Theodore Draper
In the past six years the United States has resorted to some form of military force in three major crises—in Cuba, in the Dominican Republic, and in Vietnam.
Erich Isaac
In our time, ritual observance of all kinds has become problematical not only for non-believers, but for the thinking adherents of the various faiths as well.
Robert Lekachman
A viable political consensus rests upon an expectation of benefits by all members of the coalition.
George Lichtheim
Now that the race wars of the coming decade are beginning to cast their premonitory shadow, it may be useful to look at some of the factors underlying the current disintegration of one of the few hopeful inventions in the field of race relations.
Robert Alter
The Jewish museum did such a thorough job conjuring up group memories in its ambitious exhibition devoted to the Lower East Side that I was moved to wonder just what purposes such memories ought to serve.
Robert Gorham Davis
Part of the scandal of Leslie Fiedler's fiction is the fact that there is so much of it.
Neil Compton
To be the “regular television critic” even of a magazine like COMMENTARY is surely to occupy an excessively modest position in the vast hierarchy of American criticism.
Reviewed by Daniel J. Callahan
Reviewed by James MacGregor Burns
Reviewed by Leon Poliakov
Reviewed by Walter Z. Laqueur
Reviewed by Edward S. Mason
Daniel P. Moynihan
For anyone with even a moderate concern for the sources of stability in American government, the results of the 1966 elections will appear on balance a good thing. For Negro Americans the election may turn out to have been a calamity.
Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel spent a number of weeks visiting the Jewish community in the Soviet Union. This article, translated from the Hebrew by Neal Kozodoy, contains his impressions from this second visit to the Soviet Jewish community.
Benjamin Schwartz
What lies behind the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" of 1966? The news out of China seems nothing less than fantastic.
Tadeusz Borowski
A story.
Herbert Marcuse
For here is the "new soul," prophet of the new man--radical break with the past, and with the present which is still the rule of the past. Psychoanalysis in its most extreme and most advanced concepts guides Norman Brown's interpretation of the history of men and of the human condition.
Louis Kronenberger
Of the many books published in this century as guides to a sound use of the English language, only one has become a classic: Fowler's "Modern English Usage."
Meyer Liben
I read this book ("Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports") because I am interested in sports, interested in the Jews, and interested in the Jews in sports.
Reviewed by Nathan Glazer
This enormous volume is presented as only the first of a series on Puerto Rican slum families in San Juan and New York.
Reviewed by David Schiller
Robert Graves not only writes poems; he has a theory of poetry which involves the creation of a new mythology that is to provide poetry with patterns and a rationale.
Reviewed by Edward Grossman
Can Israel be explained? More specifically, can it be explained to the curious but non-scholarly reader?
Reviewed by Werner J. Dannhauser
Reader Letters and Reader Letters
Walter Z. Laqueur
On Monday, November 21, 1966, the day after the Bavarian state elections, the London "Daily Express" carried the banner headline: "New Nazis Win Again."
C. P. Snow
One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein.
Oscar Gass
In these next years, a grave political and moral problem for the United States, in its relations with other countries, will be the absence of an equal—an equal in wealth, military power, and worldwide commitment.
Robert Alter
Although four generations of Zionist and Yiddishist thinkers, Hebrew essayists, novelists, and poets, have struggled with the definition of Jewish peoplehood and its bearing on a revived Jewish state, the question has never had much urgency in the intellectual life of American Jews.
Norman O. Brown
There is eternal recurrence; there are “eternal objects” (Whitehead); archetypes.
Cecil Roth
The antique market is booming: and as one who purchased his collection long since, and in any case is in no position to purchase anything more now, I cannot but rejoice at the fact.
Jack Richardson
An interesting phenomenon of the past few years has been the gradual adaptation of the Roman Church to practical moral attitudes which are sympathetic and recognizable to those outside Catholic dogma.
Reviewed by H. Stuart Hughes
Reviewed by Joseph Epstein
Reviewed by Jervis Anderson
Robert L. Heilbroner
Is the United States fundamentally opposed to economic development? The question is outrageous.
Oscar Gass
China's standing among the nations has been on a steep downward course from the time of American heavy combat commitment to Vietnam (March-April 1965).
George Lichtheim
London: The prime lesson for statesmen and political scientists, ever repeated and seldom understood, is that events rarely shape themselves in an orderly pattern.
Michael Novak
Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was a human being of immense wisdom.
Milton Himmelfarb
These days the error is to complain that the Jews of America are becoming selfishly conservative, above all in how they think and act about Negroes.
Leslie A. Fiedler
The revival of the literature of the 30's through which we have recently been living—the republication of novels long out of print, the redemption of reputations long lapsed, the compilation of anthologies long overdue—has been oddly one-sided.
Cecil Roth
The traditional Jewish Seder service on Passover eve begins on a note of expectancy and exhilaration.
Robert Garis
The wildly mixed reception of Antonioni's splendid new "Blow-up"--witness Pauline Kael's personal blow-up against it in "The New Republic" as against the "best movie of the year" award from the critics' group to which she belongs--proves again that following an important artist's career while its actually going on is rarely that peacefully exciting cycle of anticipation and gratification we would like it to be.
Reviewed by Walter Goodman
Reviewed by David Daiches
Reviewed by Abraham S. Goldstein
Reviewed by Werner J. Dannhauser
James Q. Wilson
A person like myself, who grew up in Southern California, finds it increasingly difficult to understand people who say they understand California.
Arthur Ralph Gold
The fundamental assumption of virtually all serious modern students of the Jewish Bible is that it ought to be treated as a historical document, valuable for the light it casts on the development of Israel as a nation and as a religion.
Joseph J. Weiss
The diary of doctor's visit to Vietnam.
Michael Frayn
As a sweeping particularization, you might say that the history of philosophy in this century is the history of Russell and his pupil Wittgenstein.
Anita Novinsky and Amilcar Paulo
Anita Novinsky and Amilcar Paulo's diary from a recent visit to Portugal.
Joseph Wood Krutch
The Monkey Trial at Dayton, Tennessee took place more than forty years ago. Few of us who were actually present survive and by now the events are more a part of the folklore of liberalism than of history.
Ronald Steel
A pile of new books on the United Nations is usually enough to drive even the most public-spirited man to his Ian Fleming.
Reviewed by Theodore Solotaroff
Reviewed by Michael Steinberg
Reviewed by Joseph Epstein
Richard N. Goodwin
Over the past several decades much of the world has been experiencing the growing power and dominion of centralized national leadership.
Paul Theroux
In the old days, fat young boys with nothing to do used to stand around drugstores talking excitedly of picking up girls.
Leo Strauss
All the hopes that we entertain in the midst of the confusion and dangers of the present are founded, positively or negatively, directly or indirectly, on the experiences of the past.
Ronald Steel
For two decades following the end of the Second World War, American foreign policy was dominated by the effort to contain the Soviet Union.
Robert Alter
Modern experience has taught us to recognize that in the particular past which we choose to rediscover, we discover ourselves—that is, we find out who we are and, in the older sense of the word “discover,” we reveal, or expose, ourselves.
Jack Richardson
I have been made weary and humble by my last visit to the theater.
Robert L. Zimmerman
Perhaps nothing so well characterizes the problematic career of depth psychology over the past fifty years as the seemingly endless chain of contradictory theories--all claiming to point to the one psychological "truth"--which have been put forward by its devotees and practitioners.
Reviewed by George Lichtheim
Reviewed by Lewis A. Coser
Reviewed by George P. Elliott
Reader Letters and Reader Letters
Edward Jay Epstein
Throughout protracted controversy surrounding the publication of William Manchester's "The Death of a President," the press seemed preoccupied with a single issue: the suppression of history.
Neil Compton
Are world's fairs obsolete? This is the eight-hundred-million-dollar question posed by Expo 67, the "universal and international exhibition" being held in Montreal from April 28 to October 27. It is too early to expect a definite answer.
Ben B. Seligman
Not too long ago, housewives rebelled all over America.
Milton Himmelfarb
We, the Jews, are modern, of course, but what does that mean? How long have we been modern? When did modern begin?
George Lichtheim
Every now and then there takes place one of those mysterious shifts in public opinion which in retrospect can be seen as a response to subterranean changes in the domain of political and military planning. In the middle and later 30's, people gradually became aware of the probability of another great European war toward the end of that decade.
Norman Birnbaum
In his book on the German Peasants' War, Friedrich Engels observed that in a religious epoch, even revolutionary ideas have to be expressed in a religious rhetoric.
Lucy S. Dawidowicz
Last December, more than fifteen years after the composer's death, Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses and Aaron was given a belated American premiere by the Opera Company of Boston.
Reviewed by Francis Fergusson
Reviewed by Walter Z. Laqueur
Reviewed by Lawrence Malkin
Reviewed by C. Vann Woodward
Reader Letters and Reader Letters
Reader Letters and Reader Letters
Theodore Draper
A peculiar combination of internal and external forces was necessary to set off the third Arab-Israeli war in June 1967.
Walter Z. Laqueur
For Eighteen Years, a state of almost permanent crisis, involving countless coups d'état and a war, left the political map of the Middle East virtually unchanged.
Amos Elon
For us, it all began on Independence Day, May 15.
Arthur Hertzberg
As soon as the Arab armies began to mass on the borders of Israel during the third week in May, the mood of the American Jewish community underwent an abrupt, radical, and possibly permanent change.
Paul Goodman
In principle, technology, the use of instruments, is a branch of moral philosophy, subject to the criteria of prudence, efficiency, simplicity, and so forth.
Robert Garis
Everybody knows that the smallish “art-movie” houses are the dependable moneymakers these days, and everybody knows too that “art-movie” deserves the quotation-marks around it.
Osip Mandelstam
An excerpt from Osip Mandelstam's interview with a young Annamese revolutionary named Nguyen Ai Quoc (otherwise known as Ho Chi Minh).
Reviewed by Denis Donoghue
Reviewed by Robert Lekachman
Reviewed by Cecil Roth
The most important thing is that people are now beginning to think in terms of synagogue art.
Reviewed by Leonard Chazen
Reader Letters and A Symposium
"Commentary" recently asked a group of twenty-one intellectuals: Would you call yourself an anti-Communist today? If so, are you still willing to support a policy of containing the spread of Communism? If not, why have you changed? Their responses follow.
Paul Lendvai
On one of the busy streets of downtown Vienna about two years ago, a young student walked up and down, collection box in hand, parading two placards.
Sanford J. Ungar
Wilkes-Barre is a city of some 60,000 inhabitants in an economically depressed area of northeastern Pennsylvania.
Reviewed by Wilfrid Sheed
Reviewed by Warren Coffey
Reviewed by Abraham S. Goldstein
Reviewed by Baruch Hochman
Bayard Rustin
Toward the end of the long hot summer of 1967, Vice-President Humphrey was asked to comment on the assertion that the United States had spent $904 billion on military power since 1946, while spending only $96 billion on social programs in the same period.
Robert Alter
Three months after the war in the Middle East, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Israel's stunning victory, whatever its final effect in altering political maps, has knocked askew a whole row of stereotypes of the Jew in his relation to history, his location in existence.
Milton Himmelfarb
It's easy to forget. Here we are, some months later, and the news from Israel is of headache and annoyance, trouble and difficulty.
George Lichtheim
Anniversaries notoriously bring out the historian in us all, and this year the pull is virtually irresistible.
James Toback
In the late 50's, Norman Mailer's reputation still stood on The Naked and the Dead (1948), neither of his subsequent efforts, Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), having quite convinced Mailer or anyone else that he was the major novelist he insisted he could become.
Michael Harrington
Liberalism, as it was known for a generation, died in November 1964. Whether it will be reborn remains to be seen.
Jervis Anderson
In newark, as in many other cities, the heart of the black ghetto—the Central Ward, or “the Hill,” as some of its residents call it—is uptown.
John Mander
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: “The West,” the Israeli diplomat was saying, “has a secret weapon it doesn't yet know about.
Reviewed by Eliezer Livneh
Reviewed by Martin Gardner
Reviewed by Arnaldo Momigliano
Reviewed by George Woodcock
Reviewed by Warner Berthoff
Richard Poirier's ambitious essay is another in the sequence of interpretive schematizations of American literary and cultural history appearing over the past fifteen years.
Reviewed by Brian Glanville
Martin Peretz
Where the Middle East is concerned, the doctrine which has won so quick an acceptance--in the sectarian press of the Left, in discussions among movement activists, and in the resolutions adopted at the disastrous convention of the National Conference for New Politics--is that Israel and Israel alone must bear the blame for the past and the responsibility for the future.
Joseph Epstein
Henry Luce died on February 28, 1967, but the mention of his name still manages to ignite passions all over the United States--and the world.
Irving Howe
In the past hundred years we have had a special kind of literature. We call it modern and distinguish it from the merely contemporary; for where the contemporary refers to time, the modern refers to sensibility and style, and where the contemporary is a term of neutral reference, the modern is a term of critical placement and judgment.
Hans Jonas
If one wishes to assess the respective roles of Jewish and Christian elements in the Western philosophical tradition, one is immediately confronted by two questions.
Ellen Willis
In five years, Bob Dylan's stance has evolved from proletarian assertiveness to anarchist Angst to pop detachment.
John Thompson
Once only in all the years of American Negro slavery did slaves organize a revolt. This was in 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, a half-century after the Declaration of Independence. William Styron's new novel, "The Confessions of Nat Turner," is based on that uprising in Virginia in 1831.
Robert Alter
The kindest thing one can say about Philip Roth's new novel is that it is a brave mistake.
Theodore Solotaroff
It gets harder and harder to see Susan Sontag through the smoke of opinion that smolders away now on all sides of her work. "Against Interpretation," her collection of essays and reviews, produced much more heat than light.
Reviewed by Mary Ellmann
Some of these "children" are little, the rest look grown-up. The "crisis" in which they are involved is the civil-rights movement.
Reviewed by Seymour Rudin
A new book by B. H. Haggin has always been something for which, as a serious listener to music and reader of music criticism, I have felt grateful.
Reviewed by Guenter Lewy
Until further archival sources become available, it would seem that everything possible has been said about the silence of Pius XII in the face of the Nazis' murder of six million Jews. The news value of this recent addition to the literature, therefore, is probably due less to its content than to its authorship.
Reviewed by James O'Gara
In accepting his party's nomination for the Presidency, John F. Kennedy told the Democratic convention delegates: "I hope that no American, considering the really critical issues facing this country, will waste his franchise by voting either for me or against me solely on account of my religious affiliation." The hope was a noble one, but vain.
Reviewed by Annie Kriegel
At a time when Laborites and Socialists in France are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Front Populaire, there has arrived from America the first biography of Leon Blum to be written by a historian.
Norman Gall
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who had come to be Latin America's most feared and famous professional revolutionary, died this October on the southern fringe of the Amazon basin, in a jungle area of tortured ravines where a thousand streams make their way from the Andean highlands into the wild continental heartland below.
Selma Fraiberg
Konrad Lorenz has called it “the bond”—the enduring ties that unite members of a species in couples, in groups, and in complex social organizations.
Gershom Scholem
In order to understand the genius of a contemporary Hebrew writer such as S. Y. Agnon it is necessary first to consider the nature of the Hebrew language before it became, once again, a normal means of communication, a language of children playing in the street.
Maurice Goldbloom
On March 12, 1947, President Harry S. Truman asked Congress to aid Greece to preserve a “way of life . . . based upon the will of the majority and . . . distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.”
John Thompson
The polish writer Tadeusz Borowski was twenty-one years old and had just published his first poems when the Germans put him in a concentration camp, in 1943.
Robert Garis
I take the Chance of writing about Bergman's Persona so long after its first showing because this seems to me a movie there's no hurry about.
Jack Richardson
For many critics, the history of Western drama is viewed as a sort of socio-aesthetic revolution, whereby tragedy's marginal personae gradually edge kings, Fausts, and aristocratic lovers from center-stage so that room may be made for smaller passions, prose and theories of a natural action style.
Franz M. Oppenheimer
It is doubtful whether any of the great Victorian statesmen who made England the leading power in the 19th century could have passed a modern loyalty and security check.
Reviewed by Andrew Hacker
Reviewed by Shlomo Avineri
Reviewed by David T. Bazelon
1967
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