Theodore Solotaroff
In early October, 1958, the ladies of the Delphian Club of Forrest City, Arkansas, met for one of their literary afternoons. The "theme" of the program was "Americanism," which the club members illustrated by the book that had been chosen for discussion--Harry Golden's "Only in America."
Ray Alan
In between convulsions, France is one of the most conservative countries in Europe.
Joseph Barry
France, said Gertrude Stein, always rises from the ashes. And now France is rising from the dirty ashes of the Algerian war, oddly regenerated by the smoldering heat of that disaster.
Mati Meged
During a short stay in New York last year, I was invited by a group of Jewish students at Columbia University to speak to them about literary life in Israel. Looking at their tense young faces, I was reminded of how I too used to feel the same ardent yearning at any lecture I attended, and I was powerfully struck by the realization that this yearning scarcely exists among young Israelis.
Staughton Lynd
The persistence of America's slum problem has been discussed in this magazine by Michael Harrington. Here it is my purpose to explore the ideological basis for this failure.
David Danzig
Perhaps the major recent development within Christianity has been the growing awareness of both Catholics and Protestants that Christianity's aspiration toward universality has been gravely compromised by its identification with the history and culture of the West.
R. A. Nisbet
The relation of man to state is a timeless problem, one that provides a sturdy bridge from Plato to the Michigan Survey on elections.
George Ross
"The Wall," both the novel and the play, is the story of the Warsaw uprising in 1943 against the Nazis. It is a celebration of the outstanding instance of Jewish resistance to the Germans.
Ernest van den, Lewis A. Coser and Ben B. Seligman
Lewis A. Coser--an associate professor of sociology at Brandeis--and Ben B. Seligman--a labor economist--here comment on "Affluence, Galbraith, the Democrats," an article by Ernest Van Den Haag, which appeared in our September issue. An answer by Mr. van den Haag follows.
Reviewed by Seymour Martin Lipset
Vance Packard has achieved notable financial and critical success with his two previous books, "The Hidden Persuaders" and "The Status Seekers," both of them harsh attacks on the mores of the business society. "The Waste Makers" now adds a third piece to what Mr. Packard's publishers describe as a continuing study of American society.
Reviewed by John Braeman
Its blind spots notwithstanding, "Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction" heralds the appearance of a major new historian.
Reviewed by Sefton D. Temkin
A recent collection of papers descriptive of Conservative Judaism bears the title "Tradition and Change." And a survey of the forces at work within Conservative Judaism would suggest that its major organ, the Jewish Theological Seminary, stands as the guardian of tradition.
Reviewed by Andrew Hacker
More than the presidency, the Supreme Court, or even the House of Representatives, the Senate remains the home of extreme positions and principled appeals
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
In the past year or two paperback reprints of many first-rate books have been published. I shall list here some of Schocken Books' paperbacks, and those of other publishers.
Gidon Gottlieb
Is Israel capable, or desirous, of manufacturing atom bombs? If so, what should be done about it?
S. Z. Abramov
At this writing, the final outcome of the Lavon affair--which three months ago triggered the most serious political crisis in the history of Israel--is still uncertain.
Hans J. Morgenthau
Exactly eight years ago, I sat down to write an article explaining why great things could be expected from Messrs. Eisenhower and Dulles in the conduct of American foreign policy. Yet before I was able to finish, certain depressing indications of what the new foreign policy was likely to be, had already appeared. These sobering reminiscences provide an appropriate background for evaluating the prospects of American foreign policy under the new administration.
Norman Birnbaum
Ideology and actuality are everywhere in conflict, but nowhere in Western Europe is that conflict so strenuously denied as in Britain.
Kathleen Nott
When I arrived in Sicily last spring, my hostess told me, with some excitement, that Danilo Dolci was holding an international conference on theme of the backward areas of Sicily. Dolci is the young artist-architect, now thirty-six, turned saintly reformer, the exponent of the philosophy of non-violence, who has dedicated himself to the purpose of reclaiming Sicily and the Sicilians.
Benjamin De Mott
Since the hesitations or reservations or embarrassments of the Jewish critic have greater than local effect now, and may increase in influence, an imprecise account of their bearings is probably a shade better than none at all.
Henry Popkin
During the past few years several new Jewish novelists and playwrights have attracted considerable attention in the British literary world.
Moshe Decter, Wm. Appleman Williams, George Lichtheim and Staughton Lynd
In his article, "How the Cold War Began" (November 1960), Staughton Lynd attempted to view the struggle between the West and the Communist bloc "with the kind of perspective which commonly comes only after the passage of much time." The exchange between Mr. Lynd and three of his critics is published below.
Harris Dienstfrey
One way of approaching an evaluation of the mass media is to ask whether it sees the media as an old or a new thing.
Reviewed by Lionel Abel
In "Resistance, Rebellion and Death," we see Albert Camus at his most spontaneous, responding to problems as they arose and to events as they occurred.
Reviewed by Ronald Gross
Suburbia is a place, not a way of life. But where does this conclusion leave the image of suburban living on which such a booming business in social commentary has subsisted for the past five years?
Reviewed by Jakob J. Petuchowski
Professor Scholem's latest work is a scholar's book--in both sense of that phrase.
Reviewed by Jane Hayman
If we are to believe the recent talk, a revolution is taking place on our campuses that makes the young people in Barbara Probst Solomon's novel, "The Beat of Life," look definitely old-hat.
Reviewed by Lewis A. Coser
These three books are all concerned with topics that border on the area between sociology and economics. But they are otherwise most dissimilar.
H. Stuart Hughes
"Deterrence," Kissinger tells us, "requires a combination of power, the will to use it, and the assessment of these by the potential aggressor." Kahn or Schelling or Murray could have written the same.
Oscar Handlin, Milton Himmelfarb and Charles E. Shulman
In an address before the World Zionist Congress, which met last December in Jerusalem, David Ben Gurion reiterated his belief that Jewish life in the Diaspora has a dim future. "Commentary" invited three prominent American-Jewish intellectuals to explore some of the wider implications of Ben Gurion's speech.
Paul Goodman
Present thinking about obscenity and pornography is wrongheaded and damaging.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
A story.
Tom Brooks
The air of expectancy that has surrounded the beginnings of the Kennedy administration has a decided piquancy for organized labor.
Philip Roth
The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality.
Herbert Weiner
In the small Jerusalem quarter of Mea Shearim--which houses the most intense concentration of Jewish Orthodoxy in the world--an unusual literary circle meets daily.
Midge Decter
What the current statistics on the whole question of womanpower reveal about the crisis in the inner life of the American woman is not so certain as some psychiatrists and social workers would have us believe.
Wallace Markfield
The intellectual who turns film critic is letting himself in for a rough time.
Reviewed by Richard J. Bernstein
Stuart Hampshire is a philosopher who has written urbanely and incisively on literary, political, and philosophic subjects. "Thought and Action," Hampshire's first sustained attempt to survey a complex web of philosophic issues, is, nevertheless, extremely disappointing.
Reviewed by R. H. S.
"The Faithful City" has all the vitality of a personal document. The picture it gives is all the more vivid because it is written in an unadorned, vigorous English.
Reviewed by Thomas Rogers
Muriel Spark is an English writer of great originality, who, since 1957, has published five novels and this collection of eleven short stories.
Reviewed by Lewis A. Coser
This volume provides--as they say--a gold mine of information about the state of graduate studies in America.
Reviewed by Ernest Stock
The publications of the Leo Baeck Institute, of which some sixteen have now appeared, have the common purpose of exploring the "spiritual features of German Jewry"--its "inner development in the fields of philosophy, religion, science, economics and art...the external events which affected that development.
Oscar Gass
In the first phase of his White House career, President Kennedy has thrilled his American audiences with the call to sacrifice and comforted them by not asking for any.
Nathan Glazer
Why is it that the peace movement in America has never been able to attract the kind of mass support which has gathered around the peace movement in England?
Julian Mayfield
For some time now it has been apparent that the traditional leadership of the American Negro community--a leadership which has been largely middle class in origin and orientation--is in danger of losing its claim to speak for the masses of Negroes.
Norman Podhoretz
In February 1944-some two years after America's entry into World War II and less than two years before the end of the war-"Commentary's" forerunner, the "Contemporary Jewish Record," published a symposium on American literature and the younger generation of American Jews. While all this was taking place in the generation that is now between forty-five and fifty-five years old, a new generation of American Jews was beginning to make its appearance on the scene.
Raziel Abelson, Alfred G. Aronowitz and Aaron Asher
"Commentary" asked a group of thirty-one intellectuals: Do you feel that the situation of the Jew in America has altered in the past fifteen years? Do you think your experience as a Jew is importantly relevant to your experience as an American? Have you ever considered the possibility that your children may convert to another religion?
Harris Dienstfrey
The four novels of Vance Bourjaily have not received much attention, partly, I think, because they have not been properly understood.
Denis Healey
The establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 was the culmination of the most creative period in recent diplomatic history. If one thing is certain it is that NATO cannot now turn the clock back ten years and start again.
Richard Lowenthal
The policy declaration and the appeal to the peoples of the world adopted last December by the Moscow conference of eighty-one Communist parties mark the end of one phase in the dispute between the leaderships of the ruling parties of China and the Soviet Union.
Richard Chase
The longer John Dos passos writes, the more one admires his integrity, his hard-won skill, his capacity for work, and whether one agrees with him or not, the forthrightness of his political views.
Emil L. Fackenheim
It is unusual nowadays for serious thinkers of any kind to address themselves directly to an audience of children, but it is perhaps even more surprising to find a Sunday school text being written by a leading Jewish religious thinker. "Commentary" asked Emil Fackenheim if he would discuss in an article why he undertook to write such a book and what kinds of problems he encountered.
Joan Peyser
After a year-long "public participation program," last September, a professional survey sponsored by the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts revealed the following bit of information: "As many people know about Lincoln Center as know about the Great Pyramids." Left unanswered, however, was the question: What is it that people know about Lincoln Center.
Herbert Weiner
For the followers of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, a famous Hasidic master (1772-1811), the hearing and telling of their founder's stories is a mode of worship.
Roma Lipsky
The existence of a minority group vote in America, or indeed of any bloc voting groups, is proclaimed and denied with about equal vigor--often by the same people.
Henry Popkin
Arthur Miller's movie, "The Misfits," is a curious article. It continues several of Miller's favorite preoccupations and, in some respects, it is a sequel to "Death of a Salesman"; but it is a violently forced dramatization of a theme.
Milton Himmelfarb
Many states require adoptive parents to be of the same religion as the natural mother, so far as possible. In hearings in February, before the law was enacted, everyone agreed that better control of private adoptions was necessary, but there was disagreement about matching.
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
Hitler's Reich continues to fascinate the historians, more especially perhaps the amateur historians. In fact, of course, Mr. Shirer has written nothing like the definitive historical study of the third Reich which it has been his ambition to compose for the benefit of future generations.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Tornquist
Ralph Ellison has written that the novel communicates a moral vision "by amplifying and giving resonance to a specific complex of experience until, through the eloquence of its statement, that specific part of life speaks metaphorically for the whole."
Reviewed by Christopher Jencks
For those who like to think of science as an orderly and progressive march toward ultimate truth, neither William Stanton nor Edward Lurie is likely to provide very agreeable reading.
Reviewed by Milton Hindus
Both Mr. Wheeler's story and Mr. Davis's are extremely pathetic, and optimistic readers are sure to be frustrated, provoked, and even alarmed by their portrayals of futility.
Reviewed by Walter Karp
It is one sign of the times that a swarm of psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, human relations experts, and similar quasiacademics now occupy high staff positions in most of America's large industrial corporations. How all these thinkers got into the land of the hardheaded businessman is a revealing bit of 20th-century history that Loren Baritz somewhat portentously examines in his new book, "The Servants of Power."
Reviewed by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Included in this book is a collection of over a thousand Jewish jokes, a brief but scholarly preface by Professor Carlo Schmid, and an introduction of some ninety pages in which the author--a doctor of philosophy--summarizes several general theories of humor and proposes a special "sociology" of the Jewish joke.
Daniel P. Moynihan
Of all the institutions that Jefferson helped to found, there is surely none that would please him more, in its freedom from the burdens of tradition, than the New York Democrats.
Daniel Bell
A persistent worried Jews of the early Diasporas and of Hellenistic times: the fear that a child of theirs might grow up to be an am-haaretz--a peasant, ignorant of Torah; or, even worse, an apikoros--a sophisticated unbeliever. A similar crisis of identity is a hallmark of our own modernity.
Samuel Shapiro
A crucial test of our policies in this hemisphere will come in Venezuela, Cuba's Caribbean neighbor, the richest nation in Latin America, governed by an exemplary liberal leader, but still plagued with economic and social problems.
Reader Letters
Halina Szwambaum died in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943, fighting alongside her lover in the final unsuccessful uprising of the seventy thousand. Halina managed to keep in constant touch with her woman friend. What follows is a translation of Halina's letters.
Philip Green
The symposium on "National Purpose," the "Report of the President's Commission on National Goals," and the campaign addresses of John F. Kennedy, were all products of the same debate; they all, furthermore, were characterized by one quality in particular--the emphasis on "National Purpose" as a perspective from which American society could most usefully viewed.
Lionel Trilling
Robert Warshow died in the spring of 1955. He was thirty-seven years old. In the circle of his friends the shock of his death was extreme--I have never known a death so intensely and openly grieved over.
Paul Kecskemeti
The Western world is facing two great revolutionary currents--the Marxist onslaught, represented chiefly by Soviet and Chinese Communism, and the colonial revolt, aimed at throwing off Western control. How can we assess the significance of these revolutionary currents?
Dan Jacobson
Reading the first volume of "Rebel and Statesman: The Jabotinsky Story" by Joseph Schechtman has reminded me that it is now almost twenty-five years since I met Vladimir Jabotinsky, when in 1938 he visited our home in Kimberley, during a South African tour.
Samuel L. Blumenfeld, Ray Alan and Joseph Barry
The discussion we present this month grew out of the companion articles on "Algeria & the Fifth Republic" which appeared in our January issue: Ray Alan's "The Political Crisis" and Joseph Barry's "The Moral Crisis." Samuel L. Blumenfeld here comments on both articles; replies by Mr. Alan and Mr. Barry follow.
Reviewed by C. Peter Magrath
Modern Americans, enlightened by the writings of legal realists such as Justice Holmes and Jerome Frank, not to mention the Court fight of the 30's, know that within the robed judge dwells the man.
Reviewed by Ellen Moers
Warmly reviewed for the American press by no less a literary couple than C. P. Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson, William Cooper's "Scenes from Life" comes to us as the fountainhead of the English angry-young-man school
Reviewed by Walter H. Plaut
What we require is an exposition of the Jewish raison d'etre outside of Zion. Ignaz Maybaum's new book attempts to meet this need.
Reviewed by Andrew Hacker
Collections of essays that were previously published in various magazines usually make unsatisfactory books. Newly-written opening and closing chapters seek to develop a common theme, but the topics discussed are generally too diverse and the transitions too forced to impose a persuasive continuity.
Reviewed by Jane Hayman
Samuel Yellen's "The Wedding Band" tells of an unhappy marriage. It is the sort of middle-class writing that tries to make barrenness palatable.
Ernest van den and Oscar Handlin
The issue of federal aid to parochial schools is often approached largely in terms of whether such aid is compatible with the separation between church and state. Yet many other questions of social policy are involved here as well. We have therefore invited two writers who take radically opposing views of how federal aid to private schools would affect it, to argue their cases for readers of "Commentary."
Hugh H. Nissenson
A journal of Hugh Nissenson's stay in Israel during the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
Paul Goodman
After a long spell of Marxian "scientific" realism and businessmen's "hard-headed" realism, our social scientists have begun to praise "utopian thinking."
Walter Schwarz
Pan-Africanism is but one aspect of the nationalism now paramount in the newly independent states of Black Africa.
Eugene Borowitz
Jewish theology to be meaningful in the postwar world would have to speak to this problem--to man's talent for creating evil, to his capacity for deluding himself about the strength and subtlety of his evil inclination.
Hans J. Morgenthau
This issue we inaugurate a bi-monthly department, "Public Affairs," in which Hans J. Morgenthau, one of America's most eminent political thinkers, will discuss leading questions of present concern. Here he likens France's problem with Algeria to America's problem with Asia.
Leo Marx
Some scholars may have been aware of it for a few years, but most of us have only begun to recognize that we are entering a new phase in the study of the American past.
Staughton Lynd
The impulse to radicalism has been getting a bad press. One hesitates, of course, to call Jane Addams a "radical."
Louis Kronenberger
Nothing, in a sense, seems easier to chronicle--perhaps in pictures alone--than a history of bad taste.
Irving Kristol and H. Stuart Hughes
The following discussion between Irving Kristol and H. Stuart Hughes grew out of Mr. Hughes's article in our March issue, "The Strategy of Deterrence-A Dissenting Statement."
Reviewed by Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Martin Mayer's "The Schools" is the best book about education I have ever read.
Reviewed by Lucy S. Dawidowicz
Just as Israel often feels it must justify its existence in the international community, so some of its supporters still examine their consciences to reassure themselves about Israel's title to sovereignty.
Reviewed by John Gross
Stifled in England, Mr. Green breathes freely in America.
Reviewed by Arnold M. Rose
These five books comprise a most remarkable contribution to applied social science.
Reviewed by Theodore Solotaroff
I have a number of quarrels with "Revolutionary Road," but have only admiration for the way its author has turned flat, worked-over material into an arrestingly relevant novel.
Alan F. Westin
The John Birch Society has become the most appealing, activist, and efficient movement to appear on the extreme right since the fertile decade of the 1930's.
Robert Alter
S.Y. Agnon has devoted his life to creative writing--and with a permanent annual stipend from his publishers, he is probably the only Hebrew writer ever to make a comfortable living from his writing alone.
Wayland and Elizabeth Young
It is now generally accepted among the informed that the arms race is too dangerous for a sane power to continue pursuing without any check or inhibition whatever.
Mordecai Richler
A memoir.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Why do many American students drop the scientific careers which they have spent several years training for with reasonable success?
Richard Lichtman and Paul Goodman
The discussion we present this month grew out of Paul Goodman's article, "Pornography, Art & Censorship," which appeared in the March "Commentary." Richard Lichtman here takes issue with Mr. Goodman.
Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong
Although Professor Newman often tries to be funny at the expense of the assortment of publicists and thinkers he examines, he tells us repeatedly that they are not a joke, that they even constitute a menace for America.
Reviewed by Milton Hindus
Nachman Syrkin was the founder of that political movement which has guided the State of Israel since its inception and which earned its leading place by the role it played in Palestinian life for many years before the state was founded.
Reviewed by Dan Jacobson
Rather to my surprise, I found "As We Are" a depressing book to go through. On the face of it, it shouldn't be depressing at all.
Reviewed by E. F. Schumacher
This engaging book, written by a highly accomplished writer, is a passionate appeal to the Western conscience to give economic aid to India on a much larger scale and firmer basis than has ever been contemplated hitherto.
Reviewed by Harris Dienstfrey
"Literature and the Press," by Louis Dudek, mainly concerns itself with the development of print in England.
Reviewed by Milton Himmelfarb
Short reviews of "What it Means to be A Jew," by Charles E. Shulman, "On the Track of Tyranny," edited by Max Beloff, "No Easy Answers," by Philip M. Klutznick, and "The First Step: A Primer of a Jew's Spiritual Life," Selected by Meshullam Zalman et. al.
Nathan Glazer
A dangerous and sophisticated assumption to be avoided is that no solutions can be found to the problems of New York City.
Robert A. Nisbet
It is only too clear that behind the tactical and strategical problems of our relations with the rest of the world--not to emphasize the occasional humiliations--lie some major difficulties of perspective.
Mati Meged
During the past year, as the result of a number of crucial public controversies, Israelis have been forced to confront some of the basic contradictions underlying their political and social order.
Tom Brooks
The fact is that the Negro-Jewish civil rights coalition now faces disruption, a dissolution that seems symptomatic of the worsening relations between white and Negro liberals in general.
A. Alvarez
In 1932 the critic F. R. Leavis proclaimed that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had between them brought about a significant reorientation of literature. Twenty years later he took most of it back again.
David Danzig
For the first time in about four centuries, the wall between Catholics and Protestants, erected first on one side by the Reformation and then on the other by the counter-Reformation, has begun to be preached.
Hans J. Morgenthau
It is obvious that the nuclear age has radically changed man's relations to nature and to his fellow men.
Milton Himmelfarb
In the latest volume of the "American Jewish Year Book" Erich Rosenthal shows that American Jews have stood aside from the baby boom.
Jacob B. Agus
Jacob B. Agus is rabbi of Beth El, a Conservative congregation in Baltimore. Ordained by the Rabbinical School of Yeshiva University, he also holds a doctorate from Harvard in the philosophy of religion. We invited him to comment on the significance of Toynbee's new analysis of Judaism.
Murray Kempton
The "New York Daily News," shadow though it be, is for some of us the closest available instrument for an immediate reflection of the real life of our society. But to judge by John Chapman's recently published history the paper must have an uncommonly and unfairly low self-estimate.
Reviewed by John Gross
Five hundred pages of collected Tynan, decked with a sumptuousness normally reserved for the Living Thoughts of major philosophers and the memoirs of field marshals: even the faithful must quail a little, confronted with the wisdom of the master in such bulk.
Reviewed by Isaac Bashevis Singer
"Great Western Mystics: Their Lasting Significance" contains three lectures presented by Professor David Baumgardt at Columbia University in November 1960. "Nine Gates to the Chassidic Mysteries presents a specific illustration of one of the schools of mysticism touched upon in Dr. Baumgardt's book.
Reviewed by Elisha Greifer
"The Transformation of Russian Society" cannot be praised too highly, for it gets on with the work.
Reviewed by Irving Feldman
Though there is much that is excellent here--honest, sensitive, densely and finely wrought--"Dawn" is seldom moving.
Reviewed by Joseph Kraft
From the far outside, American politics looks like a struggle between the two parties. From the middle distance, skirmishing between executive and legislature seems to predominate.
Reviewed by Ezra Spicehandler
The problem Ahad Ha-Am posed, "the problem of Judaism" he called it, is still on the Jewish agenda. How can a Jew remain a Jew in an essentially secularized world?
Reviewed by C. Peter Magrath
This volume is to be commended for rescuing four important essays by one of the eminent figures in American constitutional law from the obscurity of the professional journals.
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
It seems to have become the prerogative of American historians to see Europe as a whole.
Sidney Hook, H. Stuart Hughes, Hans J. Morgenthau and C. P. Snow
Last May, in observance of its fifteenth anniversary year, "Commentary" invited Sidney Hook, H. Stuart Hughes, Hans J. Morgenthau, and C. P. Snow to participate in a three-hour round-table discussion of the moral and political questions surrounding the possibility of a nuclear war. What follows is a slightly abridged transcript of the entire proceedings.
Gershom Scholem
There can be no doubt that the contribution of Martin Buber to the Western world's knowledge of the Hasidic movement has been a most distinguished one.
Theodore Solotaroff
The times seem to have caught up with Henry Miller, not only in the sexual sophistication that permits the recent publication of "Tropic of Cancer," but in the further respect of often seeming as disordered and self-destructive as he was claiming modern life to be in the early 1930's.
George Lichtheim
Great events do not invariably occur to the accompaniment of thunderous displays of passion; not at any rate in Britain.
Gerda Luft
Despite the fact that the Israeli kibbutz is in some ways an ideal place to live and work--that it offers absolute social security and even in many cases a relatively high standard of physical comfort--the collective settlements have for some years now been suffering from a shortage of manpower.
Reviewed by Harold Rosenberg
Ginsberg's "Kaddish" is a take-off on the Jewish prayer for the dead, not as it is printed in the prayer book but as it might occur in the mind of a contemporary mourner.
Reviewed by Marvin Fox
One of the merits of the existentialist emphasis in current theological discussions is its avoidance of apologetics.
Reviewed by Walter Schwarz
Decolonization in Africa proceeds no less importantly in the fields of scholarship and culture than in politics, but the process is slower.
Reviewed by Midge Decter
The career of Mr. Leon Uris tells a curious literary and cultural story. It might at first not seem worthy of note that a gifted writer of hard-core trash should three times out of the last four have made the best-seller lists in America.
Reviewed by Samuel Shapiro
C. Vann Woodward is a distinguished member of that group of Southern scholars who have in recent years attempted to destroy persistent and pernicious myths about their section's history.
Reviewed by Raziel Abelson
"The Structure of Science" suffers from a disparity between the brilliant clarity of the individual details and somewhat blurry quality of their over-all composition.
Harold Rosenberg
Can one really believe that the trial of Adolf Eichmann will deter mass murderers in the future, or that it will advance international relations?
Theodore Draper
The differences between the Soviet Union and the United States have become increasingly intractable.
Harris Dienstfrey
Two facts define the phenomenon of Ingmar Bergman: the twenty-one films he has made since 1945 (he wrote fourteen himself, of which eleven were original screenplays), and the striking popularity he has commanded since 1957 in the United States.
C. Peter Magrath
The Warren Court, which in 1956 and 1957 seemed to determined to wield a civil liberties sword at every opportunity, has since used the sword sparingly.
E. F. Schumacher
Economic misery is something altogether different from mere poverty; it is a scandal and signifies a breakdown of the natural order, for it prevents men from being human. Yet it seems to be precisely in this task that we tend to fail. The following notes attempt to find out why.
Hans J. Morgenthau
The Berlin crisis, if we come out of it alive, can teach us some lessons about the nature of foreign policy.
Gerda Luft
The general consistency of the election returns since the formation of the State of Israel can be explained by a number of factors.
Max Kozloff
Albert C. Barnes is an important, as well as colorful, figure and William Schack's first full-length biography of Barnes is of considerable interest.
David Segal
The comic strip made its first appearance in Hearst's "New York Journal" during the circulation war he and Pulitzer conducted in the 1890's; and it has developed since then into one of the staples of mass media entertainment.
Reviewed by Edgar Z. Friedenberg
These two works are further evidence of the intense concern that behavioral scientists and makers of public policy have been showing for several years about the values of American youth.
Reviewed by Marshall Sklare
Dr. Gerhard Lenski, with the publication of "The Religious Factor," has ably fulfilled the expectations of his colleagues, who believe him to be one of the few scholars capable of making a substantial contribution to that underdeveloped discipline in American social science: the sociology of religion.
Reviewed by Eugene Goodheart
My reaction to these "stories from the Yiddish about life in America" is complicated by a fact of my adolescence.
Reviewed by Martin Mayer
An American Presidential election must be the ideal subject for a book. It is an exceedingly odd story, a unique blend of rationality, irrelevance, and folk myth-at best a catharsis, at worst a cathartic, usually a little of both.
Reviewed by Robert Alter
During the past year, the American Jewish community has been presented with two new "official" prayer books.
Oscar Gass
One year after the Presidential election of 1960, the New Frontier of President John F. Kennedy has acquired a firm place in a historic American series.
Alfred Kazin
Alfred North Whitehead, that singularly clear mind, observed that even in Jesus' evasive "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's," one sees that the Jews had no independent state to govern; "the absence of such responsibility is one reason for their unpopularity." We are certainly more "popular" now--especially with ourselves.
Theodore Solotaroff
Now that college education is becoming a commonplace in American life, the graduate student seems to have preempted what novelty and prestige remain in being a student.
Dan Jacobson
One cannot possibly say of Baldwin that he should be occupying other, or "higher," ground; all one can ask, rather, is that he should explore even more thoroughly than he has so far done the ground upon which he is now standing.
R.H.S. Crossman
May we not be able to understand the Communists' behavior and predict their actions exclusively in terms of their public and publicized Communist philosophies? The question has been forced on me by reading a whole batch of books about Khrushchev--good, bad, and indifferent.
Elie Wiesel
Last month, we published an article by Harold Rosenberg which attempted to determine how far the Eichmann Trial had achieved its main purpose--that of telling the world the story of what actually happened to the European Jews under the Nazis. Here Elie Wiesel asks whether the trial did justice to Eichmann's victims.
Leo Marx
Americans who do not follow the debates of the British left may find it difficult to understand why "The Long Revolution" caused such a stir in England.
Lewis A. Coser
From this side of the Iron Curtain, Communist bloc countries tend to look alike.
Reviewed by Martin Mayer
James Bryant Conant, formerly president of Harvard, has been speaking and writing about public schools for nearly two decades.
Reviewed by Albert A. Sicroff
As with so many developments which set Spain apart from the rest of Europe, the course of Jewish history in that country owes its peculiarity to the presence there of Islam.
Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong
Not many of the scores of books on Marxism that have appeared in the last few decades are likely to remain of enduring interest. George Lichtheim's magnificently compressed yet fully comprehensive study ought to be an exception.
Reviewed by Elias Cooper
Vladimir Jabotinsky once told his Jewish audience in Poland: "I have spoiled your children, taught them to break discipline (and sometimes windows), tried to persuade them that the true translation of kometz aleph-o is not 'learn to read' but 'learn to shoot.'"
Reviewed by Gordon A. Craig
Even discouraged observers may derive some crumbs of comfort from the sight of the remarkable number of books dealing with the arms race that have been rolling from the presses in recent years.
1961
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