustein
JAMES JONES'S second novel is located in a mythical town in Illinois called Parkman. It is an attempt to interpret the lives of its representative citizens, the bums, lushes, and whores who...
Robert Gorham Davis
THIS last fall I found myself reading, with a new kind of interest, an article which Randolph Bourne had published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1916. It was called "Trans-National...
H. Stuart Hughes
THE appearance of a full-scale, comparative study of Christian Democratic movements in Western Europe from the early 19th century to the present should be an occasion for joy, not only...
Jackson Toby
AT 6:20 P.M. on Sunday, March 16, a Negro porter turned out the lights it, in Nashville's Jewish Community Center and locked up for the night. Through the darkness considerable traffic flowed...
Jakob J. Petuchowski
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and author of numerous books and articles on the nature of Judaism, has become for many the leading Jewish theologian in...
William Poster
SOMEDAY, when I am alone in your office, maybe with my good friend, Carol Dombenek, reading over your books, those complicated cases, struggles of individuals, networks of events, busy intervals...
Delmore Schwartz
ALL was as it is, before the beginning began, before We were bared to the cold air, before Pride. Fullness of bread. Abundance of idleness. No one has ever told me what now I know: Love is...
Julius Horwitz
I WAS restless at S'de Boker. It was March, 1955. A sandstorm had blurred the sky. The sun shone like a smoky disc. The dogs on a running leash barked at their shadows. The grounds inside...
Walter Goodman
WHEN the Social Register was introduced to America early in this century, it was distinguished not alone for its contents, but for the color of its binding-orange and black, which, as one...
Bernard Malamud
ONE beautiful late-autumn day in Rome, Carl Schneider, a graduate student in Italian studies at Columbia University, left a real estate agent's office after a depressing morning of...
James Dickey
WHEN car-lights turn The inside corner of the room I wake to come singing up. I watch a woman bum Who of myself is made In the sun, and turned by her heart Into the sea. Half-buried is she In...
Reader Letters
ON THE 22nd day of June, 1784, less than two years before his death, Moses Mendelssohn granted an interview to an unusual visitor named Litsken. He was a traveling Christian missionary who, by...
Sidney Hook
IN THE last year of the Weimar Republic, when ordinary criminals were sometimes more philosophical than the judges of Hitler's Third Reich subsequently proved to be, a strange case was tried...
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
OF THE two books under review, the first is a collection of essays by a Catholic scholar who has been accurately described as an immensely learned amateur; the second comes from the busy...
Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch
RELIGION, in Dewey's phrase, is more obviously an affair of having, being, and doing, than it is an affair of knowing. It is possible to get religion, to be religious, and to live...
Reviewed by Maurice Goldbloom
THE Soviet Union is issuing a stamp in honor of Longfellow, and such writers as Poe, Whitman, James, Faulkner, and Hemingway have had a worldwide audience. But of all Amercan authors, only...
Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal
COLLECTIONS of television plays such as Rod Serling's are published with a utilitarian object in view, somewhat in that same gruesome spirit which turns out books telling us how to make a...
Reviewed by Hershel Shanks
THERE are few subjects which hold such fascination for American Jews-especially young American Jews-as intermarriage. The reason, no doubt, is that intermarriage epitomizes the problems of the...
Reviewed by Isa Kapp
IN HIS recent book of essays, which ranges genially over many subjects from cheeses to social disaster, Clifton Fadiman once more uses the elastic, optimistic, civilized voice that has often...
Spencer Brown
IT IS a strong temptation these days to predict cynically that the chief effect of Sputnik on American schools will be the abolition of courses in driver training. Our first reaction to Sputnik...
Leopold Labedz
NOW that the initial reaction to the Sputniks has worn off, it may be worthwhile taking a glance at Soviet scientific and technological achievement in the longer perspective. Most of the...
Theodore Frankel
THERE are no exact figures on the number of Jews who have migrated from the city into upper-income, and once largely exclusive, suburban Westchester County in the last decade, but people who...
Robert Lekachman
BEFORE the current recession began many economists were agreed that, although the science of economic forecasting was closer to meteorology than astronomy in precision, we knew in a rough way...
Nathan Perlmutter
THE dull boom in the evening of March 16, unusual but not frightening, that announced the bombing of the Nashville Jewish Community Center echoed the thunder blast that eighteen...
Richard Lowenthal
WHEN Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, had himself elected Minister President by the Supreme Soviet on March 27, 1958, he served notice on Russia...
Paul Goodman
(The entrance of the cave; and Rebekah kneeling there beside the covered corpse of Abraham. The servant Eleazar entreating with Rebekah. Isaac seated front, perhaps crosslegged. He is in his...
Reader Letters
"Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto" TO MILLIONS of people, the Warsaw Ghetto will remain forever a symbol of man's inhumanity to man -and of the heroic resistance of the human spirit. Within its...
Irving Feldman
ONLY light and shades of light It was, and Eve a meaning there Now water, now silver, now fire, now air. Our senses then a slender height That made sound silence, silence sight, And this was...
Reader Letters
From "The Parables of Sendebar" MISHLE SENDEBAR ("The Parables of Sendebar") is the Hebrew version of the "Seven Sages," a popular medieval romance which had its origin in the East and was...
Reviewed by Midge Decter
THE PRICE OF DIAMONDS is Dan Jacobson's third novel. In another time, perhaps, or in another country, the consistently lavish praise heaped on Mr. Jacobson's earlier works, The Trap and A Dance...
Reviewed by Gordon A. Craig
WHEN, in the course of his lectures over the BBC last December, George Kennan proposed that "a general withdrawal of American, British, and Russian armed power from the heart of the Continent"...
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
THE Yale Center of Alcohol Studies has been interested for a number of years in the remarkable differences in the rates of alcoholism among various ethnic groups in America. Thus, Jews show...
Reviewed by Maurice Goldbloom
IN THESE three lectures, delivered at Harvard College, Judge Learned Hand endeavors to define the proper limits of the judicial power to review legislative action. On the whole, he is extremely...
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
I ONCE asked Chagall how he had managed to reach his seventies in good health, and to reap all the success due him, whereas that other great Jewish artist of his generation, Modigliani,...
Raymond Aron
FOR weeks now the entire West has waited on the news from France. As in a suspense film the uncertainty lasted right up to the end, although the next day observers were surprised at their...
Ray Alan
"INCAPABLE of living decently," wrote Hubert Beuve-M&y in Le Monde at the end of May, "the Fourth Republic does not know how to die with dignity." "It didn't even die," commented a Gaullist...
Warner Bloomberg Jr. and Victor F. Hoffmann
"I'M AN ingot buggy operator in a billet department. I got bumped out on Christmas Day. Boy! That was some Christmas!" Harry, a tall, slim Negro, smiled wryly and shifted his position on the...
Oscar Gass
ISRAEL'S achievement in its first decade has now been subjected to many assessments. The four books* presently under consideration were all written in English and printed in the United...
Joshua Podro
"SINCE Rabbi Joshua died, good counsel has ceased in Israel" Kl (Sotah 49b). This was a contemporary opinion of the value of Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah's leadership and the effect of his death...
Jerome Rothenberg
WE tsRE toothless hags; we cannot spit Properly; we cannot express hate or terror But in weakness; a tremor takes us And we fail again. It is an error To call the aged bitter: we make no...
Norman Birnbaum
ALL travelers' reports ought to be taken with skepticism, those of returned native travelers even more so. Last summer, after an absence of five years, I spent some time in the United States....
Dan Jacobson
THE Monday morning after the riot there was a policeman on almost every other corner of the town; we saw them standing on the pavements as we drove down to work, with their rifles grounded and...
Midge Decter
MY MOTHER, who lives in the Midwest, spends a good deal of time during her visits to New York in shopping around for bargains. Through the years she has managed to find an impressive number of...
Reader Letters
THE so-called "Diary of Justina," whose Hebrew version appeared in Israel in 1953, is an account, written down after the events, of episodes in the activities of the Zionist underground during...
Edouard Roditi
A COUPLE of years ago, an American Jewish resident of Paris happened one evening to be a guest in a French home where she met a prominent French Jewish lawyer, one of the leading figures...
Kathleen Nott
IN THE public mind, humanism is too often confused, on the one hand, with being rude to God and, on the other, with being kind to animals. Between these two flippant extremes there are a...
Reviewed by Ghita Ionescu
As THIS review is being written relations between Tito's Yugoslavia and her Soviet-controlled neighbors are entering upon a new phase. 1945-1948 were the years during which the Yugoslav...
Reviewed by Harry N. Rosenfield
WHEN the Hungarian Revolt erupted in October 1956, Martin A. Bursten was among the first to reach the Austro-Hungarian border; there he had an opportunity to observe the westward migration of...
Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong
ALFRED E. SMITH'S career has long symbolized both the gains and the frustrations experienced by the sons of immigrants in this century, so it is fitting that he should find a biographer in Oscar...
Reviewed by Moses Hadas
A PRIME ingredient disappeared from Jewish life when, following the example of philological study generally, concern for the Jewish literary tradition became professional. Books were transformed...
Reviewed by Robert S. Brustein
PARKTILDaN VILLAGE, George P. Elliott's first novel, is a satiric nose-thumbing at the age of the social sciences and embodies a plea for the restoration of certain values which the permissive...
Reviewed by Joel Blocker
HEBREW literature in English has been, until recently, a kind of literary curiosity: artificial and quaint, remote and lifeless, it has concerned only those who, for one reason or another,...
G. F. Hudson
WHY should the Western world be involved in the Middle East? It cannot be taken for granted that it should be; indeed, it is politically dangerous to take it for granted, for unless the...
Harold Lavine
EISENHOWER has succeeded where Roosevelt and Truman failed. Five times running Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman gave the Republican party a merciless beating. The Roosevelt...
Saul Touster
How does he fare The man I was Yesterday?-the lean lawyer Who stowed his heart In a bottom drawer. Does he grieve any more? Where is he stationed now? -The young ensign Of the last great...
Allan Temko
WITHIN two years after the discovery at Sutter's Mill, the rush for California gold had achieved worldwide proportions. By 1850 upwards of 5,000 immigrants were arriving each month, some of...
Michael P. Fogarty and H. Stuart Hughes
"How Democratic Is Christian Democracy?" asked H. STUART HUGHES in COMMENTARY'S May number, in an article discussing MICHAEL FOGARTY'S book, Christian Democracy in Western Europe, 1820-1953....
Bogdan Raditsa
"IN ALL parts of Montenegro," writes Milovan Djilas in his autobiography Land without Justice, "there were killings. This land was never one to reward virtue, but it has always been strong on...
Ruth Miller
YOU wouldn't think that a man would come to a hospital because he had no other place to go. On the surface no one could have told that. He entered the Baker Pavilion of New York Hospital on a...
Robert Pack
The Creation I SPACE, vacant of wind and the sweep of silence, The almost-heard voice and the listening Until intent becomes the pain of consciousness, Vacant of glooms in owlish nights And...
Alfred Werner
IT HAS been said that the only real life is that of one's fame, but the painter Jules Pascin would have scorned this idea. Perhaps he was spoiled by the praise of his admirers, or maybe he was...
Noah J. Jacobs
THE origins of human speech have long fascinated philologists and historians, but rarely has the subject been treated with such a wealth of literary reference as in the work Naming Day in Eden, by...
Reader Letters
Jews in Disguise THE so-called "Diary of Justina," an extract from which appeared in the July COMMENTARY, is the work of Gusta Davidson, one of the leaders of the Jewish underground in Cracow...
J. L. Talmon
THE early 19th century witnessed an outcrop of revolutionary movements in which religious motivations mingled with radical tendencies unleashed by the French Revolution and the Industrial...
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
ON THE evening of December 8, 1941, the Germans, having taken the Latvian city of Riga, were herding a group of women and aged Jews out of the Ghetto and into buses when one of the guards opened...
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
DESPITE all the polysyllabic rhetoric about "social science," about exploratory hypotheses and scrupulous verification and laborious system-building, it is nevertheless the obvious case that...
Reviewed by Dan Jacobson
LOOKED at in the way the author clearly does not want us to look at his book, The Bankrupts is a severely cautionary tale, a warning to young Jewish girls always to heed what their...
Reviewed by David Baumgardt
DISPUTATIOUSNESS has often been regarded as a singular characteristic of the Jewish mind:180 COMMENTARY "Tell me something and I will refute it." Yet Socrates in the Platonic dialogues is hardly...
Reviewed by Dan Wakefield
THIS is the simple and shocking story of an American tourist who went to Europe and actually saw what he looked at.182 COMMENTARY Leslie Katz, like the thousands or millions or whatever towering...
Reviewed by Irving Feldman
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH has shown great daring in basing his new poetic drama, J.B., on the Book of Job. From a strictly literary point of view, the Biblical version offers few possibilities of...
H. Stuart Hughes
AMONG the various anecdotes, authentic or bien trouvees, that circulated in Paris this summer, the one that best expressed the country's perplexities ran as follows: an old friend of de...
Ray Alan
ONLY the politically illiterate will charge Gamal Abdel Nasser with the July 14 coup in Iraq, but it is undeniable that a vicious Egyptian-Syrian propaganda campaign had helped create...
David Galler
NOT all her day foundered between sink and stove, As raves would have us think. To watch her hand Beguile us pigs at supper with sharp stews And a kind clout, one learned that such scenes...
William Korey and Charlotte Lubin
THE volcano of hatred and violence that erupted in Little Rock last September is now rumbling on the doorstep of the nation's capital. This September all eyes are focused on Arlington,...
Alex Rubner
IN THE 1948-58 period, the State of Israel has become a solid political unit and a recognized military power in the Middle East. Socially, the "ingathered exiles" have been integrated within the...
Elizabeth Bartlett
YOUR bed They said So shall you lie on it But I found rocks Were kinder than clocks And did not cry on it They meant Content Without a sigh on it But I found stars Much clearer than...
Norman Cohn
THERE are Jews still alive who can remember being told that they could not possibly be Jews because they had no horns on their heads. Until recently this belief was fairly common in...
Harris Dienstfrey
ON HIS first or second day in the United States Army, every soldier receives, gratis, Department of the Army Pamphlet 21-41, Personal Conduct for the Soldier, the effect of which on...
Jay Kaplan
OVER twenty years have passed since all of this happened, and probably I do not really remember it accurately, yet I cannot be very far wrong. The details are too clear in my memory.... It...
Leo B. Levy
AS A writer who consciously sought to create an art in which the values of traditional society make a primary claim, Henry James was faced with the difficulty of judging social, religious,...
Reader Letters
A Selection from a Commentary by the Malbim MEIR LOEB BEN YEHIEL MEIR, known as the "Malbim," was an East European rabbi who in his lifetime (1809-1879) served a number of congregations,...
Stanley Edgar Hyman
THE imposing Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,* the first of its sort, offers itself "not only to those who through Holy Baptism have been admitted to membership in the Body of Christ,...
Reviewed by Gordon A. Craig
FEW criticisms of Western leadership during World War II have been accepted more uncritically than the charge that the war was unnecessarily prolonged by insistence upon the unconditional...
Reviewed by J. C. Hurewitz
THREE of the four books under review focus on the Arab-Israel dispute. All three rest on a premise which no thoughtful person would contest: the frictions and barriers that divide Israel from...
Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch
IT is the great convenience of the church (temple, synagogue) that it functions both as savior and as scapegoat. If the world is in a To Hallow This Life MARTIN BUBER: AN ANTHOLOGY Edited and...
Reviewed by Richard Schickel
IT is almost too good a coincidence to be true. Americans seem suddenly beset with a desire for reconciliation with the intellectual-"the man who knows," as one advertisement calls him. There...
Reviewed by Edouard Roditi
JEWS have always been a very small minority in Italy, but in the past hundred years or so they have played an important part in the country's cultural, scientific, and political life. Fictional...
A. V. Sherman
WHEN Ben Gurion rejected an opposition request for a Knesset debate on foreign policy early in September, with the explanation that so far as Israel was concerned nothing had happened to make...
Daniel J. Boorstin
THE Arbella, a ship of three hundred and fifty tons, twenty-eight guns, and a crew of fifty-two, during the spring of 1630 was carrying westward across the Atlantic the future leaders of...
Erich and Rael Isaac
SHORTLY before World War II, and well before the days of the EgyptianIsraeli conflict, the Egyptian ship "Zamzam" steamed into New York harbor with a worthless cargo which, a few...
Florence Victor
UNFIT for worship, still I learned each But speech or silence, sanctity left bare. prayer, And hoping that the rabbi couldn't tell My heresy full-grown, I often now It was the music which I loved...
Giorgio Bassani
AT FIRST nobody recognized Geo Josz when he reappeared in Ferrara in August 1945, the sole survivor of the one hundred and eighty-three members of the Jewish community whom the Germans had...
David Bakan
THE year 1956 marked the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud, a man whose long life spanned almost half of the 19th century and over a third of the 20th. His...
Bruno Bettelheim
FIRST there was Little Rock; then came Sputnik. First there was excitement about equal schooling for all children irrespective of race, and then about the need for special schooling for the...
Hermann Cohen
HERMANN COHEN'S great posthumous work, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (The Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism), has never been published in English...
William Petersen
DURING the past ten years or so the study of prejudice, which has figured importantly in American sociology virtually since it established itself as a separate discipline, has developed...
Reviewed by William V. Shannon
CYCLICAL shifts in power have been a permanent feature of political life in the Englishspeaking democracies throughout their history. No party in Britain has won a general election three...
Reviewed by Walter Kaufmann
BUBER's rather sudden, and still growing, popularity in the United States coincides with the religious revival after World War II, which is variously appraised either as a hopeful...
Reviewed by Dan Jacobson
IN THIS new volume by Mr. Malamud, there are thirteen stories, most of them set in the dingiest streets of a city which-whether it is named or not-one can assume always to be New York; in...
Reviewed by Marshall Sklare
PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC is a community study which breaks new ground. It does not focus primarily on the power structure, as did the Lynds in the Middletown volumes, or on the status system, as...
Reviewed by Gerald Weales
THE seventeen plays that John Gassner has chosen for his latest collection of American plays may not be the "best" for the years 19511957, but they are at least typical. Except for Eugene...
C. Vann Woodward
THE annual fall maneuvers have left the school desegregation front very little altered in the Border States and the Upper South. Beyond the wavering front line, resistance remains to all...
Hans J. Morgenthau
IN TRYING to assess the contribution the United Nations makes today, and might be able to make tomorrow, to the settlement of international conflicts, it is indispensable to keep in mind that...
Emil Boyson
ON MY way through the park I saw you playing one second. Watching you, your father Reads "Family Times of Zion." (Berlin, 1933; it's still allowed for Jews To sit on a bench in a park; We're...
Alan Wood
UNLIKE most of the families who bought a "resale" in North Shore Community Homes, we had no relatives living there. But we did have friends, and when they asked us out for dinner one evening we...
William V. Shannon
ACROSS a divided and militarily defenseless Europe, the shadow of Stalin's armies fell; in Korea, Communist Chinese forces pushed American armies back toward the sea; in the United States,...
F. R. Leavis
HOW can a book of criticism be at once so distinguished and so unimportant? The question is the more worth asking because the author of this volume was at one time so unquestionably a major...
Paul Potts and Dannie Abse
Paul Potts I HAVE waited to ask you this. I could not ask you in prison. I waited until you were free. But why, why did you let them use Your name and your greatness As so many pennies to...
A. G. Horon
ISLAM arose in Arabia. But from the ethnographic standpoint Arabia proper comprised at first only the Nejd and the Hejaz, the vast desert lands of the nomadic Bedouins in the center and...
Delmore Schwartz
THIS is a fairy tale. And it is a success story. It is a story which is not only full of goodness and beauty, but it is also a true story. It is full of purity, innocence, and happiness. Since...
Richard Galan
THE Colossus of Rhodes was probably not very appealing as a work of art-no more than the Statue of Liberty, to compare it with a monster of the same class. Like Miss Liberty, the Colossus...
Menahem Boraisha
WHEN Menahem Boraisha died in 1949, he had finally achieved the artistic statement of "a faith that is whole" for which he struggled his entire life. His Der Geyer, an epic poem published in two...
Jacob J. Finkelstein
ONE of the most absorbing aspects of the study of the civilizations of the ancient Near East, and especially of Mesopotamia, since the decipherment of cuneiform writing about a century ago, has...
Reviewed by Irving Feldman
IT IS disappointing to find the rather dramatic title of this collection of poems and its short introductory essay, in which' incoherence tempers hysteria, followed by the tame and...
Reviewed by William W. Bartley
SOME future cultural historian may write a monumental study of the pervasive image of the "doctor" in present-day intellectual expression. Interest in those who heal is no longer focused on...
Reviewed by Joel Carmichael
ONE of the subtler successes of Leninism has been the gradual permeation of the left intelligentsia by the slogan, "The main enemy is in your own country." The widespread though unconscious...
Reviewed by Arnold M. Rose
THE automatic factory was already known in the 18th century, but it was only with its extension into many lines of production in the 1950's that it attracted great scientific and public...
Reviewed by Israel Knox
PROFESSOR LIPTZIN'S book is part history, part literary summation, but it is above all a political tract. Its thesis, insofar as it has one, is perhaps suggested in a sentence in the...
Reviewed by Kenneth Rexroth
RECENTLY I was working in a night club below Cooper Union. I had been out of New York for many years and it was thirty years since I had been in that neighborhood. Late in the wet night, a...
Karl E. Meyer
THERE are many obvious things that can be said about the elections of November 4, 1958, and in Washington, where there is little bashfulness about stating the obvious, certain results have...
Spencer Brown
TWO children in the bus seat opposite me, Tired of the rolling earth, Begin to play the simple and old game Of paper-stone-and-scissors. The winner each time gets to give a slap On the loser's...
Nathan Glazer
NEW York's Puerto Rican immigrants, who have already established a community in the city larger than the population of Seattle or New Orleans, are a historical accident. When mass...
Philip Friedman
A PARTICULARLY bitter aspect of the catastrophe which befell the it L Jews at Hitler's hands was the manner in which a number of them, in various towns and ghettos, were tricked into...
G. F. Hudson
ON DECEMBER 16, 1949, two and a half months after the inauguration in Peking of the "Central People's Government of the Chinese People's Republic," Mao Tse-tung arrived in Moscow. It was a...
Laurence Josephs
THE gardens of her mind where she most often lived Amidst all useful fruits and grains, Were fair pavilions raised beneath sweet glass: Like breads, like cookies shaped to lily for...
Erich Rosenthal
DURING the past decade our knowledge of the demographic structure of the Jewish population in America has considerably expanded. First, and most important of all, we now know as a fact that...
Sarah Singer
THEY pay him court, the weekly clan, Solemn with Sunday thought and deed, The filial and duteous breed Grown alien, an immeasured span Between them and his need. Asunder now, they would...
Maurice Carr
HOW much longer can the civil war go on, and how will it end? This is an indelicate question to ask in Algeria. Everybody is haunted by it, but nobody likes hearing it. To the French soldier...
Lore Groszmann
ON SATURDAY, when I had been with them a week, Mrs. Levine decided it was time for me to cheer up. "I know what she wants," she said, looking up at her eldest daughter. "She wants somebody to...
Sylvia Rothchild
SELMA APPLEBAUM and I are neighbors but not friends. We're not a pair. When my father saw her he said, "A pretty little woman! She makes me think of a new-born calf." I've been likened to many...
Menahem Boraisha
MENAHEM BORAISHA's autobiographical essay on his career as a poet falls into two parts, the first of which we presented last month. In it he discusses his own stubborn clinging to traditional...
William Phillips
"DR. ZHIVAGO," by Boris Pasternak, the work of a remarkable unpolitical writer who somehow managed to survive Russian history, and The Secret of Luca, the new novel by the important...
Philip Levine
THE magpie in the Joshua tree Has come to rest. Darkness collects And what I cannot hear or see, Broken limbs, the curious bird, Become in darkness darkness too. I had been going when I...
Seymour Martin Lipset
AMERICAN sociology has become the most omnivorous of all the social sciences. It has set itself the task of systematically investigating the operations of contemporary society, in much the same...
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
A CERTAIN husband decides the major questions: whether Red China should be admitted to the UN and whether the testing of nuclear weapons should be suspended; his wife decides the minor...
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin
THE materials in this document inspire, in the mind of this reviewer, dismal reflections about the general defensiveness and unimaginative inertia of the Western powers...
Reviewed by Irving Feldman
NOT, to my recollection, since the good ship "Lollipop" let fall its praline anchor into the fondant waters of Peppermint Bay has such a cargo of sentimentality been delivered to the waiting...
Reviewed by Maurice Goldbloom
AT A time when rising prices and recession appear to be going hand in hand, there is a certain wistful ring to the title of Professor Burns's Fordham lectures. Delivered in October 1957,...
Reviewed by Maurice M. Shudofsky
UNLIKE his American counterpart of the mid20th century, the East European rabbi of the 18th and 19th was expected to do little public sermonizing. In fact, the latter generallyBOOKS IN REVIEW...
Reviewed by Gordon A. Craig
SOME time ago a report that government funds had been spent to support certain scientific analyses of national surrender in the nuclear age came to the attention of the U.S. Senate and touched...
1958
Back to Top 
