Redemption Through Politics

"For me--though I would imagine that much the same would be true for anyone who has been living with at least some degree of intellectual alertness through the polemical agitations of this highly politicized era--the experience of reading Gershom Scholem's 'The Holiness of Sin' (p.41) was rather like having an amplified carillon implanted inside my head." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Gershom Scholem in the current issue.

Criticism & Identity

Author's Puzzlement

The Black Panthers

Radicals: Right, Left, & Center

The Urban Crisis (Cont'd)

Taking Issue

Judging the Chicago Trial

Julius Hoffman, Thomas Foran, William Kunstler, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin--these are, like Spiro Agnew, household names we owe to the benighted summer of 1968, though we have acquired them gradually since. We could do without them, but we can't.

The Holiness of Sin

An excerpt from a book by Gershom Scholem on Sabbatai Zevi and his followers.

Crime & the Liberal Audience

A frenzied and often acrimonious campaign seems to have produced election results that on the whole are moderate, conventional, and reasonable. Though there are good grounds for optimism in the 1970 election returns, there is also the danger of drawing false inferences.

Land Without Jews

The Republic of Haiti was a land without Jews except in myth and memory. There was no congregation and no cemetery, but there were a few visitors.

The Aristocrat in Local Politics

Most of us were told long ago that the old-time city politician, his status built on jobs for election captains and Thanksgiving baskets for the needy, had slipped, mastodon-like, into extinction. The New Deal and subsequent social legislation had allegedly rendered him useless. Yet the systems do not work perfectly in every case; perhaps not even in any case.

Three Easy Pieces

Robert Dupea, the alienated hero of "Five Easy Pieces," was a concert pianist, and has become an oil rigger. Among the various questions which may occur to you while watching the film are: Why has he dropped out? From what is he alienated.

The Rape of Tamar, by Dan Jacobson

One danger is that Dan Jacobson's new novel will be taken by those who do not know his earlier books as a costume drama or a laboriously researched period piece.

You Might As Well Live, by John Keats

Freud said there were no jokes and, as usual, wasn't kidding. One likes to think that this time out he was wrong, but in the case of Dorothy Parker, at any rate, the remark is deadly accurate.

The Wineskin and the Wizard, by Michael Selzer; Zionism Reconsidered, edited by Michael Selzer

The astonishing Mr. Selzer is at it again. Three years ago he presented us with a modest volume entitled "The Aryanization of the Jewish State," in which he sought to demonstrate that the State of Israel was the creation of a small but determined band of anti-Semitic conspirators.

Words for a Deaf Daughter, by Paul West

What can you say of a man who writes a book celebrating the deafness of his own child? Or of a culture that accepts and applauds such a book on its own terms? This book and its reception assume the kind of inversion of values we slide over from familiarity and from the fear of being thought unsophisticated.

The Tribe of the Wicked Son

"No one knows how many Jews either belong to or actively support or lazily acquiesce in the attitudes of 'the party of revolution,' as Walter Laqueur (p. 38) calls what in its contemporary American guise is better known by the more appropriate name of The Movement." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Walter Laqueur in the current issue.

Women's Lib & the Liberated Woman

Clarifications

Revolutionism & the Jews:1 - New York and Jerusalem

Concerning the participation of Jews, or lapsed Jews, in left-wing politics during the last century, two basic facts stand out: the prominent role they have played at one time or another, and their subsequent disappearance from positions of influence and command. The prominence of Jews in today's New Left, after they deserted or were squeezed out of the Old Left, is a phenomenon open to more than one interpretation.

Revolutionism & the Jews:2 - Appropriating the Religious Tradition

The still growing infatuation with ritual, mysticism, and the occult is sometimes dissociated from political activity, in other cases curiously intertwined with political protest. Among Jews the new vogue of exotic traditions has had the peculiar effect of giving an unexpected cachet to Judaism.

Revolutionism & the Jews:3 - The Role of the Intellectual

It is notoriously difficult to frame a definition of "intellectuals" that will serve for all times and all issues, but let me suggest a working one: Intellectuals are people who make a living from ideas, and are in varying degrees directly influenced by ideas.

The Future of the University

No one surveying the academic scene today can conclude other than that the American university is in an exceedingly precarious position.

The Pornography Caper

Presidential commissions, as Elizabeth B. Drew once put it in the Atlantic, are often "self-inflicted hotfoots." The tangled story of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography serves as a paradigmatic example of the truth of this observation.

Musical Wastes

There was once a handy mode of argument available to those who felt the need to be positive about the achievements of the American theater.

An Aesthete at the Movies

I encountered Parker Tyler for the first time back in the very late 40's (either in 1948 or '49) when he came to Columbia to deliver a lecture on the artist as a movie character in both the literal and colloquial sense.

Nixon Agonistes, by Garry Wills

Attacks on "liberalism" are nothing new in contemporary America. The neo-conservative heresies of a few years ago have become almost the cliches of current radicalism.

The Voice that is Great Within Us, edited by Hayden Carruth

Anthologizing is a luckless game, and one to be avoided by all men blessed with sanity and precarious good taste. Nothing, at any rate, exposes bad taste quite so tellingly as an editorial mistake in the relative emphasis or selection of poets for an anthology.

Jews and Freemasons in Europe: 1723-1939, by Jacob Katz

This book suffers from a highly inappropriate title. Viewed as a study of Jews and Freemasons in Europe, it would be inadequate and indeed misleading; but substitute "Germany" for "Europe" and many of its faults drop away.

The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh

This book runs to over a thousand pages and weighs slightly over three-and-a-half pounds. It could have been contained, for all of the meat that is in it, within a less ponderous package.

Adversaries or Critics?

"Daniel P. Moynihan (p. 41) is right, of course: the attitudes of the adversary culture have more and more come to influence the way in which the daily press, the news weeklies, and the television networks report on public affairs." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Daniel P. Moynihan in the current issue.

The Case of the “New York Review”

Crisis-Mongering

Albert Speer: Two Views

The German Left

The Presidency & the Press

As his years in Washington came to an end, Harry S. Truman wrote a friend: "I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time."

“Worthy Editor . . .” Selections from the Bintel Brief

The "Bintel Brief" ["A Bundle of Letters"] has been in existence since 1906, when the editors of the "Jewish Daily Forward"--the largest and most influential Yiddish daily in America--first opened its pages to inquiries from its readers. The letters below, along with the original replies from the "Foward's" editors, span the years 1906-1938.

Sexism in the Head

There is a point in life when every woman is a feminist. Generally it's in the college years when ideas have more glamour and excitement than they ever will have again, or in the first years out on a job, which teach the truth of feminist books and pamphlets.

The Advocate

Dorothy Rabinowitz here presents the third in a series of portraits of professions.

Beyond Particularism: On Ethical Culture & the Reconstructionists

The intellectual history of modern Jewry is singularly repetitive. As early as the 18th century, West European Jewish intellectuals defined the basic problem of retaining Jewish identity in a world both attractive and at the same time manifesting varying degrees of hostility.

Bunuel's Art

I've now had occasion in two of my last three appearances in "Commentary" to mention the work of Luis Buiuel as a mark by which to measure the shortcomings of those films under discussion.

Crime in America, by Ramsey Clark

One of the major political and intellectual problems of the 1960's was to find and defend a constructive, responsible position on the issue of predatory crime, a position that recognized the gravity of the problem without feeding the hysteria about it and that offered approaches which avoided either shrill demands or blind self-destructiveness.

Crisis in the Classroom, by Charles Silberman

Charles E. Silberman's big book has been received with pretty general cries of hosanna.

Mark Twain: An American Prophet, by Maxwell Geismar

The Mark Twain controversy is a dispute about America.

God's First Love, by Friedrich Heer

Obscurity of aim and a somewhat vexing discursiveness combine with other literary lapses--surplus detail, a tendency to proof-by-quotation, excessive citation--to render difficult an objective assessment of this work by Friedrich Heer.

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe

The Leonard Bernsteins' evening with the Black Panthers was not an event parallel to the draining away of moral authority in the French monarchy under Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette during the last days of the ancient regime.

Speak of the Devil

"In the playful spirit of Milton Himmelfarb's piece on the movement to limit population growth (p. 37), let us imagine for a moment that the Devil really exists." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Milton Himmelfarb in the current issue.

The Uses of Pain

American Jews

French Jews

Sociology

The Free Speech Movement

Ethical Culture

The Scranton Report

A Plague of Children

Murder is not the best analogy for the evil of too many children. Plague may be a better one. Both childbirth and plague are biological phenomena, and society entrusts the management of both to the medical profession.

Rediscovering American Labor

It has been almost two decades since the labor movement went out of fashion among liberal and radical intellectuals. Today it is apparent that something of a change is taking place.

Notes of a Substitute Teacher

The pickings in my more wonted fields (the arts) had gotten slimmer and slimmer. One day when they seemed to have reached a final hard zero I came to a decision: I would offer myself as a substitute high-school teacher. Why not?

Telling “Truth” to Power

It is more than twenty-five years now since the United States, emerging from what many then still hoped would prove a short-term military intervention in European and Asian affairs, confronted the wreckage of the pre-war international system behind which the Republic had been sheltered from its infancy.

The Figure of the Dybbuk

The figure of the revenant stalks through Romantic literature. He is a presence not to be put by.

Four-Party Race?

In a recent syndicated column, Roscoe Drummond--articulating in public what many have been saying in private--suggests the possibility of a four-party race in 1972, similar to that of 1948.

Shakespeare and Beckett

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is one of the few plays by Shakespeare that appear to have no definite source.

Equal Time

"Alex in Wonderland" is about a crisis in the life and art of a young film director in Hollywood, searching for a new project and life style with the success of his first film just behind him.

Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, by James MacGregor Burns

Is there really such a thing as contemporary history? Or does journalism stop and history begin when the concepts and emotions of the participants are no longer shared by those who write and read about them?

Cocteau, by Francis Steegmuller; Professional Secrets: An Autobiography of Jean Cocteau, writings selected by Robert Phelps

In 1965, two years after Jean Cocteau's death, a splendid exhibition of his life and times was mounted at the Musee Jacquemart-Andre in Paris, presenting an unforgettable display of more than half a century of art, literature, and greasepaint.

New York Jews and the Quest for Community, by Arthur A. Goren

Earlier in the century, spanning the years 1908 to 1922, a curious and rather high-minded experiment in local community organization was carried out in New York under the initiative of some of the city's most prominent Jewish residents.

The Rebirth of Europe, by Walter Laqueur

This, for many of us, was lived history, and to read about it in Walter Laqueur's excellent book brings sharply back to mind what that aftermath of an apocalypse was like.

Good-bye Union Square, by Albert Halper

Albert Halper's cool account of his experiences in the literary and radical milieu of the 1930's should not be judged as a picture of the times.

A Note on Vietnamization

"Nathan Glazer (p. 33) tells us that he is embarrassed to add to the millions upon millions of words which have already been written on Vietnam. I too find myself embarrassed, if for slightly different reasons." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Nathan Glazer in the current issue.

Judging the Chicago Trial

Film Buffs & Critics

The Councilman

Anthologizing

Relevance & Sin

Judaism & Politics

Meeting Jews

Law Enforcement, Crime, & Public Policy

Vietnam: The Case for Immediate Withdrawal

One is embarrassed to add new words on Vietnam. Already there have been millions, and despite the good sense so many of them have shown, they have as yet, after all these years, been unable to sway the American government, through three successive administrations, to desist from a disastrous policy which can only be carried out by cruel and inhuman methods.

A Look at Israel

It is impossible, of course, to experience Israel as one might, or even might not, experience any other place on earth.

Inventing the Young

There are two dominant imaginings of the young--as victims and as visionaries. More often than not, the two images coalesce.

Covenant A Story

A story.

The City in Literature

Simplicity, at least in literature, is a complex idea. Pastoral poetry, which has been written for more than two thousand years and may therefore be supposed to have some permanent appeal, takes as its aim to make simplicity complex.

Scenes from a “Special” Classroom

The first time I saw the classroom that was later to become mine, none of the children was in it, and so it was empty of what made it unusual.

Founders & Fur Traders

On September 30, 1847, when the founding father of Montgomery, Alabama, cradle city of the Southern Confederacy, had reached his ninetieth year, he was visited by a reporter for the Montgomery "Flag and Advertiser," Albert James Pickett, who was later to write the official history of the State of Alabama.

Of a Fire on the Moon, by Norman Mailer

In a sense, this book was the inevitable next move for a writer who, having pitted himself against the likes of the late Sonny Liston, the Pentagon, Lyndon Johnson, and the mayor of Chicago, found himself running out of sufficiently testing opposition.

Paganism-Christianity-Judaism, by Max Brod

In his essay, "Apologetic Thinking" (1923) Franz Rosenzweig noted the peculiar predicament of the Jewish apologist.

Families Against the City; The Uses of Disorder, by Richard Sennett

Richard Sennett, whose works and ideas have come in for enthusiastic attention in recent months, would seem to propound a thesis whose essence had already been broadcast--and with far greater succinctness--by the Beatles in "Yesterday."

The Beautiful People's Beauty Book, by Luciana Pignatelli

Beauty manuals have existed in Western culture for centuries, ever since Ovid's "Ars Amatoria" and probably before.

A Percentage of the Take, by Walter Goodman

The Marcus case broke in December 1967, with headlines announcing that James Marcus, Mayor Lindsay's Commissioner of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity, had resigned under fire.

Seducer of the Innocent

"The distinction Samuel McCracken (p. 43) draws between the drugs of habit (tobacco, alcohol, heroin) and the drugs of belief (marijuana, mescaline, LSD) is useful and illuminating but I wonder whether the drugs of belief are quite so free of habit-forming properties as it is often supposed." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Samuel McCracken in the current issue.

Jewish Radicalism in America

Preventive Detention in Israel

To Be Sure

The Drugs of Habit & the Drugs of Belief

If any man doubt the question of drugs* to be increasingly confused, even bizarre, let him recall that between January 9 and January 13, 1971 the Algiers pad of the Reverend Dr. Timothy Leary was the scene of a bust staged by the local office of the Black Panther party.

Doing History

Some years ago, Ved Mehta wrote for the New Yorker magazine a series of articles on the practice of history. They were based on the views expressed to Mr. Mehta by several eminent British historians, and reported with what accuracy who knows.

Sensibility in the 60's

Each decade--we think now of decades or generations as the units of social time--has its hallmarks. That of the 1960's was a political and cultural radicalism.

Agnon's Last Word

Anyone for whom novels have mattered must surely at times be troubled by the sort of doubt Mary McCarthy raised some years ago, in one her most intelligent and disquieting, essays, "The Fact in Fiction."

The Young Weizmann

What kind of book tells us most about history--the straight "objective" story from A to Z, or the book with fragmentary but living echoes of the past, where the historian keeps in the background and we are free to build up our own response to the voices we hear?

Rio Lobotomy

Andre Hodeir, the French music critic, once wrote an essay entitled "Why Do They Age So Badly?" on the all but universal artistic decline of good and even great veteran jazzmen.

Military Justice Is to Justice as Military Music Is to Music, by Robert Sherrill

The uproar about the court-martial of Lieutenant Calley--an uncomplicated conviction of premeditated murder on evidence which fully supported the verdict--shows the depth of the public's interest, and also of its ignorance, in matters of military justice.

Khrushchev Remembers, translated and edited by Strobe Talbot

When the young Karl Marx first extolled the dictatorship of the proletariat in the heady days of the pre-revolutionary 1840's, he doubtless had in mind a state of affairs much different from the rule of Nikita Khrushchev a hundred and twenty years later.

The Goy, by Mark Harris

When a book by a writer with a large following drops into the void, one wonders why.

A White House Diary, by Lady Bird Johnson

No longer, if ever it was, a presence in our public life, the voice of a lady is, evidently, still marked by certain authenticating notes: it is still just perceptibly chilly to one's enemies, gracious to one's inferiors, loyal to one's clan.

Civilisation, by Kenneth Clark

The word "civilization" seems to have made its first appearance almost two hundred years ago, in 1772 to be precise, when Boswell suggested to Dr. Johnson that he use the term to denote the opposite of barbarism.

Repentance and a Stand

"Thinking about the situation in response to which men like Paul Goodman (p. 39) and Erich Heller (p. 47) have been driven to make the case for literature, I found myself wryly remembering that once, as a practicing literary critic, I wrote the following sentence: 'A literary critic ought to regard literature as an end in itself.'" Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Paul Goodman, and an article by Erich Heller, both of which are in the current issue.

The Press and the President

Lindbergh

Research and a Report

The Good Old Days

An Apology for Literature

Statements in literary works are taken seriously and men of letters are invited to confer with experts as if they had something useful to contribute. They are not scientific statements. They are grounded in something, but in what?

Literature & Political Responsibility Apropos the “Letters of Thomas Mann”

Literature and Political Responsibility--a couple that have acquired some notoriety in the history of thought both by their mutual attraction and their ceaseless quarrels. Indeed, the two have been married and divorced so often that the invitation to dwell with them is unlikely to be received with a sense of relaxed serenity.

The Azhdanov Tailors A Story

A story.

Memoirs of a Fraternity Man

A memoir.

East Is West?

There will soon be no earthly reason why travel should not be done on a simulator. And space travel, it appears, might quite possibly be better done by unmanned craft, until, paradoxically, when we have transported enough of the earth's environmental conditions, the package-tourist may become persuaded that the planets are worth a visit.

A Modern Master

What characterizes masters of social thought? Surely it is not alone, or even primarily, the quality of justness in their perceptions, the capacity to be right.

Ibsen's Nora & Ours

Occasionally life provides complementary moments of experience, making it seem as though existence were not after all simply a collection of random events upon which only an unsettled mind would think of imposing order.

Why Can't They Be Like Us? America's White Ethnic Groups, by Andrew Greeley

Andrew Greeley is one of the few sociologists who, for several years, has emphasized the continuing importance of white ethnicity in American society.

The Star of Redemption, by Franz Rosenzweig

To anyone even remotely interested in 20th-century Jewish thought the name of Franz Rosenzweig has long been familiar, as are the outlines of his extraordinary life.

The Imperial Self, by Quentin Anderson

Quentin Anderson's "essay in American literary and cultural history," a superb and outrageous book, sees our current countercultural rabblement as having started from Emerson.

Anti-Semitism Without Jews, by Paul Lendvai

In a recent review of Paul Lendvai's new book, Vladimir Dedijer, the author of an idealized official biography of Tito and a true "internationalist," informs us that the real anti-Semites in the world today are the "court Jews from Vienna, Moscow, Harvard, and Washington who despise their brothers who preach and fight for social equality and justice."

Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938, by Lawrance Thompson

Imagine a famous poet, revered by the public for his wisdom and humanity, who attracts to him a young academic disciple; imagine that the disciple learns that behind his serene facade the poet is a vain hypocrite. It's a good story; Henry James might have been able to use it to advantage.

A Certain Anxiety

"In the last few years some of us--often to our own surprise and usually against our own will but at the ultimately irresistible command of instinct and judgment--have begun to feel a certain anxiety about the Jewish position in America." This is the text of an address originally delivered last spring by Norman Podhoretz.

Public & Private Morality

The Use of Statistics

Christianity and Anti-Semitism

Trade Unions

Mark Twain & The Crtics

FDR

Two Movements

What's Left?

Unless one experiences a sudden conversion, one of those emotional thunderclaps after which the world changes color before one's eyes, the process of shifting one's attitudes toward familiar institutions and policies hardly strikes one's attention more noticeably than the gradual process by which, we are told, the cells of the body replace themselves.

Crusade

A novella.

Stars and Celebrities

Long before anyone saw it on film, it was a famous scene: the actor Rip Torn, without obvious provocation, attacking Norman Mailer with a hammer, taking him by surprise and, in the subsequent wrestle, getting his ear bitten by the startled writer. Mailer is strongly committed to what, for want of a better term, we might call improvisatory movie-making.

Berkeley: A Tale of One City

Gaining fame seven years ago for being the birthplace of American student militancy, Berkeley this year has come close to setting another American first.

“Never Again!”

"Never Again!" must have been used as a slogan long before nie wieder Krieg! was popular in German, between Kaiser and Fuehrer. Among Jews the currency of the slogan seems to date from the anxious weeks before the 1967 war, when Israel was threatened with destruction.

Reading Robert Lowell

Writing in 1944, from his perch atop the indomitable sway of the New Criticism and with a view of all its shining academic minions receding into the distance, Mr. Allen Tate, in a short prefatory note to "Land of Unlikeliness," announced that "there is now other poetry today quite like this." And he was right.

The Reputation of Eric Rohmer

With "Claire's Knee," one begins to see more clearly precisely what Eric Rohmer was up to in "My Night at Maud's," and what the morality consists of in his "Six Moral Tales."

The Many Americas Shall Be One, by Harrison E. Salisbury; Out of Place in America, by Peter Schrag; U.S. Journal, by Calvin Trillin; Listening to America, by Bill Moyers; Yazoo, by Willie Morris

Off they go, our journalists, on their endless quest for America. Thousands of them, craftsmen and hacks, a few poets, surprisingly few propagandists, puffed-up TV commentators, moonlighting academics, novelists between novels, newspapermen doing a job, celebrities out to see or be seen.

The German Dictatorship, by Karl Dietrich Bracher; The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany, by Gerhard L. Weinberg

Karl Dietrich Bracher, professor of political science and contemporary history at the University of Bonn and the author of major studies on the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and on the Nazi seizure of power, is one of the new generation of German historians who in recent years have come to confront their national past without evasion or self-pity.

The Unknown Mayhew, by Eileen Yeo and E.P. Thompson

The historian who does not subscribe to the creed of "relevance," who believes, indeed, that the best history is written without thought of contemporary relevance, is embarrassed by the occasions when history seems to be all too relevant.

The Workings of Military Justice

On Choosing Life

Jules and Jack

By now, just about everyone has heard of the folkloric salesman whose reaction to Death of a Salesman is reported to have been, "Well, that New England territory never was any good." From as valid, if off-center, a point of view, the film of Jules Feiffer's "Little Murders" might be taken as one long, belated Procaccino-for-mayor commercial.

Authenticity and the Modern Unconscious

One of the most salient characteristics of the culture of our time is the intense, we might say obsessive, concern with authenticity as a quality of the personal life and as a criterion of art.

The Limits of Social Policy

There is a general sense that we face a crisis in social policy, and in almost all its branches. Whether this crisis derives from the backwardness of the United States in social policy generally, the revolt of the blacks, the fiscal plight of the cities, the failure of national leadership, the inherent complexity of the problems, or the weakening of the national fiber, and what weight we may ascribe to these and other causes, are no easy questions to settle.

Building Jerusalem

For sheer scale of construction, there hasn't been anything like it since Herod's time. In the alleys of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City it could almost be Herod's time, though not in the center of town, where new high-rise office and apartment buildings have punctured a series of holes in the city's once lowly skyline.

How Jewish Quotas Began

American Jews have an important stake in the nation's system of higher education. For second- and third-generation Jews college was the major channel of upward mobility, and among young Jews today college attendance is practically universal.

On Ford Madox Ford

Arthur Mizener's biography of Ford Madox Ford has been accused of most of the failings of the exhaustive modern biography, especially lack of sympathy.

The Israelis: Founders and Sons, by Amos Elon

In the flood of recent works on Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East, Amos Elon's The Israelis stands out as a uniquely valuable book--valuable for its searching portrait of the classical Zionist character and the temper of Israel today.

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago, by Mike Royko

Until not too long ago, the general view of Chicago's longtime mayor, Richard J. Daley, was of a New Dealish liberal. But all this is past history now.

The Obituary Book, by Alden Whitman

Progress always dazzles, especially when we suddenly realize that something has improved without having previously been aware of its need for improvement.

Jesus and Israel, by Jules Isaac

It has been the fairly typical experience of many a cultured European Jew in the modern age to have discovered Judaism only on the way back from Western Christian civilization; to have made acquaintance of the Old Testament through the filter of the New.

The Underground Man, by Ross Macdonald

Not since W. S. Gilbert brought to jolly culmination the Victorian obsession with children who somehow mislay--or are mislaid by--their parents, has a writer been as successful with entertainments revolving around what might loosely be termed the Oedipal theme as Ross Macdonald.

Doomsday Fears & Modern Life

"The kind of apocalyptic thinking to which Samuel McCracken (p. 61) directs his acerbic attention is, as apocalyptic thinking goes, a relatively mild and optimistic variety." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Samuel McCracken in the current issue.

The Question of Drugs

Radicalism among the Young

Action Painting

The New Journalism

The Dubbuk-Archetype

Civilization

An Absolute Pacifist

America after Vietnam

The President of the United States of America, though he is not a man known for a reflective turn of mind, has lately been directing his thoughts to "sad stories of the death of kings" and indeed, in Mr. Nixon's case, to the death of entire empires.

From an Israeli Diary

A diary of Walter Laqueur's recent visit to Israel.

Apocalyptic Thinking

An apocalyptic revelation might in theory be a crashing bore but all apocalypses worth attention rival the original one of St. John in scope and surprise value.

Custom and Costume A Story

A story.

Literature and Crisis

Children of a dark century, we tend to look into our literature as in a glass darkly. The glass itself may mirror more faithfully the twisted confusion of faces that modern reality has assumed.

Family Fever Chart

The family was a social invention of our ancestors in the dim and shadowy past.

The Real Grandees

An aura of special glamour--all those exotic-sounding names perhaps, Rodriguez, Carvalho, Lopes, Pereira Mendes--seems to attach itself to the Sephardic Jews, that segment of Jewry which traces its origins to medieval Spain and Portugal and among whose ancestors can be found advisers to royalty, distinguished scholars, scientists, statesmen, and adventurers who flourished in the Iberian peninsula.

Kent State, by James A. Michener

Based on exhaustive local interviews and minutest scrutiny of all available evidence, Kent State was intended to be--and in a way perhaps is--the definitive account of those events which led directly to the deaths by shooting of four students in 1970.

MF, by Anthony Burgess; West of the Rockies, by Daniel Fuchs; A Cry of Absence, by Madison Jones; Losing Battles, by Eudora Welty; Birds of America, by Mary McCarthy

There are times when the print just stays right on the paper, when the words are nothing but words.

Jews and Blacks, by Ben Halpern

Ben Halpern, a gifted intellectual spokesman in this country for Labor Zionism, has written a book that reads with difficulty, sometimes irritation, but is nevertheless important.

The Nightmare Decade, by Fred J. Cook

"There is a new generation of young Americans, many of whom have only the vaguest ideas about Joseph R. McCarthy and what the McCarthyism of the 1950's represented." Here, unwittingly encapsulated in the opening sentence of Fred J. Cook's "The Nightmare Decade," is evidence of the book's major drawback.

Liberty & the Intellectuals

"There can be no question that Norman Gall (p. 45) is right in saying that the 'literary reputation' of the Cuban Revolution has been very seriously damaged in the past year or two and that this in itself constitutes an important political event, quite apart from whatever changes in the actual policies of the Castro regime may or may not have provoked it." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Norman Gall in the current issue.

History & Historians

College Days

Intellectuals & Ethnics

“A Certain Anxiety”

Travel Writing

In Appreciation

Block That Cult!

"Wild Rovers." William Holden. The waning of the old style cowboy cum bank-robber. The heroes bathing together, and affectionately dallying with Mexican whores. A shameless plagiarism of "The Wild Bunch," you might think, though the connoisseur will note a touch of "Butch Cassidy," too, in its spinelessly pretty photography and the first part's labored cuteness.

How Castro Failed

A Spanish colonial governor of Cuba once said, in the midst of a series of 19th-century slave revolts, that the island could be easily-governed with a fiddle and a fighting cock. No Cuban ruler of the past century has borne out this old aphorism more fully than Fidel Castro Ruz.

Confessions of a Visiting Professor

Of course, we are all anti-Americans nowadays. So what is there to confess? What is there to say that hasn't already been said ad nauseam?

Walking Distance A Story

A story.

Malraux's Fate

If only Chateaubriand had visited Napoleon in exile on St. Helena, what a book would have resulted! Unlike General de Gaulle, the Emperor was unlucky in not having his free and intimate table talk conveyed to posterity by a great artist. Andre Malraux, thinking on these lines without false modesty, did not intend to miss his opportunity and in his most recent book he gives his own recreated or transfigured version of his last meeting with the General at Colombey.

Counting Jews

Travel has been, as we know, a constant, if not always voluntary feature of Jewish life. And the voluntary voyages were generally either business trips or pilgrimages to the Holy Land.

The (Freudian) Congress of Vienna

In July of 1971, the psychoanalysts returned to Vienna thirty-three years after Freud had left his native city. They came for the 27th International Psychoanalytical Congress.

American Education, by Lawrence A. Cremin

Whether or not the crisis of our time can properly be called a revolution, most people agree that its nature is cultural.

Jewish Ceremonial Art and Religious Observance, by Abram Kanof; The Horned Moses in Medieval Thought, by Ruth Mellinkoff

Of the production of art books in recent years there seems to be no end. Among their constantly growing number, a small enclave has developed of books devoted specifically to "Jewish art," or, to those aspects of art considered likely to be of interest to the Jewish book-buying public.

Bryan by Louis W. Koenig

Louis Koenig's biography of William Jennings Bryan is more than the effort to rehabilitate a man; it is a struggle to restore the integrity of our political history.

Los Angeles, by Reyner Banham

The problem has always been rationalizing one's basic, and essentially visceral, liking for the place. I mean, it's just not done expressing affection for Los Angeles, a preference for it over uptight San Francisco.

On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover and Other Stories, by Tess Slesinger

The tick of domestic conscience, the blank reassurance, the falling back into routine, belongs to Mrs. Ramsay in "To the Lighthouse." Most of Tess Slesinger's people feel the same kind of pull from the mundane, and the recording voice, too, is remarkably similar.

Liberty & the Liberals

"At first sight the change Joseph W. Bishop, Jr. (p. 50) tells us has been taking place in the American Civil Liberties Union looks like the same process of politicization which so many other organizations have undergone during the past few years." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Joseph W. Bishop, Jr. in the current issue.

The Unconscious

Of Cities & Suits

The Gospel Jesus

The Light Touch

Viewing “Little Murders”

The JDL

Social Policy

Philosopher's Argument

Jesus on Broadway

It seems that Jesus Christ Superstar is not destined to be a landmark in the struggle of Christian revivalism.

The Specter of Weimar

Weimar Germany haunts democracies in trouble. The United States is in trouble today and, as a result, the question has arisen whether we are destined to suffer the fate of Weimar Germany.

Politics & ACLU

Within the community of liberals the American Civil Liberties Union--now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary--has long occupied a place comparable to that of Dwight D. Eisenhower among Republicans. But the Union has impact and influence far out of proportion to its size and its tangible resources.

The Saga of Great Men A Story

A story.

Jews Under Communism

Since 1967, an "anti-Zionist" campaign of almost unprecedented dimensions has been waged by the Communist propaganda apparatus in the Soviet Union and in several countries of Eastern Europe. Even Jews in Hungary and Rumania, who have so far remained immune from official persecution, are today living in fear of a new wave of official "anti-Zionism."

Of Fish and People

For a Justice of the United States Supreme Court there is the side of people and there is the side of fish, and to be on one side is to be against the other. Justice William O. Douglas is on the side of the fish.

Forster as Homosexual

Possibly the most famous sentence in Forster's fiction is the one that comes out of the blue at the start of Chapter Five of "The Longest Journey": "Gerald died that afternoon." The sentence is there with no preparation whatever--no novelistic "plant," no hidden tracks laid out in advance.

Towards a Rational Power Policy, by Neil Fabricant and Robert M. Hallman; Power Generation and Environmental Change, edited by David A. Berkowitz and Arthur M. Squires

These two books, with similar if not interchangeable titles, cover the same subject but resemble each other as little as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" resembles Frederick Olmsted's "Journey Through the Seabord Slave States." My analogy is more than whimsical.

The Unfashionable Human Body, by Bernard Rudofsky

The subject of clothing is hardly ever discussed seriously by serious writers except for certain Frenchmen, some of whom have thereby helped to promote and maintain the French reputation for frivolity rather than the subject's reputation for weight.

James Madison, by Ralph Ketcham

James Madison, framer and interpreter of the Constitution, is universally, and rightly, regarded as the primary theoretician of American pluralist democracy.

In Praise of Yiddish, by Maurice Samuel

Jews, it may be said, are cultural universalists par excellence; even when residing within their own linguistic jurisdictions--Yiddish in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, Hebrew in present-day Israel--they have always been, and remain, avid consumers of the published products of Western civilization.