Dennis H. Wrong
AMERICANS, particularly those of conservative inclination, invariably ,A draw a sharp contrast between the stability and continuity of their domestic political institutions and the turmoil and...
Ray Alan
THE bookseller was fondling a stack of bile-yellow paperbacks devoted to the "Jewish problem." They dated from the period 1937-1943 and he had just bought them secondhand from the widow of a...
Murray Friedman
A YOUNG Jewish attorney in a small city in central Virginia was discussing school desegregation with a non-Jewish friend. "I hear that the president of the NAACP is Jewish," remarked the...
E. LaB. Cherbonnier
IN THE May 1958 issue of COMMENTARY, Jakob J. Petuchowski makes a provocative analysis of the thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel. One of his conclusions, which it is my present purpose...
Chayym Zeldis
WE HAD it, we had it-the violet hour, We had the singed twilight for our own; The lamps were headless and the years unformed, And we had the silence in our hands Like a seer's ball. Today's...
Gerald Reitlinger
FURTIVELY presented in stray paragraphs of the world press during October and November 1958, an assiduous student might find traces of a weird, sacrificial, and Kafka-like Polish trial....
Norma Stahl
LARRY, awaking, heard his chin stubble rasp the satin ribbon of their white blanket. "Oh, you lucky bum!" he said to himself, as a small doubt hit him. "Oh, you no-good lucky bum!" Finnegan had...
Donald Paneth
JAMES W. RODER, a district man for the Associated Press who covered the Bronx at night from 5:30 P.M. to 2 A.M., had been a newspaper man in New York City for almost thirty years upon his...
Leonard Wolf
POLICE or fire? We've been in bed because Of weariness and love; but it's not safe. Our sheets have lost their warmth, our pillows twistSomeone's wounded; someone's breaking laws. Drowsy,...
Reader Letters
Two Letters from the Archives A VIVID glimpse into Jewish life in Virginia during the last decades of the Sth century is given by the two letters we present below. Originally written in Yiddish,...
Sidney Hook
THE modernization of Japan, with its great dangling balloons by day and dancing arabesques of neon lights at night, strikes the eye of the visitor at every turn, especially in the huge,...
George Lichtheim
CONTEMPORARY history begins with the First World War. In 1914 European society was shaken by the earlier of two armed conflicts whose after-effects have now unsettled the whole globe. The...
Reviewed by Moses Hadas
IN ANY conflict it is the victorious party that writes the history, and, particularly if the issue is religion, the record of the opposition is either wholly effaced or survives only in the...
Reviewed by A. V. Sherman
OURS is an age of second thoughts, and of going back to earlier writers for inspiration and new insights. Until a few years ago it seemed that knowledge progressed in linear fashion, each...
Reviewed by Stanley Edgar Hyman
AS THE title suggests, here are two books stitched together with the seam visible. Wolf Wirgin's, consisting of the first six chapters, is a work of numismatics, a radical reattribution of some...
Reviewed by Joel Carmichael
THIS book has had an unprecedented success, having been selected as a Book-of-the-Month after being run in an abridged series of installments in Life Magazine. An illuminating case history of...
Reviewed by Abby Fink
NAMING-DAY IN EDEN has clearly been designed for the man who knows nothing about the science of linguistics; it is a light concoction (a souffle, according to the publishers) that may be...
Reviewed by Manfred Wolf
THE INTRUDER is a passionate but abstract the lack of sensitivity shown Jewduring the last war. The hero, a man who lives in New York, falls a Jewish girl who had fled before tom Holland....
John Higham
IN RETROSPECT, it is becoming apparent that the decade of the 1940's marked a fundamental change of direction in the exploration of the American past. At the time nothing very...
Walter Z. Laqueur
A BRITISH Middle Eastern expert named Tom Little, in a book written several months ago which has just been published, declared: "The chasm between Cairo and Baghdad has been bridged by the...
Harry Gersh
BRONXVILLE, New York, is a pleasant, handsome suburban village in lower Westchester County, fifteen miles north of New York City. In most respects it differs little from other...
Leslie A. Fiedler
The Fours Sons FOUR sons only says the Law Spring from all the seed we sow; Wise or wicked, foolish, dumb Suffice to name whatever son. Wise one, ask that I may still Recite what asking you...
H. Stuart Hughes
FOR the past decade C. Wright Mills has been a very special phenomenon on the American intellectual horizon. As the author of three probing and impassioned studies of our contemporary...
A. Wiseman and O. Pick
EVEN Nikita Khrushchev does not claim that, forty-one years after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet Union has "solved the Jewish problem." In an interview with a French journalist,...
Menke Katz
Mine are the names outmoded as the kindness Of my mother, humble as the cool shadows in the evening woods, where echoes do not pine away for the love of Narcissus, but in yearning for a yell of the...
Alex Miller
HIS father sitting at the glass-topped desk looked him square in the eyes. His father's deep-cut face lines were not hard now but compassionate. "You don't have to keep it a secret from...
Jakob J. Petuchowski
THIRTY-NINE books of ancient Hebrew literature-though Jewish tradition counts them as only twentyfour-have found their permanent place within the covers of a single volume. We call it the...
Abraham Yehudah Chein
An Excerpt from the Writing of Abraham Yehudah Chein RABBI ABRAHAM YBHUDAH CHEIN was born in Russia in 1878, and lived in Jerusalem during the latter part of his life, up to the day of his...
Herbert Weiner
I WONDER, Mr. MacLeish, if you realize how unlikable your character J.B. really is?" The poet seemed to start back in unpleasant surprise at the question asked by a lady sitting in the rear...
Dachine Rainer
KNOWING not the quantity nor precise degree of my sinning, And advised to abandon all antiquated notions of guilt, I atone for the sin of omission: That I know not where my Lord resides Nor in...
Robert Langbaum
IT IS a sign of Woodrow Wilson's greatness that he has remained, since his death in 1924, both a living issue in American politics and a living figure in the American consciousness. We can...
Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal
IN MOST of his novels, at least until The Enemy Camp, Jerome Weidman has been the modest, self-effacing bard of New York Jewish life, a rather acidulous and satiric bard at times, yet, like the...
Reviewed by
IN 1938, just after publication of the Pope's ti-Nazi encyclical "Mit Brennender Sorge" on the eve of Hitler's invasion of eud observed that he was now living protection of the Catholic...
Reviewed by William Poster
DESPITE the ease with which legends are manufactured, there is one respect in which the Agee legend seems to me justified: namely, in the scope of his endeavors, the sheer variety of his...
Reviewed by Ernest van den
THIS book is an attempt to assess the effects of the McCarthy episode on social scientists in the various colleges. However, McCarthy himself is never mentioned by name (his time of glory is...
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
PANEL discussions in academic circles are rarely characterized by violent outbursts of emotion. But in the summer of 1950, when Hans Sedlmayr, professor of art history at the University of...
Robert C. Smith
WHEN the Federal and state courts ended Virginia's "massive resistance" to integration at the end of January, 10,000 Norfolk students, locked out since September, finally went back to school. A...
Erwin Knoll
FOLLOWING the collapse of Virginia's "massive resistance" to public school desegregation in the face of adverse court decisions, Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., took to the airwaves to...
Meir Mindlin
AS IT recedes into the past, the SuezSinai war may produce only labored rhetorical echoes in the House of Commons, or lingering heartburn in the State Department, but in Israel it looks more...
William J. Newman
"Mandamus and certiorari are flowers of paradise, and the whole length and breadth of Pakistan is not wide enough to confine their perfume. If, in England, judges can stretch certiorari even to...
Delmore Schwartz
ABRAHAM (To J.M. Kaplan) I WAS a mere boy in a stone-cutter's shop When, early one evening, my raised hand Was halted and the soundless voice said: "Depart from your father and your...
Allan Temko
These . . . cities shall be a refuge, both for the children of Israel, and for the stranger. . . . -Numbers 35:15 LIKE Canaan, Provence is eloquent with sunlight. The landscape, harsh, dry, . J...
James Purdy
HE'S in that Greek restaurant every night. I thought you knew that," Merta told her brother. 'What does he do in it?" Spence said, wearily attentive. "I don't go to Greek restaurants and...
Moses Hadas
SCHOLARS, like women, are deviations from the norm Man; and just as the position of women can serve as a criterion for a culture, so can the position of scholars also. Sometimes women...
John Lloyd Stephens
IN AN earlier number (February 1957), in this department, we set forth some fascinating entries from a journal kept by Herman Melville on a pilgrimage which he made to the Holy Land in 1857....
Gerald Weales
MOST American playwrights are fitted out with identification labels early in their careers. A conventional tag makes easy the reaction of the reviewers and the public to any play that a man...
Reviewed by W. W. Bartley
A BOOK by Reinhold Niebuhr is always an excellent illustration of the truth of his basic principle: that good and bad are inextricably mixed in any human product. Pious and Secular America is...
Reviewed by Francis Golffing
PETER NEUMANN-a former SS lieutenant in the Viking division-records in this diary faithfully and sans phrase his early upbringing in a small Prussian town, his activities in the Hitler Youth...
Reviewed by Joel Carmichael
THE confluence of the Arab renaissance and Soviet policy, a central factor in world politics, is the dominant theme of this latest compila- tion of Middle East studies, edited by Walter Z....
Reviewed by Jean Garrigue
THIS is criticism with a philosophical intent. R. W. B. Lewis is not interested in studying the novels of his chosen six authors with close technical analysis nor in making judgments on that...
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
WHEN the first edition of this book was published in 1930, Salvador de Madariaga held the chair of Spanish literature at Oxford, a locality to which he returned in the fateful year 1936,...
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
SIR JACOB EPSTEIN told me that he was not too happy about this elegant volume: it was much too "personal." Yet I found nothing more intimate in it than a picture of the artist with his collie....
Reviewed by David Fitelson
JOHN UPDIKE, one of the more talented of the New Yorker's resident storytellers, has had a hearty but not very successful try at a first novel. The failure of The Poorhouse Fair lies largely in...
Richard Lowenthal
THE 21st Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union was more remarkable for the problems it shelved or disguised than for those which it solved. It had nothing of the bold,...
G. L. Arnold and H. Stuart Hughes
An Exchange IN THE February COMMENTARY, H. STUART HUGHES advocated disengagement in Central Europe and a more imaginative approach to Asia and Africa as the basis of "A Politics of Peace." Here...
Arthur Ralph Gold
IN FLORIDA and not Jerusalem, Being at last both prosperous and warm, He has his most cantankerous last words. And he is mourned by alien jungle birds, Flamingoes, rusty-legged, that pace the...
Philip Roth
LEO TZUREF stepped out from back of a white column to welcome Eli Peck. Eli jumped back, surprised; then they shook hands and Tzuref gestured him into the sagging old mansion. At the door Eli...
G. F. Hudson
IN THE nine and a half years between the raising of Stalin's Berlin blockade in May 1949 and Khrushchev's new challenge to the city in November 1958, the Soviet Union accepted the outcome of...
Philip Levine
THE cot trees rotting In the near orchard Have injured nothing If, in this lost world, One's eventual Decline is the last Duty, the slow fall Of ripe fruit to dust Or alluvial Mould surely...
Koka Freier Infield
AT THE time I met Masal she was about seventeen years old. She was working in the household of friends of mine. They were Americans, like myself, who had come to Jerusalem as visitors, taking...
Richard Chase
WITH the publication of Henderson the Rain King (Viking, $4.50), Saul Bellow confirms one's impression that he is just about the best novelist of his generation. The new book has faults; it...
Ray Alan
NORTH from Beirut, the Lebanon foothills leave only a crumpled ribbon of coastal plain; and after five or six miles even this is crushed out. The north-south road, which but for...
Sholom Aleichem
SHOLOM ALBICHEM, the 100th anniversary of whose birth is currently being celebrated, is no stranger to COMMENTARY. Selections from his work published in earlier issues include: "Journalism in...
Jacob J. Finkelstein
THE lay reader who keeps abreast of the output of popular and semi-popular books on the subject of the Bible and Biblical archaeology, as well as the specialist working in these or related...
Reviewed by A. V. Sherman
A WELL-WRITTEN biography of David Ben Gurion would make fascinating reading, and would be of far more than purely Jewish or "current affairs" interest. The task calls for a biographer of...
Reviewed by R. W. Flint
WHEN Lawrence Durrell's Justine appeared in 1957, I wondered why, with the exception of Howard Nemerov, none of our major critics had anything to say. Now, after the publication of Balthazar...
Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch
THERE is matter enough in Mircea Eliade's study of The Sacred and the Profane to scandalize the scholar and to offend the philosopher. But the majority of discerning readers will take delight...
Reviewed by G. E. von
IN AN attempt "to present to Western readers the major religions of the world from the point of view of the followers of those faiths," Kenneth W. Morgan, professor of religion and director...
Reviewed by Edouard Roditi
IN THE heyday of the Mercure de France, some fifty years ago, when it was one of Europe's most intelligent literary monthlies, the French critic Jules de Gaultier, a frequent contributor, coined...
Reviewed by Robert Gutman
WHAT is today's college generation like? This question has been asked with increasing frequency in the last decade. Many adults suspect that the present crop of students lacks the moral,...
Reviewed by Erwin D. Canham
THE modern newspaper suffers from the concessions it must make in solving the severe economic problem of holding a mass audience. Only with such an audience can most newspapers hope to...
Walter Z. Laqueur
COMPARED with the turmoil engendered in the Middle East by the Iraqi revolution, the Berlin crisis is a largely artificial contrivance. A summit meeting on Berlin may have some...
Irving Feldman
O Jerusalem, if I forget thee, may I die! If I forget thee not, how will I live! THE GATES OF GAZA SIDELONG in this obscene world going, Under battery of filth, bawdry of elements, Perjurious...
G. L. Arnold
"As something of a connoisseur of political demonstrations, I have no doubt that the last stages of this year's Aldermaston march provided the greatest turn-out for any cause that London has seen...
Yehuda Amihai
AROUND me my father built a huge care like a shipyard And then I went forth from it and I was still unfinished And he was left with his huge and empty care. And my mother-like a tree on the...
Jakob J. Petuchowski
MODERN writers on Judaism are fond of quoting the saying, "God, the Torah, and Israel are one"apparently in the conviction that it is an ancient Jewish teaching. The fact that the saying goes...
Maius Bergman
GLANCING through the diary which I kept during my three-week stay in Poland last autumn, I keep returning to those pages which describe the young people I met, talked and argued with for hours...
William V. Shannon
THE 86th Congress demonstrates more vividly than usual the often ignored fact that in America we have not one but two kinds of national politics. One is the politics of the big states like...
Robert Graves
WHAT does it feel like to be a Goy? Most modern Jewish fiction, or autobiography disguised as fiction, answers the complementary question "What does it feel like to be a Jew?" The goyim who...
J. Ayalti
ARE you lost?" The girl stood in the doorway of a wooden shack near the canal. Herman stopped. "No. But did you see an old lady pass by?" "With a black lace scarf on her head? I saw her. I...
Edward N. Saveth
THE second volume of Ernest Samuels' leisurely biography of Henry Adams (Henry Adams: The Middle Years, Harvard University Press, $6.50) is a book to delight the Adams buff, whose number,...
Zalman Shneour
ZALMAN SHNEOUR, who died on February 20, 1959, a contemporary of the Yiddish novelists Sholem Asch and I. J. Singer, was one of the major figures in modern Jewish literature. A prolific writer,...
Bert F. Hoselitz
PRECISELY how does a backward peasant society transform itself into a modern, technically advanced one? This question represents a new field of investigation for social scientists, whose...
Reviewed by Ben Halpern
"To KNOW-to enjoy the friendship of-a great man," says Sir Isaiah Berlin of his great friend, Chaim Weizmann, "must permanently transform one's ideas of what human beings can be or do.......
Reviewed by Herman E. Schaalman
FOR TWO MILLENNIA, the coexistence of Judaism and Christianity has been marked by repeated conflict and controversy. In political and social terms, Christianity's marriage with the temporal...
Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong
THIS is the Age of Spock and Gesell, of child psychiatry, progressive education, and a host of other child-rearing pedagogies devised by professional experts and marketed under the brand of...
Reviewed by Henry Popkin
SHOW business is a risky enterprise, and the biographies of its great men record mainly the chances they take. The qualities of the con man and the gambler provide the key to this little stack...
Reviewed by Irving Howe
AT A time when so many American intellectuals have been turning to conservatism, the literary critic Richard Chase has moved in the opposite direction. Invoking the tradition of Randolph...
Reviewed by Isa Kapp
IN THESE polished, bittersweet stories, John Cheever is writing (as he has done over a long period in the New Yorker) about the fretfulness and decline of heart in middle-class people of...
Dan Wakefield
THE Garden Cafeteria, across from Seward Park on the Lower East Side of New York, is a crowded, noisy, American-style beanery where customers shove their trays down a chromium counter and are...
Spencer Brown
Men of the woods and lumberjacks, They judged me by their appropriate tool. Except as a fellow handled an axe They had no way of knowing a fool. -Robert Frost "Two Tramps in Mud Time" NOT the...
Herbert Weiner
ON THE altar of the Baptist church in Nazareth is a painting of the River Jordan, flowing along gently curving green banks whose trees trail their boughs peacefully in its blue waters. It is...
Arnold M. Rose
THE average American is inclined to believe that the separation of the races in the United States goes all the way back to the beginning of thingsindeed, that segregation is "natural"...
Bogdan Raditsa
TWENTY years ago, on March 28, 1939, Madrid fell to Franco's armies and Spain's short-lived Republic came to an end. In three years of civil war marked by intervention by Nazi Germany, Fascist...
Meyer Liben
"WHAT'S wrong with him?" asked Mr. Flaxman, as Davey got up from the table, where he had sat morosely through the meal, and walked off. Mrs. Flaxman shrugged, as though to say that she could...
Francis Golffing
I WATCHED rude farmers toiling east of Keene: One farmer's engine coming on a corpse Ground through the bones, moved on, and no harm doneNo harm but to the gossamer-thin wraith Winding its...
Cecil Roth
THE events in Palestine during the great revolt against the Romans in 66-73, culminating, although not ending, in the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in the year...
S. Niger
SAMUEL CHARNEY, who died in New York in 1955, was known to Jewish readers as S. NIGER and regarded as the dean of Yiddish literature. A review of the S. Niger Memorial Volume elsewhere in the...
Gerald Weales
ON THE day that the New York Drama Critics' Award was announced, a student stopped me as I walked across the campus-where I pass as an expert on the theater-and asked a sensible question. Had...
Anatole Shub
O what fears and tears, cries and prayers, night and day, was there in many places, and in my dear mother's house in particular. I was then about twelve or thirteen years of age, and though I was...
Reviewed by Joel Blocker
LIKE many bestsellers, Exodus (a quarter-of-amillion copies sold to date; 30-odd weeks on the best-seller list; current sale 8,000 copies a week) was written with one eye on the movies....
Reviewed by Lincoln Reis
WHY should so many critics look upon this book as brilliant rather than presumptuous? It has a grandiose intention: to diagnose what Dr. Arendt calls "man's condition." It promises to illuminate...
Reviewed by Irving Feldman
THIS collection of Dan Jacobson's short stories provides a valuable and illuminating addition to the three novels he has already published. A number of these stories are excellent in...
Reviewed by Francis Golffing
HAROLD ROSENBERG's reputation among the intelligentsia-hitherto based on his trenchant magazine articles only-may not need the support of this book, which presents the best of those same...
Reviewed by Israel Knox
SAMUEL Niger, the noted Yiddish literary critic who died in 1955 at the age of seventytwo, began to write in the early years of the century, when Mendele, Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem were...
Reviewed by Ruth Dalin
WRITTEN by a Jungian psychoanalyst, Loathsome Women is a book about four witches. That the author, Dr. Leopold Stein (former chairman of the British Society of Analytical 550BOOKS IN...
Dan Jacobson
IT IS the things you don't remember, that you couldn't possibly remember, that come back with the most overwhelming sense of familiarity: you see them, you smell them, you taste them, and...
Gerald Reitlinger
ON FEBRUARY 6, 1959, two former SS guards from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were sentenced to life imprisonment by a German court in Bonn. Outside Germany this belated warcrimes trial...
Michael Harrington
A FAIR statement of a current myth about poverty in the United States would probably go something like this: the poor are a small, rapidly declining group; they have achieved a...
Johann Caspar
JORDAN and Lebanon, which were the scenes of British and American troop landings last July, are now the quietest of the Arab states, as political attention focuses on Colonel Nasser's Egypt...
Harvey Shapiro
HOW everything gets tamed. The pronominal outcry, as if uttered in ecstasy, Is turned to syntax. We are Only a step from discursive prose When the voice speaks from the thornbush. Mountain,...
Lucjan Blit
WHEN I visited Poland in December 1956, its atmosphere was electric with hopes and fears, uncertainties and expectations. For most of the seventy or eighty thousand Jews still remaining in...
Oscar Gass
THE United States need never, at any time we can now foresee, yield to economic or political pressure from any nation because of dependence on foreign petroleum supplies. We are not...
Henry Roth
I WAS courting a young woman, if the kind of brusque, uncertain, equivocal attentions I paid her might be called courting: it was for me at any rate, never having done it before. I had met her...
Morris Freedman
ALBUQUERQUE, originally settled in 1708, lies on the Rio Grande River in New Mexico, some sixty miles south of Santa Fe. Running through the city is the ancient Camino Real, laid out by...
Francis Golffing and Barbara Gibbs
THE prototypes of current American poetry are well known: William But- ler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, William Empson, W. H. Auden; to a...
Reader Letters
WE OFFER below a selection from a classic of Yiddish folk literature, the famous Boba Buch (or Bova Buch) of Elijah Bahur. So far as we know, this is the first translation into English of any...
Reviewed by Saul Bellow
GOODBYE, COLUMBUS is a first book but it is not the book of a beginner. Unlike those of us who came howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, and teeth, speaking...
Reviewed by Moses Hadas
FOR promoting understanding between Jews and Chrisitians Professor Grant's little book is more efffective than a thousand interfaith dinners. Ira learning and clarity and convic tion it car...
Reviewed by Ray Alan
THE Bromberger brothers' approach to anyone in power is cloyingly sycophantic; and they value their contacts too highly to venture more than a toe or two beyond the orthodoxy of the Defense...
Reviewed by Milton Hindus
TWENTY-FIVE years ago and more, Morris Schappes was contributing keen literary criticism to James Burnham's old quarterly the Symposium and teaching English at New York's City College. He...
Reviewed by John H. Kautsky
UNTIL the end of World War II, Indian Communists numbered hardly more than a handful. Their activities, in obscure, tiny, squabbling grouplets in Moscow, London, Berlin, Paris, and India...
Reviewed by Charles Curran
WHEN Satan and his angels were expelled from heaven, they built a palace in space which they named Pandemonium; and there they met in conclave to decide "What do we do now?" Milton has...
A. H. Raskin
ORGANIZED labor in the United States is in serious difficulties today-and it may prove to be the healthiest thing that has happened to it in the last fifteen years. Born of insecurity and bred...
Nathan Glazer
WHEN I left Los Angeles one day last February, after a week in Southern California, the newspaper I picked up at the airport reported that the population of Los Angeles County was now...
Earl Latham
IN HIS inaugural lecture on "Two Concepts of Liberty" at Oxford University last October, Sir Isaiah Berlin professed a faith in freedom that resembles the philosophy of John Stuart Mill and...
Alex Weingrod
IT WAS one of those winter days between rains, when the air is bright and clear, yet never warm enough to take the chill from your feet. I had been playing social observer for several weeks so...
Hilton Kramer
A FEW years ago when the art critic for the New Yorker went abroad to report on current art activities in London, Paris, and other European centers, I began receiving regular telephone calls,...
Leonard Nathan
ALL the way there forebode him nothing but fact: "Here am I, Father, son! Here, biding land," Vague in the first light of morning milkers. Nor could the fagotted ass better understand The...
Emil L. Fackenheim
THE modern Jew is an enigma to himself. When he reflects on his existence as a Jew, he cannot but be filled with wonder. Other individuals and peoples may wonder how they have come to be what...
Alexander Dallin
IN THE last five years, Moscow and Leningrad have become favored tourist spots for all sorts of Americans-the curious, well-heeled, or confused; students, businessmen, journalists, balletomanes;...
Thomas F. Curley
"A HANDSOME evening," Phil was saying. "Look at that steam come off the street. Beautiful." He paused, and I nodded, all the while admiring my cigar. "I really ought to get married," he...
Neil Weiss
Song For My Dead Grandmother I WONDER whether I might tether my hope to the hair of her head. Or rejecting that after service is said walk away shrugging, my shoulder lugging a wisp of her...
J. L. Talmon
SINCE the time of the French Revolution, a substantial proportion of the most politically conscious and active people have tended to equate Politics with Utopianism. Yet the two are, in...
Reader Letters
WE OFFER a second episode from J. I. Trunk's modem Yiddish version of the classic medieval Boba Buch, again in translation by JAcoB SLOAN. The interested reader may turn for the beginning of the...
Robert Lekachman
THE major theoretical generalizations of economics have usually filled a felt need. This need generally rose from the dissatisfaction with conventional explanations which failed to...
Florence Victor
"SPEAK to it in Yiddish," I kept hearing a From the time I climbed out of my crib and Almost broke my skull. It was the same in Kindergarten, first and second grades, then High school, college,...
Reviewed by Philip Friedman
IN THE last twenty-five years, a prolific literature has sprung up on the tragedy of the Jews under Nazism: more than 6,000 books and scores of thousands of articles, pamphlets, etc. In the...
Reviewed by F. W. Dupee
IF NOVELISTS are in some degree historians, Thomas Mann was the great historian of the present crisis in Western culture. He made a magnificent spectacle out of what has since become a dreary...
Reviewed by D. W. Brogan
AS MR. RIESMAN points out, this book is one of a kind rare enough in American political literature. Mr. Bullitt has never held high office, didn't get elected, and is still a young man. This is...
Reviewed by Irving Feldman
THIS tetralogy-plus of novels is a very odd work. OdcI not because of its abundant and ingenious fantasy, or the variety of literary genres it isincludes, or its encyclopedic learning, or...
Reviewed by Charles Reznikoff
MOST of the Jews of the 18th century in North America were engaged in trade, but their business letters to one another also touched on religious and personal matters, so that Dr. Marcus's...
Reviewed by Emanuel Celler
WHO LIVE IN SHADOW is a constructive and challenging appraisal of the problem of narcotics addiction. Judge Murtagh is Chief Magistrate of the City of New York, and Mrs. Harris is a...
Reviewed by Paul Kecskemeti
WHY is the Communist party so much stronger in France and Italy than in any other democratic country of the Western world? It is a prevalent notion among Americans that the iniquities of the...
Ray Alan
IRAQ and Egypt celebrated the anniversaries of the coups which made them both military republics within eight days of one another. The Egyptians, only vaguely aware of what they are supposed...
Johann Caspar
AT FIRST glance, the streets of Baghdad do not appear to have changed since the revolution of July 14, 1958, which overthrew the old monarchy and established the Iraqi Republic. Baghdad's...
Hans Meyerhoff
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to Freud my soul to keep. And if I dream-ah, that's the ticket, I pray that it be really wicked. And if, perchance, I wake depressed, Thank Freud, I know what...
Max Beloff
SOVIET Premier Khrushchev's impending visit to the United States, and President Eisenhower's visit to Europe to consult with America's principal allies, come as the climax to a summer...
Arthur Gregor
THEY seemed this morning on their way to work, not mindful of the fog they could not see, not minfu of an eye hidden somewhere, the sign on someone rushing by: the mist from tree to tree. They...
Evelyn N. Rossman
WHEN I first began to think and write about Northrup, ten years ago, an older friend was amused at some of my observations. "Don't worry so much about Jewish survival," he said. "We survived...
Robert J. Lampman
TAXES in our country have increased tenfold since Herbert Hoover was President. We now pay out $110 billion a year-30 per cent of our personal income-to the Federal, state, and local...
Jakob J. Petuchowski
IN THE whole history of the Christian Church there is probably no more fascinating and controversial figure than that of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. Saul of Tarsus, who was a Jew,...
Joseph Papaleo
SOMETHING had happened to the river, perhaps when the city had taken it for sewage. The green banks had worn down and been washed away to wherever it was the river went, away like the 19th...
Cynthia Ozick
LISTEN, I am one of those idiot-saints who teach by unexample. My house is full of disciples. What I do not do they seek. What I have not done they praise. What I will not do they believe....
Theodor Herzl
BETWEEN 1884 and his death twenty years later, Theodor Herzl wrote many light, nonpolitical pieces of literary criticism, travelogue, and fiction or semi-fiction, of the genre known as...
James Baldwin
GRANDIOSE, foolish, and heavy with the stale perfume of selfcongratulation, the HollywoodGoldwyn-Preminger production of Porgy and Bess lumbered into the Warner theater shortly before the...
George Lichtheim
THE longer the global stalemate lasts, the more obvious it becomes that the "cold war" and "coexistence" are two sides of the same coin; in the end they may come to be synonymous. Even now the...
Reviewed by Moses Hadas
UNTIL a century ago the interval between the classical ages of Greece and Rome, which then received the designation Hellenistic, was a barren stretch despised and neglected by classical, and...
Reviewed by H. R. Trevor-Roper
EIGHTEN FIFTY-NINE was the annus mirabilis of the 19th-century intellectual revolution. It saw the publication of Mill's Liberty, Marx's Political Economy, Darwin's Origin of Species. Men looked...
Reviewed by Robert Lekachman
BY Now both social scientists and ordinary book critics have had their say about Vance Packard's latest exercise in popular sociology. In general, lay reviewers have been favorable; sociologists...
Reviewed by A. J. P.
FOR some reason, to me rather mysterious, French politics have an endless fascination for intellectuals. They are a drug, an addiction, a vice. They do not need to be contemporary politics; the...
Reviewed by Richard G. Stern
ROBERT LOWELL'S new book does not pose as a full-fledged autobiography, but even those of the ninety pages which are not explicitly autobiographical are controlled by either the poet's "I" or...
Reviewed by A. V. Sherman
THIS book conveys the special flavor of the political thinking produced in the Russian Pale of Settlement in the late 19th century, when Jewish youths whose studies had been confined to the...
G. F. Hudson
IN A letter to Dr. Konrad Adenauer some time before his own trip to the United States, Premier Khrushchev warned the Federal German Chancellor against "fanning of passions and preparation for...
David Daiches
MASS literacy is a new phenomenon in the history of civilization, and it is no surprise that thoughtful people find its effects disturbing. When ability to read no longer guarantees...
Gerda L. Cohen
REVISITING the Jordan Valley, we thought how prosperous, and how ugly, it had become. Not only the immigrant suburbia clinging to the yellow hills over Tiberias, buit the kibbutzim also, their...
David Baumgardt
IS OUR prayerbook for the Day of Atonement, the Mahzor of Yom Kippur, a chance compilation of orisons? Or may we trace some intuitive designhowever unobtrusive-in the order and structure of...
Dan Wakefield
GREENWICH VILLAGE and Tammany Hall are among the few social institutions still standing on our flat, gray, affluent landscape which lend themselves at all to romanticism. The Village and...
David Spitz
ONCE again, as in the days of the New Deal, the Supreme Court is the center of a vigorous national debate. But the issues now are different from those which agitated the country two decades...
Leonard Wolf
MY MOTHER MY MOTEIER used to say: MV1 Laughter and lightThat's all it takes to deal with life. And, with that, She became urgently busy, Worked like a horse, Cooking, washing, Bedroom to...
Harold Lavine
WHEN Fidel Castro was in the Sierra Maestra, he spent most of his time talking. What little fighting there was, was done by his firebrand younger brother Raul, and by Major Ernesto Guevara, his...
James Purdy
"I DON'T know why Mrs. Carlin entertained," Mrs. Benson admitted. "She didn't like it, and she couldn't do it." "I had to sit an entire hour under one of those potted palms she had in her...
Ann Roelofs
WHEN I was young my family lived in a suburb of London called Blackheath. This was rather a pleasant, old-fashioned part of London, not as sooty as it sounds. There was a broad heath where...
Gerald Weales
I AM not quite a classic case. When I stepped off the train at Pennsylvania Station in September 1946, I was not carrying my few but spotless possessions in a cardboard suitcase; there were not...
Harvey Shapiro
"THE word moves a bit of air, And this the next, until it reaches The man who receives the word of his friend And receives his soul therein And is therein awakened"Rabbi Nachman's preachment...
Reader Letters
CECIL ROTH, the historian, translates for this department a hymn from the Aramaic, commenting: "The traditional Jewish feast of Simhat Torah (the Rejoicing of the Law), which is celebrated...
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
NOTHING fails like success. The old Zionist activists are mostly apathetic or splenetic, the old theorists mostly silent. Was it dissatisfaction with the present and a desire to recall past...
Reviewed by Henry David Aiken
PROFESSOR KAUFMANN'S new book purports to and historical development of ideas; is only a collection of scattered reviews, most of them previously during the last ten years. These i, casually...
Reviewed by Isa Kapp
MRS. PALEY'S stories are about city people in tight places and rushed moments, and she tells them, from the first phrases, with great urban momentum and no rural moonshine. "My husband gave me...
Reviewed by Richard Hoggart
READING books about mass entertainments is, in the long run, exceptionally depressing. Taken separately, they are often peculiarly fascinating-crammed with curious detail and illustration, and...
Reviewed by Paul Willen
THE week of Vice President Nixon's visit to Moscow last July coincided with the official U. S. declaration of "Captive Nations Week"neatly illustrating a central paradox in our foreign...
Reviewed by H. Stuart Hughes
IT IS most unusual in these days to encounter a book written by a specialist and primarily for specialists, yet which has at the same time so large a theme and so wide-ranging a grasp...
Reviewed by Henry Popkin
THIS sober, unintentionally funny record of a strange literary career might have been called "Portrait of the Artist as a Shlimazl." Its author, Harold Loeb, was a leading spirit in the...
William V. Shannon
AT THE foot of Capital Hill stands the newly dedicated Taft Memorial Carillon and, in front of it, a statue of the late Ohio Senator. it is easy to see the carillon and the statue as a...
Dennis H. Wrong
COLLEGE students, however unlettered, often possess what journalists call "the instinct for the jugular." Meeting a class one day which had just been reading C. Wright Mills's White Collar,...
Hans J. Morgenthau
ACCORDING to Plutarch, Julius Caesar announced his victory at Zela in 47 B.C.E. to his friend Amintius with the words, "Veni, vidi, vici-I came, I saw, I conquered." Is it likely that...
Harry Gersh and Sam Miller
WILLIAMSBURG, one of the oldest parts of Brooklyn, is the new home of the Hasidic followers of the Satmar Rebbe. Clustered in the areas to the east and south of the familiar great gold dome of...
George Lichtheim
THE remarkable thing about the British general election of October 1959 was not that the Conservatives won, but that anyone should have thought they might lose. Politicians are...
Sonya Rudikoff
ANYONE will defend D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover against censorship, but who will defend it as a novel? Who, for that matter, will attack it? No one. With the reissue (Grove Press,...
Eugene Borowitz
WHY has existentialism had so little impact upon the leaders of American Jewry? The educators and social workers move in another philosophic universe entirely. The laity is barely conscious...
Albert Halper
DOCTOR HARRIS had his office on Amsterdam Avenue, in the Upper Eighties of New York City. His office was on the second floor, over a drugstore, and his premises possessed north and east...
Reader Letters
MOSES MAIMONIDES (1135-1204) has achieved lasting fame as the outstanding philosopher of the Jewish Middle Ages. Philosophy was only one of his accomplishments. The fourteen volumes of his...
Yehuda Amihai
NOW, when the waters press in force On the walls of the dams, Now, when the white returning cranes Change in the middle of the air to flights of jets, Again we will feel how strong the ribs...
Edouard Roditi
ALL through 1946, I was employed by the Department of the Army as an interpreter at the International Military Tribunal's war crimes trials in Nuremberg. One morning I was summoned to my...
William Petersen, Herbert C. Kelman and Thomas F. Pettigrew
HERE two social psychologists at Harvard University take exception to the views presented by WILLIAM PETERSEN in his article "Prejudice in American Society" (October 1958), and Mr. Petersen...
Reviewed by G. E. von
OF THE many lessons Walter Laqueur's remarkable new book contains, perhaps the most significant is the demonstration that only through the most careful, almost pedantic assembling of details...
Reviewed by H. R. Trevor-Roper
THE career of Grand Admiral Doenitz was unique in Germany. A serving commander, he nevertheless rose consistently in Hitler's favor. Beginning the war as a naval captain, in command of the...
Reviewed by Richard Peters
THERE was a time, at a congress in 1910, when a professor banged the table when Freud's theories were mentioned and shouted, "This is not a topic for discussion at a scientific meeting; it is...
Reviewed by Sidney B. Hoenig
THE daily reading of the psalms has been traditional in the liturgy of the synagogue for centuries, and long ago its poetic phrases invited intellectual exposition and commentary. In the...
Reviewed by Ronald Gross
H. G. WELLS'S warning that we are engaged in "a race between education and catastrophe" has taken on new meaning. We are now told that, if the increasing complexity of our technological...
A. V. Sherman
THE Israeli election last month was a spectacular personal triumph for Premier David Ben Gurion, as well for his party, Mapai (the Israel Workers' party). Not only will the party's gain-from 32...
William J. Newman
Vigor surges through our own society, through our allies (when last had France this look of hope?), through our enemies, though the "uncommitted" lands that are passionately committing...
Herbert Hill
THE removal of the sanction of law from racial segregation has sharply posed the issue of the Negro's status in virtually every area of American life. As much as the public schools, religious...
Louise Laser
WHEN my husband accepted a position as an associate professor of sociology at Rufus College, we moved to Foxton, Ohio, with our sons, David, five, and Allen, four. For three years, from...
Hugh H. Nissenson
IN THE first decade of the century, when he was twelve years old, my father, his parents, and his cousin Yecheil all lived in a little shop on Mila Street in Warsaw where my grandfather made...
Francis Golffing
FRANCIS GOLFFRNG, poet and critic, is a professor in the English department at Bennington College. He has contributed both verse and essays to COMMENTARY, the latter including "The Public Voice:...
Josephine Herbst
IF IT is not so easy to trace the historic developments that have taken place in Bucks County, it is possible to discover the point at which 'the locality became fashionable. It is customary...
Z. F. Finot
Z. F. FINOT was the pen name of Dr. Z. F. Finkelstein, who was born in Lvov in 1886. For many years he was a resident of Vienna, where he was editor of Die Stimme as well as correspondent of the...
Anatole Shub
PADDY CHAYEFSKY, it has been said many times, is the Clifford Odets of the 1950's, and the differences between the two playwrights largely reflect a shift in popular attitudes since the 30's....
Harold Enrico
IN EGYPT HAROLD ENRICO NcCE-born from the womb of your mother; U Twice-born from the grave-meant room; Thrice-born through the gate at the border Into the Egyptian noon, the stones and the...
Alan F. Westin
SIX years have passed since American hysteria over internal security measures reached a crescendo; in that rush of months in 1954 when sober men wondered when-and whether-our society would...
Reviewed by Lionel Abel
ROBERT PENN WARREN is generally regarded as a novelist of stature, for he is thought to combine high spiritual concern for moral problems with a craftsman's approach to the problems of his...
Reviewed by Nahum N. Glatzer
How did Judaism manage to survive after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple? From what sources did it derive strength to create new forms of meaningful Jewish...
Reviewed by Kathryn Feuer
THi Slavonic Reading Room of the New York Public Library is for its habitu6es a special and fondly esteemed place. In its humanizing atmosphere of yellowed journals and worn briefcases, of...
Reviewed by Hugh Seton-Watson
THIS volume contains translations of the articles written by Milovan Djilas in the last months of 1953 in the official newspaper of the Yugoslav League of Communists, Borba, of which he was...
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
AMONG Jewish historians and theologians nowadays one often encounters the notion that the plastic arts were never a particular concern of the Jewish people, and that Judaism traditionally...
Reviewed by Martin Green
WHEN people told me I was clever to console me when I was growing up, I would add, sotto voce, to myself, sourly, "Like Aldous Huxley, I suppose." He somehow summed up the word clever for...
1959
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