Denis Healey
FOR the last fifteen years, the possession of atomic weapons has been the one incontestable criterion of great power status-and the difficulty of producing atomic weapons has kept the...
Maurice Samuel
AMONG modem literary creations there are on my list three which I believe cannot impart anything approaching their full values without long and sustained intimacy. They are James...
Dan Jacobson
NEITHER for me nor for my parents was England "Home." My father and mother both came to South Africa directly from Eastern Europe; I was born in Johannesburg and grew up in Kimberley....
Ray Alan
A LITTLE over a year ago in the outskirts of a small southern French town I stopped my car beside a group of four men and a woman to ask a direction. It was a few minutes after ten in the...
Jakob J. Petuchowski
FESTIVALS, like books, have their fate. Changing times and environments can be either beneficial or detrimental to a festival's survival and, in this connection, its position within the...
Irving Feldman
The Lost Language I HAVE eaten all my words, And still I am not satisfied! Fourteen thousand and twenty blackbirds Hushed under my side. And when I think of what I have written Or might have...
Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely
DURING the spring of 1959, a number of posters appeared on trees and utility poles in certain sections of Little Rock and at least eight other Arkansas towns, and along major highways...
Cecil Roth
VISITORS to Rome are inevitably taken to see the Mamertine Prison, not far from the Forum, where it is said Servius Tullius, sixth king of Rome, perpetrated his deeds of bloodshed as early as...
Jack Ludwig
BY DAY it was substandard candy, by night women, one his business, the other his calling. Those walleyes of his missed nothing, caught all: melted chocolate given new body in a freezer, a face...
Reader Letters
WE OFFER below some remarks on the possibility of space travel by the renowned 18th-century Cabbalist, JONATHAN EYBESCHOTZ. The excerpt was translated from the original Hebrew by Shabtai...
David Bakan
SOME months ago I received a brief note, in German, from Chaim Bloch, the eminent student of Judaism, Cabbala, and Hasidism. He wrote that he had seen a review of my book, Sigmund Freud and...
Oscar Gass
The Counterrevolutionary Tradition THE traditional counterrevolutionary assessment of the aims and methods of the French Revolution is dominated by two thoughts: the Revolution came...
Reviewed by Maurice Cohen
AFTER many years, the universal historian Arnmold Toynbee has given us a booklength work on the particular civilization in which he has been especially interested all his life. Hellenism is,...
Reviewed by Milton Hindus
SOME may see in these meticulously edited volumes a form of poetic justice: compensation to Dreiser for the indignities that were visited upon him when his first book Sister Carrie was...
Reviewed by David Ray
QUITE belatedly-for Walter Toman's work, long popular in Germany, has been making the rounds of American publishers for some years -Bobbs-Merrill has brought out a volume of his tales. They are...
Reviewed by Rose Guildenstern
IN AN interview with a French journalist, Yael Dayan is reported to have said that she does not consider this book of hers to be a work of art, but a documentary (timoignage). One is still left...
Reviewed by Reuel Denney
THE editors of Sociology Today have put together thirty-five readable papers which serve to update us on many of the problems of method that make it so easy for sociologists to pick a bone...
Reviewed by Ben B. Seligman
THE turbulent history of labor was simultaneously the history of America's growth. Yet, Philip Taft, who gives us now the second volume of his study of the American Federation of Labor, has...
Reviewed by Christopher Hill
THE important problem which Professor Robbins sets herself has never been properly tackled: what is the connection between the English revolutionaries of 1640-60 and the radicals of the age of...
Norman Podhoretz
"On the Death of a Friend" was spoken by Lionel Trilling at the funeral services held for Elliot Cohen on May 31, 1959, and we are publishing it here in its original form. Everyone knows...
Lionel Trilling
If we are to speak of Elliot Cohen with truth, the first thing we must say about him is that he was a man of genius. Whoever, at any time, experienced the power of his mind, and the quality of...
Paul Goodman
Growing up in America It's hard to grow up when there isn't enough man's work. There is "nearly full employment" (with highly significant exceptions), but there get to be fewer jobs that are...
Alfred Kazin
Long before the ice-cream man comes down the block (twice a day) you can hear his truck playing Brahms's "Lullaby" over the loudspeaker, and after he is gone, the sweet and gluey tones...
Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake
Until recently, the birth control movement was a ladies' volunteer affair, publicly regarded as either inconsequential or embarrassing. At the same time, Americans were privately exhibiting...
Isaac Bashevis Singer
You may not believe it but there are people in the world who were called back. I myself knew such a one, in our town of Turbin, a rich man. He was taken with a mortal illness, the doctors...
F. W. Dupee
Some future literary historian will doubtless be able to name the precise moment at which the big change in American literature occurred, and to give the reasons why it occurred at all....
Edouard Roditi
My great-grandmother, whose maiden name was Rebecca Yachni Belinfante, came of an ancient family, once famous for its learning and piety throughout the lands where the Torah is studied....
Arthur Koestler
In May, 1953, two years after Acharya Vinoba Bhave had set out on foot to solve India's problem by persuading the rich to give away their land to the poor, the Rajah of Ranka, province of Bihar,...
Philip Levine
EARTH and water without form, Change or pause: as if the third Day had not come, this calm norm Of chaos denies the Word. One sees only a surface Pocked with rushes, the starved clumps Pressed...
Lawrence Bloomgarden
Since the end of World War II, a significant change has taken place in the character of the so-called prestige college, a change which is bound to affect the patterns of American higher...
Oscar Gass
Democracy and revolution are dominant, recurring themes in the politics of the past two centuries. They work variously in combination and tension, with other major themes: autocracy and...
Reviewed by Steven Marcus
"By training I was a scientist," remarks Sir Charles Snow at the beginning of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, "by vocation I was a writer. That was all. It was a piece of luck,...
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
There is nothing quite like American humorous writing in the literature of other nations. Nowhere else is humor so central to the literary tradition, so intimately revealing of the national...
Reviewed by Murray Kempton
THERE are two possible tones whose employment toward William F. Buckley fits the fashion. One is the tone of hostility, by now a shade passe but still being worn in some college towns and...
Reviewed by Robert Graves
WHEN doubt in the literal truth of the Scriptures first seriously struck our universities, peace was kept by a tacit agreement between leaders of the theology and classics faculties not...
Reviewed by Mati Meged
NOTHING in the history of the Jewish diaspora can be compared with the Sabbatean movement for depth of spiritual influence and psychological impact. On New Year's day of 1665, a relatively...
Reviewed by George Lightheim
IT CANNOT be said with complete assurance that this is the worst book yet published on the Jewish and Protestant views of American Catholics The Catholic Church in America as it looks to...
Reviewed by Richard Chase
AS FAULKNER tells us in a prefatory note to The Mansion, the book is the "final chapter of, and the summation of, a work conceived and begun in 1925." In this new book we presumably see the...
N. P.
IT MAY SEEM THAT MR. SIDNEY HOOK, IN HIS article "Ideas of God," is simply doing once more what so many philosophers have done before him-exposing the weaknesses in the various proofs that have...
Daniel Bell
Unhappy is a society that has run out of words to describe what is going on. So Thurman Arnold observed in connection with the language of private propertythe myths and folklore of...
Robert Gorham Davis
This summer, if all goes as expected, some 400,000 people will travel to Oberammergau in Bavaria to watch the spectacle of Christ's being reviled and sent to his death by the Jews. In a period...
Sidney Hook
Many years ago in a discussion with Jacques Maritain he remarked that anyone who was as keenly interested in arguments for the existence of God as I seemed to be was not beyond hope of...
Paul Goodman
Let us exaggerate. Conceive that the man-made environment is now out of human scale. Business, government, and real property have closed up all the space there is. There is no behavior...
Norman Stein
A Story · The kitchen staff whispered and hissed their amazement and anger. Even the waiters were upset; the fruit cup and consomme had been cleared away practically untouched and now...
Leslie A. Fiedler
Duplicity is the most notable, perhaps the essential characteristic of the greatest American novelists; and surely the most duplicitous of all is Mark Twain, precisely because he wears the...
William Barrett
Why was Frank Lloyd Wright, who for twenty years or so had spoken with no uncertain contempt of modern painting, chosen as the architect of a building whose main function, supposedly, was to...
H. Schmidt
The recent outbreak of anti-Semitic incidents in Germany, with its juvenile chain reaction in many parts of the world, has focused attention on the school, the teacher, and the textbook as the...
James O'Gara
I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on COMMENTARY'S article [February] by Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake. Under the heading of "Birth Control and Public Policy" the authors have...
Reviewed by Gordon A. Craig
A colleague of mine who has had some interest in military affairs confessed recently that he was completely bewildered by the discussion of these matters in Washington, and that the Senate...
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
THESE are the third and fourth volumes of the New York Metropolitan Region Study, of which two volumes (Anatomy of a Metropolis, by Edgar M. Hoover and Raymond Vernon, and Made in New York, by...
Reviewed by Midge Decter
One may clasify the nature of Mr. Max Lerner's work in many ways (none of them quite satisfactory). He is a journalist or contemporary historian or sociologist or interpreter -vague word--of...
Reviewed by Max Beloff
FILIAL piety is a virtue--children should be jealous of their parents' reputation. And Pierre Laval's horrible end in no way relieves us of the obligation to assess his tangled role during the...
Reviewed by Mairi MacInnes
THE initially striking and ultimately perhaps the most appalling characteristic of the world of 1984 was that it lacked privacy altogether. The book was an unpleasant shock to most of us: it all...
N. P.
Dwight Macdonald is right, of course: it matters very little to problems like defense or desegregation which candidate gets "that job" in 1960. He is also right in saying that so far as the...
David T. Bazelon
SUCCESSFUL corporate lawyers like to be described these days as "generalists." This new term has a touch of magic for them-it seems to catch the essence of their drastically changed role in...
Dwight Macdonald
I HAVE been reading a book called Candidates 1960 edited by Eric Sevareid and published by Basic Books, and it has activated two old prejudices, the one against newspaper journalism and the one...
George Lichtheim
AN ESSAY on the current social significance of the floating stratum variously known as "the intellectuals" or "the intelligentsia" must at the outset face the obvious problem of coming to...
Ernest Jouhy
THE new wave of anti-Semitism, Twhich began in Cologne and spread over many German cities, has evoked a profound concern with the German future, and with the youth upon whom that future so...
Paul Goodman
THE use of history, Benjamin Nelson has said, is to rescue from oblivion the lost causes of the past. History is especially important when those causes haunt us in the present as unfinished...
Sydor Rey
PEOPLE were quietly suspecting-at least such was my impression-that I had homosexual inclinations, but these suspicions did not disturb me. At a certain moment I was so obsessed by the...
Alan F. Westin
IN THE past six years, what can best be described as a civil liberties revolt has taken place in America over wire tapping and electronic eavesdropping. Because this exploded primarily at the...
Milton Himmelfarb
Swastikas The pandemic of swastika and "Out with the Jews" scrawlings has abated by now, but the newspapers were full of it in the month or so after Christmas Eve. It started in Germany and...
Reviewed by Irving Kristol
IT IS generally forgotten that Edmund Burke and Adam Smith were both Whigs. In our textbooks of political theory, they are segregated from, and opposed to, one another: the romantic exponent of...
Reviewed by Albert Goldman
ARTHUR HOLDE'S recent volume Jews in Music should have been titled "Guide to Jews in Music" or "Handbook of Jewish Musicians." It is simply a rather pedestrian exercise in lexicography-little...
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
IN 1915, Booker T. Washington died. Dr. Du Bois, then editor of The Crisis, the organ of the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for some years had been...
Reviewed by Midge Decter
RALPH DE TOLEDANO'S lament for his generation is a curious mixture of a book: part autobiographical memoir, part essay in hagiography, part manifesto, and in the midst of all this, a rousing...
Reviewed by Harris Dienstfrey
Our Times is a collection of "the best from The Reporter," the magazine which, since its first issue in April 1949, has come to represent the concerns of intelligent American liberalism. The...
Norman Podhoretz
Reading Arthur Settel's "Seven Nazis Were Hanged" was for me an experience similar to the one I had in watching I Want to Live, the movie about the execution of Barbara Graham. Any person of...
Arthur Settel
ON AUGUST 8,1945, in London, the governments of the USA, France, Britain, and the USSR resolved to punish "those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been...
David Marquand
"I WOULDN'T cross the road to vote for the Labor party, let alone the Conservatives," said a student friend of mine recently, "but I'd march from here to Timbuctoo for the sake of the CND." His...
Myron Kolatch
IN FIFTEEN states scattered around the country, fifty young doctors are now interning who never took the Hippocratic oath. At their graduation they chanted instead the Declaration of...
Roderick MacFarquhar
A TENTH anniversary is customarily an occasion for review and appraisal. But the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Sino-Soviet treaty of friendship, alliance, and mutual friendship on...
Lionel Abel
REALLY surprising about the Pasternak affair was not so much that Doctor Zhivago was denied publication in the Soviet Union or that Boris Pasternak was prevented from accepting his Nobel...
David Bergelson
DAVID BERGELsoN-considered by many critics to be the greatest Yiddish writer of the generations following Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz-was killed somewhere in Russia in 1952, a victim of...
Mark Neuweld
THE FIRST census of the Soviet population to be taken since the war-exactly twenty years after the last census-was conducted from January 15 to January 29, 1959. It provides some basic...
Alfred Kazin
(1) And the Lion Shall Lie Down with the Lamb .. , WHEN Mr. Kazin's piece on Puerto Rico [February] was reprinted in the local English-language daily, violent letters filled the columns; mine...
Reviewed by Paul Levine and Benjamin DeMott
FOR some time now critics have been so busy noting the decline of the American novel that they have completely missed the passing of American criticism. Certainly, the largescale studies of...
Reviewed by Israel Knox
BEFORE publication in book form, these volumes were serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward, of whose staff Mr. Cahn is a member. The chapters appeared once a weekon the Sabbath; the author...
Reviewed by Lewis A. Coser
MAX WEBER is without doubt the greatest German sociologist, and his work belongs among the rare classics of the social sciences. Not only his substantive contributions, but his moral stance-his...
Reviewed by Harris Dienstfrey
THESE works are two examples of current avant-garde fiction in America. Cain's Book presents the first-person reflections of a drug addict-writer who lives on a scow in the Hudson; his...
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
THERE exists a major problem about American slavery, one on which even a reader of the best American historians on slavery will not be enlightened: indeed, if he limits his reading to...
Norman Podhoretz
Like Daniel Bell's article on collective bargaining in our March issue, Hans J. Morgenthau's extraordinary analysis of the executive function points to the signs of obsolescence in an apparently...
David Riesman and Michael Maccoby
A VERY large number of the ablest minds in the country, if concerned at all with defense and foreign policy, work for the Air Force's Rand Corporation, the Army's Operations Research Office...
Hans J. Morgenthau
IT IS the supreme dual paradox of contemporary democracy that the expansion of democratic methods goes hand in hand with the recession of actual popular control over the government and that...
Kenneth Keniston
LATE in January, the CommisLsioner of the New York City Youth Service called an extraordinary press conference to announce a development of "tremendous significance for the juvenile...
Lucy S. Dawidowicz
DURING the past ten years, "Garfield Hills"-the name I have given a compact neighborhood in New York City's borough of Queens which was once closed to Jews-has turned more and more markedly...
Richard Lowenthal
ONE OF the most fateful deO velopments of the 20th century has been the rise of the "totalitarian" regimes, both of the Communist and the nationalist-fascist types. In both...
Oscar Gass
I CONFESS TO having read Sidney Hook's new book* with disappointment. I admire some of Professor Hook's earlier publications and also several chapters of this book. I believe, moreover, that I...
Midge Decter
AT SOME moment during the course of On the Beach, the movie adaptation by Stanley Kramer of Nevil Shute's novel about the end of the world, one of the characters remarks that people must have...
Ted Dienstfrey
IT IS with a desire to do something that many Northern white college students look at the sit-in movement of their Southern Negro counterparts. (Some of us, seeing newspaper pictures of...
Daniel Rosenblatt and Paul Goodman
IN PAUL GOODMAN'S roughly 25,000-word essay, what we have is a long, anguished, soul-rending cry of pain for the crucified adolescent. The society (not the parents) has eaten sour grapes, and...
Reviewed by Theodore Solotaroff
THIS is a very good first novel-noisy and anecdotal, to be sure, but at the same time written under the spell of the truth it is telling. The Time of the Peaches takes place in Brownsville at...
Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong
FOR nearly two decades now articles and reviews by Daniel Bell have been appearing in our better journals of ideas and opinion. He has been so ubiquitous a figure, expressing himself on so...
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
THESE thirty-one papers were prepared as background reading for the decennial White House Conference on Children and Youth held late in March in Washington, with a vast attendance from all over...
Reviewed by Melvin J. Tumin
Many of us have known in our own lives what it feels like to be socially depreciated: considered unworthy of ordinary social rewards, excluded from places where others have unquestioned...
Reviewed by Ben Halpern
IF HISTORY is what remains memorable over a span of generations, then history finds itself consistently distorted as the generations pass, owing to the original sin of the invention of...
Norman Podhoretz
Jacob Robinson develops what seems to me a strong argument for Israel's claim under international law to jurisdiction in the Eichmann case. Though it is reassuring to know that such an argument...
Jacob Robinson
THE recent capture of Adolf Eichmann has raised a good many questions in the public mind, some of them involving what might be called matters of policy and others touching on issues of...
Dan Jacobson
THOUGH my latest return to South Africa coincided (quite unintentionally) with the country's savage political crisis, my single overwhelming impression of South Africa, when I look back now, is...
Joseph Kraft
SEYMOUR, G r e e e y, Tilden, Cleveland, Parker, Smith, and Roosevelt: seven of the thirteen men named by the Democrats for the Presidency since the Civil War have been New Yorkers. An eighth...
Harris Dienstfrey
OVER the past two years, a series of incidents in this country has highlighted the uneasiness with which some Americans occasionally view their official leaders. The Southern sit-ins,...
Milton Himmelfarb
THE two most striking things about the statistics of Jewish education today are that enrollments are growing faster than the Jewish child population and that the enrollment in day schools is...
Arthur Granit
ONCE upon a time, we Jews had a Princess, named Berenice, who was affianced to the Emperor Titus. Bedecked in her jewels, attended by her slaves, and with gongs and cymbals clashing,...
Oscar Gass
NO OTHER error of public judgment would, I think, be more damaging, for the just influence of the United States, than that we should ascribe too universal a significance to the...
Alfred Kazin
CHEKHOV, who died at forty-four, would have been a hundred years old this year, and there have been suitable tributes to him from short story writers, people in the theater, and scholars in the...
Arthur J. Goldberg and Daniel Bell
DANIEL BELL'S article "The Subversion of Collective Bargaining" in the March issue reflects the disillusionment with the labor movement expressed by an increasing number of pro-labor...
Reviewed by Marshall Sklare
IN ADDITION to the timeliness of its appearance just before the presidential contest the obvious significance of this volume is its contribution to the "Dialogue." The participants in the...
Reviewed by Fred Graham
THE central character in Brendan Behan's current London play, The Hostage, is a likeable cockney soldier named Leslie, who is captured by Irish Republican rebels. To buck up his courage Leslie...
Reviewed by Michael Millgate
IT WILL no doubt be said of C. P. Snow's new novel, The Affair, that it attempts to repeat the formula of The Masters but does not succeed in doing so. Certainly The Affair does not have quite...
Reviewed by R. A. Nisbet
A SKEPTICAL historian once suggested that feudalism was introduced into England, not by William the Conqueror in the 11th century but by the antiquary, Sir Henry Spelman, in the 17th. There...
Reviewed by Gertrude Himmelfarb
SOME time ago there was an exchange program for English and American journalists, in the course of which a member of the staff of the Economist was briefly attached to Time. Apart from the...
Reviewed by Andrew Hacker
A GOOD part of the corporation executive's time, it now appears, is spent in talking with people who want to know what he does with his time. In our age of public relations and corporate...
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
"WEATHERBEATEN and very old, of a deep metallic dull-green hue, it towered impressively above the market square, topped with its pagoda pinnacles and sloping shingle roof that revealed so...
Reviewed by Marshall McLuhan
"SINCE the arc of tradition in a given culture may vary considerably from country to country, it is only right that the study of folklore should follow the contours of a particular...
Norman Podhoretz
THE ISSUE: AUGUST 1960 In criticizing my remarks about the Eichmann case last month, Oscar Handlin calls it a "tragic turn of events" that Jews "who profess an interest in an international...
A. V. Sherman
THE experience of Turkey in the Past decade holds a significance for Asian and Middle Eastern nationalism in general: Turkey in the 1920's was the scene of the first successful...
Leslie A. Fiedler
After the publication in 1935 of his first and only novel, Call It Sleep, HENRY ROTH retired completely from the literary scene until last year when his parable, "At Times in Flight," appeared in...
Henry Roth
THERE was something ruinous about the time, or fatal to creative gusto, or so I feel. I have my inklings about its nature, my brief illumination, but just what it was I leave to others more...
Asher Brynes
WHEN, last May, the omnibus Agriculture Appropriation Bill for 1961 was on the floor of the House for final consideration, a city Congressman rose to say: "There are literally no farmers in my...
Michael Harrington
IT IS clear now that postwar America's greatest single social scandal has been its failure to provide adequate housing for its low-income groups. Less than half of the federal public housing...
Lewis Yablonsky
IT IS a truism that criminal orIganizations and criminal activities tend to reflect social conditions. Just as surely as the Bowery gang mirrored aspects of the 1900's, the Capone mob...
Robert S. Brustein
WHEN Boris called me in the W summer of 1952, it had been a full three years since I had last heard from him; yet he launched into his proposition with only the most...
Sidney Hook
IN THE realm of thought and culture America has largely been a colonial dependency of Europe. Its own authentic history-the conquest of a virgin continent, the bloodiest of all civil wars, the...
Harold Rosenberg
SOCIOLOGICAL studies expose their areas of inquiry as under a huge searchlight. There is an absence of shading, but this only makes the image presented by systematic research seem...
Milton Himmelfarb
Nazi, Foreign Editorial opinion on the Eichmann case was generally understanding but mildly disapproving of the way the Israelis captured him and of their intention to try him in Israel. The...
Oscar Handlin and Jacob Robinson
OscAR HANDLIN, a professor of history at Harvard and a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY, here comments on JACOB ROBINSON'S article, which appeared last month, "Eichmann & the Question of...
Reviewed by Richard L. Schoenwald
GENERAL education grew out of a dissatisfaction with the system of free electives which, after the Civil War, displaced the tightly prescribed, largely classical curriculum long dominant in...
Reviewed by George L. Mosse
THESE weighty volumes of documents Show us how little we have, as yet, penetrated to the core of National Socialism. HiStoriati5 have concentrated on the political and sociological side of the...
Reviewed by Lewis A. Coser
THIS thought-provoking book follows the tradition of such modern classics as Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom and The Authoritarian Personality by T. W. Adorno, et al. Investigating the...
Reviewed by Elmer Borklund
AFTER paying his dollar and a half, the reader who prides himself on keeping up with the most promising new fiction (the person who bought the revived Dial and waited impatiently to see what New...
Reviewed by Marshall Cohen
ERNEST GELLNER knew full well that sooner or later the role of Angry Young Philosophei would have to be cast. But he could only have dreamed that Words and Things would become the most discussed...
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
THESE three books are the most recent additions to the Chicago History of American Civilization, which has been imaginatively, even brilliantly, edited by Daniel Boorstin. It is only with the...
Norman Podhoretz and Norman Podhoretz
THE ISSUE: SEPTEMBER 1960 Those liberals who have expressed disgust at the "undemocratic rigging" of the conventions and the resultant mediocrity of the two nominees may have to console...
Nathan Glazer
IT is now more than six years since "integration" became an issue in the New York City school system; and, very likely, at the start of the new school term some of New York's Negro parents-for...
Mark Richards
DURING the past few years a particularly vehement campaign on the part of the Soviet press has systematically represented Soviet Jews as being malicious and anti-social, and Jewish...
Dennis H. Wrong
THE most unusual event of the two cut-and-dried and largely predictable party conventions was the Nixon-Rockefeller meeting and its outcome the weekend before the Republican convention. The...
Ernest van den
AT THE recent Republican convention, Senator Barry Goldwater varied the occasion's ritual excoriation of Democrats by accusing them of having abandoned Jefferson and Jackson in favor of:...
Maurice Marks
THE LAST time I tried my hand at public expression was in 1948 and in Doomington, England. For almost two months I trained to be a public speaker, attended Mr. Gordon, his classes, and learned...
Jack Jones
OTTO RANK, who will probably turn out in the end to have been the best mind that psychoanalysis contributed to intellectual history, defected from the company of Freudians about 1925 and, as...
J. G. Weightman
A TINY but significant piece of cultural news from France earlier this year was the report that JeanPaul Sartre had said of one of the latest nouvelle vague ("new wave") films, JeanLuc...
Edwin M. Schur
THERE are in the United States about 60,000 opiate addicts, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics estimates, and some medical experts believe that 1,000,000 is closer to the actual number of those...
Judd L. Teller
THE story of how the manuscript of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of the Soviet Union is drab compared to the odyssey of a recently published collection of strange,...
Reviewed by Benjamin DeMott
CLEVER folk scorn it as a cliche and vulgar men read it with dollar-conscious leers, but the plain truth remains that the present situation of the young university teacher is probably more...
Reviewed by Harris Dienstfrey
IT IS impossible to read any of Dan Jacobson's four novels without feeling how strongly they are suffused by his own humanity. Because he believes that every individual absorbs some of a...
Reviewed by Gerald Strauss
IN THE dismal chronicle that records the existence of Jews among their host peoples, the age of the Italian Renaissance stands out as a period of uncommon liberality. Cosmopolitan in outlook...
Reviewed by Midge Decter
THE appearance of a volume like American Marriage acts to remind one that there are colleges in the United States offering courses in how to have a happy marriage. The book is a textbook,...
Reviewed by Leo Marx
CRUMBLING IDOLS is an earnest, slapdash, literary manifesto first published in 1894 and now reissued by the John Harvard Library as one of "a rich store" of scarce American books "of importance...
Reviewed by Andrew Hacker
GENERALS and admirals are figures of no little mystery. Their well-fitting uniforms, their disciplined posture, their disconcerting good looks all combine to suggest that they are not like the...
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
Karaism, an anti-talmudic and antirabbinic movement, arose among the Jews of Babylonia more than a thousand years ago and flourished there, in Palestine, and in Egypt for a few centuries....
Arthur Hertzberg
AFTER more than a year of discussion, culminating in the statement last month by Norman Vincent Peale and a number of other conservative Protestants, the "religious issue" in the coming...
Seymour Martin Lipset
THOUGH the outcome of the 1960 Presidential election will be determined by a variety of factors, it is clearly the "religious issue" which most fascinates the majority of our...
Benjamin De Mott
WHAT stands in the way of a reinvigoration of national purpose? Who opposes the invention of an active, responsible future for America? A thousand answers have already been returned to these...
Emil L. Fackenheim
THE liberal Jew of today is in a dilemma. His Jewish conscience urges him to look for an authority which might guide and direct his Jewish life. But his liberal conscience frowns on that...
S. Y. Agnon
S. Y. AGNON is generally considered to be the foremost living writer of Hebrew prose. In addition to his numerous novels and short stories, he has also published anthologies of selections from...
F. R. Leavis
Daniel Deronda is notable among George Eliot's major novels for its preoccupation with the Jewish question and the beginnings of the Zionist movement in the 19th century. Most readers of the...
Ralph Lee Smith
IF school integration in the South were to continue at its 1959 rate, it would take four thousand years for all Southern Negro children to achieve their right to equal educational opportunity....
Francis Golffing
FOR over three decades now Professor Ludwig von Mises has, with admirable consistency, pursued his passion for changing the world by making it stand still. A distinguished economist...
Paul Goodman
LOUIS SULLIVAN AS HE LIVED* is necessarily a valuable book, for it is the first attempt at a proper biography of the "founder of modern architecture." Here, in conditions approximating our...
Riesman , Maccoby and And Critics
LEON LIPSON-a member of the Yale Law School faculty and a consultant to the Rand Corporation-and NEHEMIAH JORDAN-who' has worked for various "think factories"-here comment on "The American...
Reviewed by Irving Howe
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER is the only living Yiddish writer whose translated work has caught the imagination of the American literary public. Though his brilliant stories and novels are crowded with...
Reviewed by Hal Lehrman
The Arabs burst into quarrels and threats. . . . The Arabs talk more than they act; their plans and menaces promise more than can be actualized. Their excitement about public issues is easily...
Reviewed by Walter H. Plaut
EVER since its promulgation in Mishnaic times, the doctrine Torah im derech eretz has meant what it said: a linking of Torah with the contemporary surrounding civilization. It mattered little...
Reviewed by Algene Ballif
THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY, second novel of the remarkable young Southern writer Flannery O'Connor, is about people whose psychopathology can never for a moment be mistaken for anything else, so...
Reviewed by Maurice Cohen
THESE two short but significant books are additions to the World Perspective series edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. Moses Hadas's Humanism deals with humanism in the literature of classical Greece;...
Reviewed by Eric L. McKitrick
EACH of these two recent books from the university presses describes a different example of the American crusading spirit, and each of the books embodies a different attitude toward its...
Alfred Kazin
SOME years ago, in a course I was giving on European novels, a student handed in a paper in which he described Emile Zola's Germinal-that powerful but old-fashioned novel of French miners...
Staughton Lynd
AT THE banquet which closed the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin all offered toasts. When it came Churchill's turn, he addressed himself to the years ahead. He felt, he said,...
A. V. Sherman
"THE EAST END is not what it used to be"-the theme recurs in almost any conversation on London Jewry and its changing patterns of settlement and behavior. For over half a century the "East...
Alan W. Miller
NOT long ago, an American firm (Meridian Books) reprinted a singular work entitled A Rabbinic Anthology which was originally published in England in 1938. As its title indicates, A Rabbinic...
Andrew Hacker
OVER the last several years our larger graduate schools have contained within their precincts a cold war the outcome of which is going to influence higher education in this country for some...
Hannah Arendt
THE purpose of the following reflections is to rehabilitate the word "revolution." No other word, except perhaps "freedom," will be more urgently needed in the years to come, and no other...
Hugh H. Nissenson
ON AND OFF, that whole summer, I wondered what my uncle Willi was going to do about his son. The boy, Danny, was going to be thirteen on the twelfth of July, and as early as February, I...
Edward T. Chase
THE year 1960 may well come to mark the turning point in the American medical profession's social and economic relations with the American public. Several developments which have taken place...
Reviewed by Theodore Solotaroff
KARL SHAPIRO is, as he says, a "critic in spite of himself"-a man of feeling, intuition, and personal taste, who over the years has had little inclination and less use for the abstruse ways of...
Reviewed by Moses Hadas
THE GRANDIOSE MOSAICS which all the world knows-at Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome of the 5th century, at San Vitale at Ravenna of the 6th, at Torcello and Palermo of the 12th and 13th-were...
Reviewed by Stanley M. Elkins
THE Harvard University Press is publishing a new historical series, the "John Harvard Library," whose purpose is to rescue "significant books and documents from the American past," hitherto...
Reviewed by Elmer Borklund
"THE only true experience," observes the protagonist of Set This House on Fire, "is the one where a man learns to love himself. And his country." This is a terrible simplification, no doubt,...
Reviewed by Solomon F. Bloom
THE two World Wars of our century were acts of a single historical drama, and the whole period since the years that produced the crisis of 1914 seems, in retrospect, to be all of a piece-a time...
Reviewed by Lewis A. Coser
AMONG the favorite cliches of European observers of America has been the so-called materialism of American culture, its alleged concentration upon productivity, technological progress, and...
Paul Goodman
IN THE present round of the century-old debate between Science and the Humanities, the humanities are a weak opponent. They are not sure of what they are and they do not seem to have much of...
Amitai Etzioni
ONE OF THE most striking aspects of the 1960 election campaign is that it was waged between two comparatively liberal platforms and candidates. It is true that Kennedy carried the standard of...
Midge Decter
THE year 1960 has been set aside by the Zionist movement, Hadassah particularly, for celebrating the centennial of the birth of Miss Henrietta Szold. In addition to being the founder, first...
David Marquand
EVER since its birth sixty years ago, the British Labor party has appeared to be on the point of collapse. Again and again, the mourners have assembled in the graveyard--only to find the...
Norman Stein
When Night in her rustie dungeon hath imprisoned our ey-sight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from re- sort, the divell keepeth his audit in our sin-guilty consciences, no sense...
Saul Goodman
THERE is a widespread notion in American Jewish thought that the philosophies and ideologies of Jewish existence which developed in East Europe toward the end of the 19th century have become...
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
TRUTH surely is complex; but there is one dimension of truth that is especially useful in distinguishing among the different approaches to conviction that occur most frequently at...
Theodore Frankel
SINCE the end of the war, the German literary world has been waiting for the great German novel, one that would sum up, and at the same time transcend, the experiences of the last...
Milton Himmelfarb
Jewish Vote? With a Catholic candidate for the presidency, the so-called Jewish vote was bound to attract the scrutiny of reporters and the attention of politicians. The statistics of group...
Edwin M. Schur and And Critics
M. L. HARNEY-formerly Superintendent of the Illinois Division of Narcotic Control, Assistant to the U. S. Commissioner of Narcotics, and Assistant to the Secretary, U. S. Treasury, for Law...
Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong
THEODORE DRAPER'S previous book, The Roots of American Communism, covered the early years of American Communism from the Russian Revolution to roughly the end of 1922. It also subjected to close...
Reviewed by Alfred Werner
DR. KANN perceives a cyclical development in Austrian history from the late Baroque to early Romanticism (from the middle of the 17th to the middle of the 19th century): long conservative...
Reviewed by Kenneth Keniston
IT WAS Marx who in 1846 ridiculed the view of "Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality and subsists only in the realm of philosophical fantasy." Since then, the influence of...
Reviewed by Lucy S. Dawidowicz
NORMAN BENTWICH'S survey of the modern Jewish scene is the second "original" devoted to Jewish matters to be issued by the English publishing house of Penguin Books; last year they brought out...
Reviewed by Theodore Solotaroff
AT one point in The Last of the Just the main figure, young Ernie Levy, says of the reports about the Nazi extermination camps -" 'But the stories they tell are too much for the human spirit.'"...
Reviewed by Walter Schwarz
WHEN the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry landed in Palestine in 1946, Chaim Weizmann referred to the "excellent men" like Richard Crossman who were on it. Crossman was a Labor M.P., picked...
1960
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