Crime & the American Dream

"Joseph Epstein's piece on Capone, Lansky, and the Bonannos (p. 46) has set me to wondering what it is about gangsters that fascinates so many people, including myself." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Joseph Epstein in the current issue.

Apocalyptics

Discrmination & Quotas

On the Sephardim

Making Communities

The Fall of Europe?

Never in its history has Europe suffered from so large and perceptible a discrepancy between economic strength on the one hand, and political and military impotence on the other.

Quotas by Any Other Name

In March 1971, the San Francisco School Board decided to eliminate a number of administrative positions. The school board formally established several criteria for deselection, including "the racial and ethnic needs" of students.

Browsing in Gangland

The best thing ever written about crime in America was written not by a criminologist, not by an investigative reporter, not by a novelist, but by a movie critic.

Wiretaps & National Security

During its current term, the Supreme Court will be hearing argument on whether warrantless "national-security" wiretaps are constitutional. How many national-security taps and "bugs" are currently in operation, and against what sorts of persons, is a well-guarded secret, but bits of information that are slowly emerging raise some disturbing questions.

A Blow Struck for the Revolution

A memoir.

Discords in the Music of Time

Men are received at their own valuation. By undertaking a chronicle of the last fifty years, by drawing out the tale to ten volumes, each of them, however, slim as a wafer, and by the cultivation of an artificial prose, in which sentences are decelerated under the grip of subordinate clauses, Anthony Powell has claimed to be the British Proust.

Journey of a Poet

Exactly fifty-two years ago Jacob Glatstein published a sparkling piece of impudence called "A Shnel-Loif iber der Idisher Poezie" (roughly, "A Quick Tour of Yiddish Poetry"), in which he slashed away at his poetic elders with the recklessness of a young man determined to incite the anger of those he most admires.

Youth; Manhood; Middle Age

Some time in late 1965, I was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge by car when the driver turned to me and remarked of the record being played on the radio (the Rolling Stones's "Under My Thumb") that it was the greatest song of its genre. What was its genre?

Kennedy Justice, by Victor S. Navasky

Most studies of political leadership, and virtually all studies of Presidential leadership, suffer from the egocentric fallacy-namely, the assumption that governance consists chiefly, if not entirely, of the confrontation between a personality and an issue which is resolved in a way that expresses some combination of the style of the former and the merits of the latter.

Israelis and Jews, by Simon Herman

Israeli sociology and social psychology have constantly sought to emphasize the universal rather than the particular.

The Medvedev Papers, by Zhores A. Medvedev; A Question of Madness, by Zhores A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev

The Medvedev brothers were born in 1925, the twin sons of a philosophy professor, a Communist party member who died in one of Stalin's prison camps.

American Medicine and the Public Interest, by Rosemary Stevens

Among the popular subjects of the past several publishing seasons, up there with the Vietnam crisis, the black crisis, the youth crisis, and the crisis of sexual technology, has been the American health-care crisis.

Edward Hopper, by Lloyd Goodrich

In 1829, William Cullen Bryant concluded a sonnet to his friend Thomas Cole who was about to set off for Europe, warning the painter against allowing his American vision to be darkened by the glittering ruins and visions he would be encountering.

“Is It Good for the Jews?”

"Although he scarcely touches on the implications of 'affirmative action' for Jews, Paul Seabury's article (p. 38), especially taken in conjunction with Earl Raab's 'Quotas by Any Other Name' in the January 'Commentary' has persuaded me that the question, 'Is it good for the Jews?' has not quite reached the end of its ancient career as a useful guide to thought." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Paul Seabury in the current issue.

Cuba & the Revolution

Moviemakers

Malraux

Yiddish Scholarship

Admiration

HEW & the Universities

The middle-range bureaucrats staffing the HEW Civil Rights office, under its Director, J. Stanley Pottinger, now scent sexism more easily than racism in the crusade to purify university hiring practices.

Public Facilities-A Memoir

A memoir.

On Intoxication

Perhaps the best way to approach the subject of intoxication is to note that the word "whiskey" in its Gaelic derivation (uisgebeatha) meant exactly what whiskey ads have always implied: "water of life."

Emancipation, Enlightenment & All That

The history of European Jewry over the past two hundred years offers an intriguing perspective on the whole confusing phenomenon of modernity partly because the Jews lurched into the modern world from their protracted medieval existence with a suddenness that was bound to be unsettling for all concerned.

Community Control Revisited

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Demonstration District is by now a symbol of the movement for community control of public schools.

Letter from Tel Aviv

The rains came late this year. Now, early in December, autumn abruptly drops and the air is pregnant with uncertainties, political and otherwise.

Ministering to Britain

There are two basic stereotypes of politicians, with a great many variations on each.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity, by B. F. Skinner

It is now familiar in the teaching and publishing world to be confronted by aroused and militant scientists who wish to turn their science to the uses of social reform.

Eleanor and Franklin, by Joseph P. Lash

Nothing in the American temper surpasses the claim that mystery makes upon our hearts, except perhaps our love of the obvious.

Without Marx or Jesus, by Jean-Francois Revel

To judge a book by a Frenchman that has "America" in its title by comparing it with Democracy in America is unfair.

There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America, by Frank Deford

Miss America is chosen every September in Atlantic City, and promptly sinks into oblivion so far as most of the nation is concerned.

In Bluebeard's Castle, by George Steiner

A phalanx of crucial topics, a tone of high-church gravity, a light sprinkle of multilingual erudition, a genteel stab at prophecy--it's easy to imagine the strong impression these lectures must have made when first delivered for the T.S. Eliot Memorial Foundation at the University of Kent.

School Integration & Liberal Opinion

"If Nathan Glazer (p. 39) is right--and I find his arguments entirely convincing--no benefit will accrue to anyone, whether white or black, from the requirement now apparently being established by the courts that no American public school shall have a black majority and that the student population of every school shall be racially balanced as far as possible in accordance with a specified mix." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Nathan Glazer in the current issue.

ACLU

Loneliness

Anti-Semitism

Psychoanalysis

Is Busing Necessary?

It is the fate of any social reform in the United States--perhaps anywhere--that, instituted by enthusiasts, men of vision, politicians, statesmen, it is soon put into the keeping of full-time professionals. This has two consequences.

He Said, She Said

In its efforts to redress sexual, social, political, economic, artistic, and religious inequalities, the new feminism has thrown into question all those institutions under whose auspices men and women through the centuries have sought to combine their lots or join their fates.

On Becoming a Jew

In the cathedral at Palma, on the island of Mallorca to which many Marranos fled from mainland Spain, I found Menorahs wrought in gold. Of course, there was no Jewish community in Palma. But there were Jewish traditions.

R. S. V. P.—A Story

A story.

The Sorrows of American-Jewish Poetry

American-Jewish literature, in English, began most inauspiciously with the verse of Emma Lazarus, whose intentions were noble, but who rarely rose even to the level of the English Romantic poet, Mrs. Felicia Hemans.

The New Pluralists

One thing that came out of the sense of all American things falling apart in the last few years was a new view of the so-called "Middle Americans."

Peckinpah & Kubrick: Fire & Ice

"Of directors to have emerged in the American film during the 1950's, Stanley Kubrick seems to me the most interesting."

Chance and Necessity, by Jacques Monod

Jacques Monod, director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and winner (with two colleagues, Andre Lwoff and Francois Jacob) of the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1965, calls our attention to the genius of Escherichia coli.

America at 1750, by Richard Hofstadter

In May 1969 Richard Hofstadter sent his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, the prospectus for a three-volume comprehensive history of the United States, extending from 1750 to the present.

The News Twisters, by Edith Efron

Early in October of last year a little-known publisher in Los Angeles released a book which, by the normal standards of American publishing, had only a modest future.

The American Idea of Success, by Richard M. Huber

It is hard now to imagine a time when this book would not have been timely, convinced as we are that to understand America one must first understand the American idea of success.

A Minor Cultural Event

B Y A journalistically happy coincidence, Edward Grossman's 'Henry James and the Sexual-Military Complex' (p. 37) appears at a time when James is, as it were, in the news again." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Edward Grossman in the current issue.

Electric Power

Fascism, Weimar, and America

Jews & Communism

Repression

Henry James & the Sexual-Military Complex

"The Bostonians," according to its author a "very American tale," was published in 1886, but the time in which the "tale" is set may be exactly one hundred years ago.

Does IQ Matter?

The last four or five years have not exactly been years of glory for American liberals. Some of the reasons for this like the war or the President-are ephemeral. At least one other, however--the depressing performance of recent liberal social programs--probably is not.

Russians vs. Arabs The Age of Disenchantment

The Soviet attitude toward the Middle East is a curiously ambivalent one.

Jews, Ethnics, and the American City

At a time when the plight of the American city engages so much of our attention--when scarcely a week can pass without the New York Times featuring a story about middle-class New Yorkers fleeing the metropolis to seek contentment in a New England village--it would also seem particularly appropriate to analyze the special relationship of the Jew to the American city.

Academic Freedom & the Franklin Case

The action of Stanford University in firing a tenured professor, H. Bruce Franklin, has received nationwide publicity. I think that the faculty tribunal did the right thing and that the cause of free speech on campuses, of academic freedom, and of civil liberties was advanced by their action and by the quality of their concern for the values of constitutionally-protected speech.

“Relevant” Shakespeare

In the jargon of our time, the word "relevant" has taken on a polemical connotation. In the cultural hagglings between those who idolize the present and themselves in it and those whose egos are coerced by tradition into modesty, relevance is almost always the line on which the battle is fixed.

Voyeur Voyant: A Portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, by Erika Ostrovsky

The year before his death in 1961 Celine claimed one achievement: it was to have succeeded in getting everybody to agree that "I'm the biggest bastard alive!"

The Ticket-Splitter, by Walter DeVries and Lance Tarrance, Jr.

Trends are news and continuity is not. Thus, even though there is far more stability than change in any polity, it is change and rumors of change which capture the headlines.

The Politics of Twentieth-Century Novelists, edited by George A. Panichas; Politics and Film, by Leif Furhammer and Folke Isaksson

Politics is relevant to art whenever the critic cares to make it relevant.

My Life, by Oswald Mosley

Forty years ago Oswald Mosley committed political suicide. In 1918 this dashing young baronet--descended from a long line of wealthy English gentry, boasting of a splendid war record, a fencer of international caliber--became a Conservative MP at the age of twenty-two.

Beyond ZPG

"Partly because I am much more skeptical than Samuel McCracken (p. 45) about the desirability of a stabilized population, I am, if possible, even more horrified than he is by the idea of empowering the state to decide how many children shall be born." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Samuel McCracken in the current issue.

The Pottinger Papers HEW, Affirmative Action & the Universities

On Quotas

More on ACLU

Forster's Statue

The Population Controllers

"I'll never have any children. Who'd want to bring one into this overpopulated world, anyway?" Thus spoke a child of our time some months ago, meeting the press after her conviction on a charge of abortion. Indeed, few of the people busy declaring emergencies these days have been as precise in telling us what the emergency requires us to do, few more likely to get a hearing outside their own proximate True Believers.

Americans in Israel

There are times when an American settler in Israel might think he was back in the 50's all over again. Suddenly everyone is talking about a house in the suburbs.

What to Do About Television

Television will not go away; it is embedded in the culture now, like frozen lasagna, golf carts, and sociology departments. Television has been so pervasive a presence in American society that one cannot imagine what American life would be like without it.

Sword of the Law

"Civil Libertarians Denounce Georgia Legislator for Urging Lynch Law." That headline was never printed, because the civil libertarians said nothing.

Liberalism and Purpose

Unpopular doctrines, even despised ones, have rarely lacked for defenders; for every heresy, there is a heretic. Contemporary liberalism, however, seems peculiarly without spokesmen, even though it is everywhere reviled and allegedly discredited.

Movie Musicals

Though I'm very fond of movie musicals, I rarely go to them; or perhaps I should say I rarely go because I'm very fond of them.

The Tenants, by Bernard Malamud

Malamud, a writer who has gained much in the past by taking risks, ventures onto particularly dangerous ground in The Tenants.

The Rivals: America and Russia since World War II, by Adam B. Ulam

Perseverance must surely rank high among the scholarly virtues that in recent years have fallen into dispute.

The End of the Modern Age, by Allen Wheelis

Once upon a time there was a man who wrote fantasies and parables and meditations that sometimes started once upon a time.

The Sensuous Woman, by “J.”; Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, by David Reuben; Any Woman Can!, by David Reuben

When it comes to sex, it makes a difference whose hands you are in, yet the democratization of sexual ambition has made us more and more promiscuous in the choice of our literary guides.

Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, by Daniel Hoffman

The long-standing quarrel between Edgar Allan Poe's disparagers and adulators no longer hinges on his alleged moral and psychological infirmities.

The Idea of a Common Culture

"Reading Robert Alter's 'A Fever of Ethnicity' (p. 68), I was struck by the relative coolness he displays toward the 'New Pluralism'--just as I was struck by a comparable reserve in a piece on the same subject by Harold R. Isaacs which appeared in our March issue. Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Robert Alter in the current issue.

Ethnics and Pluralists

Community Control

Jewish History

On Libraries

Government Surveillance

Asking the Questions

Affirmative Action (Cont'd)

Growth and Its Enemies

One of the characteristics of the human race, a look at current bookstore displays would suggest, is that it is the only species of animal which worries obsessively about its own future.

The Lesson of Forest Hills

The conflict triggered by the attempt to build a low-income public-housing project in the Forest Hills section of New York has raised a great many difficult and unpleasant issues.

Liberalism versus Liberal Education

My title will strike many readers as paradoxical, even absurd. Liberalism, far from being the enemy of a liberal education, is widely regarded as being the product of it. For better or worse, the liberal creed has been nurtured and propagated on the college campuses, and though not all students become its disciples, almost all are affected by it, and some dramatically so.

Judaism after Auschwitz

Only in the last five years have Emil Fackenheim's writings become known to more than'a small group of interested Jewish theologians. Once the Holocaust is seen in the perspective of Fackenheim's thinking in all of its aspects does its crucial place in his theology become apparent.

Love in Bloom A Story

A story.

A Fever of Ethnicity

More and more, America comes to seem the land of perpetual identity crisis.

Agony in the Clubhouse

After faltering for the past years into the oblivion that aged revolutionists are heir to, the New York City Reform Democrats have returned to the front pages and to the chaos which is their natural state.

Let History Judge, by Roy A. Medvedev

The publication of Roy A. Medvedev's Let History Judge is an event of real importance.

The Dual Image, by Harold Fisch; The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, by Ruth R. Wisse

No one can be more sensitive than Professor Wisse herself to the tragic, or rather the disastrous, political implications for Jewish history of the centrality of the schlemiel figure in the psychic life of European Jewry.

Museums in Crisis, edited by Brian O'Doherty

It would appear from more than just the publication of this book that all existing museums of art in America are unsatisfactory to themselves, their public, or both.

A Feast of History, by Chaim Raphael

Mr. Raphael has produced a fascinating history of the Passover Haggadah, a history of the celebration of the Seder, an account of the origins of Passover synthesized from the best modern scholarship on the subject.

Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America, by Reynold M. Wik

Is there any single person who did more to transform America from a land of family farms and small towns into a modern, urban, corporate, technologized, mass society than Henry Ford?

A Call to Dubious Battle

"The description by T. R. Marmor (p. 86) of the 'intemperate and intimidating atmosphere in which the discussion of social policy has come to be conducted in America' acquired an added resonance for me the other day when I happened to read a paper entitled 'The Assault on Equality' by Professor William Ryan. Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by T. R. Marmor in the current issue.

Busing, the Courts, and the Politics of Integration

American-Jewish Poetry

“The Pottinger Papers” (Cont'd)

The Constitution and the War

It is frightening when out of the privacy of the Oval Room or of Camp David a decision emerges to invade Cambodia, bomb Laos or North Vietnam, or, as most recently, mine the harbor at Haiphong and risk a clash with the Russian navy. One man makes the decision, as freely as any dictator or emperor.

Portrait of a Soviet Zionist

In virtually every planeload of Soviet Jews that lands at Lydda airport these days there is at least a handful of really hardcore Zionist militants, whose burning enthusiasm for their new homeland recalls the pristine ardor of another day--a long-ago time when a young Golda Meir was first learning to till the soil at Merhavia.

O Pioneers! Reflections on the Whole Earth People

It was a gossip and fashion columnist, Eugenia Sheppard, who remarked of 1970 that it was the year when clothes became costumes and costumes became clothes.

August 1939-A Memoir

A memoir.

Banfield's “Heresy”

Last fall, just before Thanksgiving, Professor Edward Banfield resigned from Harvard University. No official attention was drawn to Banfield's reasons for leaving. Yet it would be extraordinary if his departure from Harvard were not partially occasioned by the angry and imbalanced controversy over his book, "The Unheavenly City."

Keeping Up With the Corleones

In one of my earliest appearances in COMMENTARY, I wrote in praise of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Rain People," a film I had little company in finding favor with. And "The Godfather" is, furthermore, and by critical consensus, a stunning confirmation of my claims for Coppola's talents.

Passion and Politics, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gerald M. Schaflander

The number of books and articles which have appeared on the "student" question during the past seven years is probably exceeded only by the number which have been published on the subject of racial conflict.

From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, by Yosef Haim Yerushalmi

Jewish history, rich in the unusual and the bizarre, has produced few phenomena stranger than the Marranos.

Problems and Projects, by Nelson Goodman

Nelson Goodman refers to Hume as "the greatest of modern philosophers"--an assessment sufficiently peculiar to suggest a peculiar set of preferences.

America's Jews, by Marshall Sklare

The United States, it has often been noted, was the first society in history to have been founded consciously as a nation, its own history, in effect, being the evolution of the social processes that forged national unity.

Felled Oaks: Conversations with de Gaulle, by Andre Malraux

Without any false modesty, Malraux remarks in the introduction to this short book that "we possess no dialogue between a man of history and a great artist."

The Franklin Case

Jews and the City

On Henry James

Princeton Faculty

Man and Woman

Heredity vs. Environment

The World of the 70's

The present moment in world politics is one of transition (defined once by a distinguished economist as the interval between two other periods of transition), and it is characterized on the level of theory and action alike by a great deal of confusion, by exaggerated hopes and exaggerated fears, by wishful thinking and groundless pessimism.

On the Love of Suicide

Among the numerous ancient and modern proponents of self-destruction discussed in A. Alvarez's brilliant, controversial, and moving study of suicide, "The Savage God," the name of one distinctly odd but celebrated figure who has fascinated French writers is missing.

Encyclopaedia Judaica

Encyclopaedia Judaica has a truly magisterial aim. In sixteen large volumes--11,000 pages and more than 11 million words--it sets out to survey the whole of Jewish experience from the most far-off times to the present day.

Blue in Chicago

First thing this morning, getting ready to leave the house, I heard over the news broadcast that another University of Chicago graduate student had been shot and killed in a holdup in Hyde Park. I am a graduate student at the university and I live in Hyde Park. I listened closely for details--the time of night, a number, a street. You always want to know how close these things have come to you.

Beauvoir's Last Revolt

The unrelenting industry of Simone de Beauvoir is astounding, and it is almost as great as that of Sartre.

Dr. Coles among the Poor

It is a strange business, the sudden popular success of people who do intellectual work in America.

Socialism, by Michael Harrington

A specter is haunting the world--the specter of failed socialism.

A Question of Judgment: The Fortas Case and the Struggle for the Supreme Court, by Robert Shogan

On the basis of early returns the Supreme Court, which now seats four appointees of Mr. Nixon, is living up to the best hopes of one part of the citizenry and the worst expectations of another, by changing the direction of decisions in the area of criminal law.

Living on the Dead, by Aharon Megged; Adam Resurrected, by Yoram Kaniuk; Three Days and a Child, by A. B. Yehoshua

The new generation of Israeli writers, those who reached maturity in the period following the establishment of the state, are in some sense to be understood as reacting in their work against the values of the heroic past.

Crises of the Republic, by Hannah Arendt

Journalistic opinion in Britain (where this reviewer lives) about American policies abroad is divided to the point of faction, not least about America in Vietnam and what she is doing there and why.

Nine Lies about America, by Arnold Beichman

Except in rather special circles, self-flagellation has never been considered one of the more wholesome experiences life has to offer.

Between Nixon and the New Politics

"Although Nathan Glazer (p. 43) is for McGovern and Milton Himmelfarb (p. 48) is against him, they both expect that Jews will give a smaller majority of their vote to the Democratic candidate this year than they have ever given to a Democratic candidate in any recent Presidential election." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to a debate between Nathan Glazer and Milton Himmelfarb in the current issue.

Population Control

The Franklin Case (Cont'd)

McGovern and the Jews: A Debate

A debate between Nathan Glazer and Milton Himmelfarb on the role that Jewish interests should and will play in the coming election.

Needing Niebuhr Again

Is it only a year since Reinhold Niebuhr died? It seems like ten.

From Globalism to Isolationism

Only a dozen years have passed since President Kennedy in his inaugural address spoke of America as "the watchman on the wall of freedom." Since that time the pendulum has swung to the other extreme and the burden most Americans are willing to bear in the world today appears slight indeed.

“Serrano” vs. the People

Last year the California Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Serrano v. Priest that condemned the entire structure of public education in the nation's most populous state.

On “The Sorrow and the Pity”

Marcel Ophuls's four-and-a half-hour documentary film about France under the Nazi occupation, "The Sorrow and the Pity," was originally made for television, but it has never been shown on French television.

The Hitchcock Problem

With "Frenzy," its director, Alfred Hitchcock, is said to have returned to form, but to what form has he returned?

The Papers & The Papers, by Sanford J. Ungar

A free press cannot be a patriotic press. In George Orwell's words, "freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means freedom to criticize and oppose."

Souls on Fire, by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel ended "One Generation After," his previous book, with an announcement (in tone somewhere between exasperation and disgust) that his work was entering a new phase because all that he had shown about the Holocaust could not change the tenor of a single headline.

Science and Sentiment in America, by Morton White

Near the end of his new book, Morton White says that "on all the lower floors of philosophical anti-intellectualism we can hear the noise of philosophers who live at the top."

Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research, by Wardell B. Pomeroy

Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research is probably the fullest, the most intimate portrait that we are ever going to get of the man whom the author calls "the greatest figure in sex research since Freud."

Lillian Hellman Playwright, by Richard Moody The Collected Plays of Lillian Hellman

I have just finished reading through the Collected Plays of Lillian Hellman with excitement and surprise--surprise, because I had forgotten about the theater.

Intellectuals at War

"Just before reading Hilton Kramer's essay on the avant-garde (p. 37), I also happened to read the symposium on 'Art, Culture and Conservatism' in the Summer 1972 issue of Partisan Review." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Hilton Kramer in the current issue.

Ethnicity

Growing Pains

Genetic Bookkeeping

Housing

Friend of the Court

Writers and Politics

The Age of the Avant-Garde

The "normal condition" of our culture has become one in which the ideology of the avant-garde wields a pervasive and often cynical authority over sizable portions of the very public it affects to despise.

Getting Out of Russia

The answers given at a refugee center in Europe by one of those who left Russia in October 1971.

The Quota Commission

A great deal of attention has been directed lately to the efforts of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and especially its Office for Civil Rights, to force universities and other institutions which depend on federal contracts to follow quota systems in their hiring practices.

Why Some Children Don't Speak

The pain of parents knows no end--the parents waiting for letters and telephone calls, the parents searching for itinerant children, the parents so relentlessly attacked and disowned and abandoned, the parents who feel that their love and work and devotion meet no reward except disaffection and the serpent's tooth. And they are always inescapably, unalterably, the children's parents.

Updike, Malamud, and the Fire This Time

Taking certain striking passages out of context from some recent American novels, one might conclude that white writers in this country have been engulfed by a wave of racial paranoia.

Reykjavik vs. Miami

Strategy, the mode of human thought that seeks effects instead of causes, provided the real drama of the past summer.

The Great School Legend, by Colin Greer; The Ecology of the Public Schools, by Leonard J. Fein

Education has traditionally been thought of as America's great cure-all.

Ten Versions of America, by Gerald B. Nelson; Democratic Humanism and American Literature, by Harold Kaplan; The Novel of Manners in America, by James W. Tuttleton

Professors of American literature often seem to assume that the books they study afford not simply a means but a sufficient means of understanding us.

Jewish Worship, by Abraham E. Millgram

Of all the sacred books the Jews have produced, the siddur--which might be termed the Jewish book of common prayer--is perhaps the most representative of Jewish life and thought.

Arriving Where We Started, by Barbara Probst Solomon

"Arriving Where We Started," a title taken from a line in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, brings to mind a more current variation on the same theme: "Anywhere you go, there you are!"

Only One Earth, by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos

Since all those who currently write about man's setting describe it in the singular as The Environment, the social movement that may develop from the current interest must ultimately achieve near global unity.

My Name Is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok

The protagonists of Chaim Potok's novels--"The Chosen," "The Promise," and now "My Name is Asher Lev"--follow a common career; in the course of the narrative they are seen moving slowly and with agonizing reluctance out of the religious community in which they were born and brought up.

Psychopaths, by Alan Harrington

Along with a lot of people I know, I've been observing an increase in the amount of apparently psychopathic behavior in the street, at work, in meetings, and, for that matter, behind the wheels of New York taxicabs.

Living with Free Speech

"Whenever I am forced--as I have been this month by Alexander M. Bickel (p. 60)--to think seriously about freedom of speech and the problems it poses, I instantly find myself getting depressed." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Alexander M. Bickel in the current issue.

McGovern, Nixon & the Jews

Making War

Harvard

Social Policy

About Equality

There would appear to be little doubt that the matter of equality has become, in these past two decades, a major political and ideological issue.

The Last Jew on Earth A Fable

A story.

The “Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open” First Amendment From “Sullivan” to the Pentagon Papers

In 1964, the Supreme Court decided New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, an important and novel decision of great consequence in the law of the First Amendment. Among other things, the Court declared the Sedition Act of 1798 unconstitutional, better than a century-and-a-half after its expiration. Justice delayed, but not denied.

Indians and Other Americans

In the confrontation between the American Indian and the white man over the course of the past three centuries, no single episode is more revealing or more devastating in its moral implications than the removal of the Cherokees from their ancestral lands in the 1830's.

Summer of '72

One comes to this scrubby pine place without large misgivings, despite the fact that the immediate environment is flat and ugly, the house set back on a territory matted by nature's rubble.

Revisiting the New Critics

The New Criticism grew up in the 1930's alongside the "socially committed" criticism which used to be thought of as its rival but which it has, by now, long outlived.

Holding the Horses

I'd very much like to like John Huston's new film, and, to judge by many of the reviews, so would a lot of other people.

The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative, by Leopold Tyrmand

Given the social and cultural atmosphere of the times, it is likely that some people will dismiss this hard-hitting broadside, aimed at the inanities and oppressions of Communist society, with a bored shrug.

Arthur Ruppin: Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, edited by Alex Bein

Alex Bein, the editor of this volume, holds that, in the roster of heroes who created Israel, Arthur Ruppin was one of four major personalities who were "the symbol or expression of an entire era."

The History Primer, by J. H. Hexter; Doing History, by J. H. Hexter

For nearly a generation professional historians in the United States have been experiencing a crisis of confidence.

Cities of Light and Sons of the Morning, by Martin Green

Subtitled "The Confessions of an Incipient Old Jew," A Bias of Reflections is a gentle, sensitive, and profoundly sad volume.

A Bias of Reflections, by Nathan Perlmutter

Laureate of the New Class

"Except for a detail or two, I agree with everything Irving Howe (p. 69) says about Philip Roth, but I wonder whether the steady growth in Roth's reputation over the past ten years or so is really a function of the decline in the quality of his work." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Irving Howe in the current issue.

Lies and Truth

Encyclopedia Judaica

Eugenics

Affirmative Action & Quotas

On Merit

Growing Old

Book Note

The Idea of Merit

The current American social squall has caused a number of logistical difficulties for beleaguered liberals.

From Auschwitz to Prague: A Memoir

A memoir.

An Address to the Entering Class at Harvard College, 1972

Daniel P. Moynihan's address to the entering class at Harvard College with reflections on Lionel Trilling and Joseph A. Schumpeter.

On the Soviet Departure from Egypt

It should have been obvious ever since the late 50's, when the Soviet Union became the dominant power in the Arab world, that sooner or later its relationship with the Arabs would become fraught with tension, discord, and even open conflict.

Philip Roth Reconsidered

When Philip Roth published his collection of stories, "Goodbye, Columbus," in 1959, the book was generously praised and I was among the reviewers who praised it.

The New Politics & the Democrats

In 1969 the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection of the Democratic party set out to make basic revisions in party rules. With their effects on the electoral fortunes of the Democratic party no longer in doubt, the reforms have perhaps lost that sanctity which so long sheltered them from serious appraisal.

The Question of War Crimes

In the last few years the American public has been buried by a Vesuvian eruption of intellectual sludge on the subject of war crimes.

The Hidden Injuries of Class, by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb

Class is like a fur coat-soft and warm to wrap around you if you have it, a constant goad and affront if you're one of those left out in the cold.

Time of Need, by William Barrett

William Barrett believes that in the headlong pursuit of technological advantage we have deserted our true nature and are increasingly dead to its directives.

Ling, by Stanley H. Brown

If the name had not been grabbed off by others, this lucid and troubling book might profitably have been subtitled "Metamorphoses."

Philosophy and Human Nature; A Soul in the Quad, by Kathleen Nott

My first reaction to Sartre's "La Nausee" was inadequacy and guilt. Try as I would, it was impossible for me to experience the nausea at the daily confrontation of environment which gagged the great existentialist.