What the Voters Sensed

"Among the more puzzling questions arising from an analysis of the election returns like the one by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab (p. 43) is how the ideologues of the McGovern movement could have been so wrong in all their political judgments." Norman Podohoretz's introduction to an article by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab in the current issue.

On Autism

Niebuhr and Ethnicity

Aesthetics and Politics

The Pentagon Papers

The Pottinger Paper (Cont'd)

Schooling in America

Robert Coles

Religious Jewry

Victims

Wartime France

Quotas and Jobs

The Election and the National Mood

The reasons underlying Senator McGovern's defeat in the 1972 elections had been thoroughly analyzed long before the polls opened on November 7. But apart from the specific issues and candidates, and apart from the idiosyncrasies of this particular election year, the results of the balloting afford an opportunity to relearn some important lessons about the continuing character of the American electorate.

Dayan as Politician

Dayan's credentials seem authentic enough. But the clincher, of course, is that piratical eye-patch. To make off with such a souvenir from death has always been a mark of the hero.

Money, the Job, and Little Women

All of Jane Austen's opening paragraphs, and the best of her first sentences, have money in them; this may be the first obviously feminine thing about her novels,for money and its making were characteristically female rather than male subjects in English fiction.

The Cold War According to Kennan

In August 1950 George F. Kennan went on indefinite leave from the State Department. His decision to do so seemed on the face of it inexplicable; only forty-six at the time, he was widely recognized as one of the chief architects of U.S. foreign policy and was obviously slated for a brilliant diplomatic preferment.

Lords of the Press

The mass media and their masters, the men who control the largecirculation press and television, exert a peculiar, half-guilty fascination upon us. The power of the mass media often tends to be seen as a corruption of the democratic process.

Defaming the Jews

Some cliches become so hallowed by usage that they can serve as a cover for the worst kinds of crassness and stupidity. This seems to be increasingly the case with the familiar notion of Jewish humor as the time-honored way for Jews to laugh with shrewd candor at their own foibles.

America, Rome, and the Bourgeoisie

The "Emigrants" is an almost three-hour-long Swedish saga about a mid-19th-century migration of peasants to America, made by a director, Jan Troell, who is his own photographer, and who composes each shot with the care an artist might give to his canvas.

The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays, by Edward Shils

The great tradition of Western sociological thought has been preoccupied, not with the family, small groups, occupations, or any of the other specialties into which the current sociology curriculum may be divided, but rather with explaining the governing institutions of society.

August 1914; The Nobel Lecture on Literature, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Since "August 1914" is only part of a larger work, and so perhaps not susceptible of ready judgment, it may be more important to consider first what Solzhenitsyn feels himself to be doing.

Amphigorey; The Awdrey-Gore Legacy, by Edward Gorey

The recent rise of the picture book has paradoxically come about as a result of the decline of book illustration in the past half century.

Where the Wasteland Ends, by Theodore Roszak

When Theodore Roszak wrote his popular "The Making of a Counter Culture" back in 1969, he may have been partial to Gestalt psychology, to guerrilla theater, to Zen; but there was yet an intentional effort to stand away.

Somewhere Else, by Robert Kotlowitz

Robert Kotlowitz's first novel tells a story which in its every aspect is commonplace.

The Intellectuals & the Pursuit of Happiness

"I was, I must admit, surprised both by the volume and by the intensity of the response (p. 12) to Irving Kristol's article 'About Equality' which appeared in our November 1972 number." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by Irving Kristol.

Equality and Justice

Financing the Schools

Free Speech & Pornography

Liberal-Jews' Jew

Higher Education for All?

Access to education has been one of the most durable issues in the political life of this century, and not just in the United States.

A Memoir of Sinai

Most young native Israeli Jews are named after martial and ethical heroes of the Bible, or have made-up names out of the Hebrew dictionary, like my own given name. In contrast, Mendel is saddled with a name out of the dead East European Diaspora.

The Revolt of the Masses

Last year's Presidential election differed from elections of the recent past not so much because of how people voted as why. For millions of Americans cultural values displaced pocketbooks as the chief determinant of Presidential voting.

Poetry and Public Experience

In an age defined most vividly by the appearance of schematized conflict on all fronts, one of the most persistent difficulties encountered by the poet is the threat to his belief in the logic of his own experience.

The Greeks, the Romans & Captain Dreyfus

Lady Beaconsfield said she never could remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans. Because I studied Latin before trying to learn a little Greek, for me the Romans came first.

Disease as a Way of Life

In all the recent talk about the "crisis" in medical care, a major concern-whether explicitly stated or merely implied-has been the disproportionate burden of disease borne by America's poor.

Arthur Miller's Eden

Change is certainly one of the facts of a critic's life. Having been enthralled and perplexed by art for many years, and having struggled to find a useful articulation of his enthusiasms and dislikes, he discovers one day that his pleasures have been restructured, that his intellectual energies are no longer nourished by works that once earned his joy and approval.

Inequality, by Christopher Jencks et al.

Christopher Jencks's "Inequality" is a good case study of what happens when a serious and complex piece of research is promoted like the Love Story of social science.

Bare Ruined Choirs, by Garry Wills

"Bare Ruined Choirs" is a collection of articles by an "involved" journalist reporting on the last ten years of the history of American Catholicism.

Tradition and Reality, by Nathan Rotenstreich

The conviction that the Jews possess a fixed and unchanging tradition is woven into the very fabric of classical Judaism.

The Fall of the American University, by Adam Ulam

Adam Ulam is in pain, and he has written a cranky and opinionated book whose true purpose is to disclose the sources of his pain and its possible cure.

The Big Foundations, by Waldemar A. Nielsen

How other people spend their money is a perennial American preoccupation, and when the people in question are multimillionaires enjoying special tax breaks, monitoring their disbursements becomes a positive duty.

Vietnam and Collective Guilt

"In discussing the bigoted attitudes toward the general American populace which have become so widespread within the intellectual community in the past few years, James Hitchcock (p. 64) confines himself to examples drawn from domestic life, no doubt because that is the arena in which these attitudes have mainly found expression." Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by James Hitchcock in the current issue.

About Philip Roth

Life under Communism

Coles, Orwell & the Press

On Merit

Leaving Russia

Redistributing Income

In Praise

Prisons, Politics & the Attica Report

On September 11, 1972, one year to the day after the end of the Attica prison riot, the Special Citizens' Commission appointed to investigate the riot issued its official report. Although the report was beyond question a government document, it did not resemble one.

Early in the Summer of 1970

A novella.

Rewriting History

Revisionist historiography is almost as old as history itself, the impulses behind it as varied as the full range of human motivation.

The Intellectuals and the People

Events in America in the past decade have often seemed contrived to stand Charles Peguy's famous dictum on its head-everything which has begun in politique has ended in mystique.

A Look at Margaret Mead

In the mid-1960's, when I was doing graduate work in anthropology, a favorite topic of debate in the student commons used to be whether Margaret Mead was "any good" as an anthropologist.

The Art of Diane Arbus

Until recently it seemed that photography as a serious art (not as an adjunct to fashion and advertising) would be confined to two major traditions.

Remember Thou Art Pulp

I thought when I wrote about "Bed and Board" that I wouldn't want to be writing about Truffaut again for the foreseeable future, but then the future has a peculiar disposition to be unforeseeable.

The Seventies: Problems and Proposals, edited by Irving Howe and Michael Harrington

These are times of considerable confusion on matters of public policy. The federal housing program has collapsed amid scandal; equal expenditure on education is called a constitutional right by some, attacked as irrelevant by others; the welfare system is as universally deplored as is the high crime rate, yet there is great discord as to how to deal with either.

Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, by Hermann Cohen

Modern philosophers of Judaism have always had to face a dilemma.

Harry Truman, by Margaret Truman

Praise of famous men should not be assigned to their devoted children-the subject is too close to the camera for true definition.

Peace in the Balance, by Eugene V. Rostow

In 1966, when many of the original New Frontiersmen sought what then seemed the safe refuge of the academy, Eugene Rostow traveled in the opposite direction, going from the Yale Law School to the State Department.

Black Education, by Thomas Sowell

"Black Education" begins with a section of pertinent autobiography and ends with a discussion of such matters as IQ and race and proposals for improving the education of ghetto youths.

The New Inquisitors

"To me, the worst part of the story R. J. Herrnstein (p. 52) tells of the harassment he has endured at Harvard and on other college campuses since publishing an article in the Atlantic on the heritability of IQ scores is what it reveals about the 'subtle connection' between 'the radicals and the liberal-intellectual community.'" Norman Podhoretz's introduction to an article by R. J. Herrnstein in the current issue.

The Election and the Democrats

Dayan

NPG

A Puzzlement

Black Progress and Liberal Rhetoric

A remarkable development has taken place in America over the last dozen years: for the first time in the history of the republic, truly large and growing numbers of American blacks have been moving into the middle class, so that by now these numbers can reasonably be said to add up to a majority of black Americans--a slender majority, but a majority nevertheless.

The “Times” Op-Ed Page: Both Ends Against the Middle

In the past two-and-a-half years, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times--so-called because it appears opposite the editorial page--has become a powerful presence in American culture.

On Challenging an Orthodoxy

In the immediate aftermath of Charles Darwin's epochal Origin of Species, social theorists were quick to apply the doctrine to man. Almost as soon as Darwinism was applied to social theory, however, there were problems.

A Pride of Candidates

When the mayoral race for New York City is over, the considerable number of aspirants to that office will have spent themselves, to say nothing of their fortunes, proving which among them can do the most for the citizens of the city.

The Achievement of Gershom Scholem

"The desire to destroy," wrote Bakunin, "is also a creative desire," and he managed to inflame--indeed, his ideas still inflame--tens of thousands of minds through his incandescent vision of "the whole of Europe, with St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, transformed into an enormous rubbish-heap."

Our (English) Crowd

Anything "Our Crowd" can do, we-"The Cousinhood" of England-can do better: or so Chaim Bermant might seem to be saying in his highly entertaining study of seven enormously wealthy and interconnected Jewish families that rose to dizzy heights of fame and influence in 19th-century Britain.

The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, by Daniel P. Moynihan

If a somnolent Congressman from a safe district had fallen asleep in the basement of the West Wing of the White House in October 1968 and awakened the following January to find Daniel P. Moynihan behind the desk, one thing would have been perfectly clear to him: Hubert Humphrey had won the election.

Norman Mailer, by Richard Poirier; St. George and the Godfather, by Norman Mailer

Richard Poirier's new book on Norman Mailer is one in a series devoted to "modern masters . . . who have changed or are changing the life and thought of our age."

Reflections on a Teapot, by Ronald Sanders; My Last Two Thousand Years, by Herbert Gold

Although both these works pose as straightforward autobiographical memoirs, each is actually a document of coming-to-Jewishness, an attempt to define a uniquely personal Jewish identity by a narrative of the events through which that identity came ultimately to be formed.

Political Violence and Civil Disobedience, by Ernest van den Haag

Ernest Van Den Haag's book is something of a literary oddity: two excellent essays (the first on civil disobedience, the second on political violence) which there should have been no need to write.

That Most Distressful Nation, by Andrew M. Greeley

Over the past several years evidence has been mounting to indicate that a reemerging white ethnic consciousness is upon us.

The Question of Open Admissions

Anti-Semitism

Women and Work

Decimal Points and Taxes

Nixon, the Great Society, and the Future of Social Policy-A Symposium

Commentary asked Edward Banfield, Nathan Glazer, Michael Harrington, Tom Kahn, Christopher Lasch, Robert Lekachman, Bayard Rustin, Gus Tyler, and George Will: It is frequently said that the Great Society was a failure. Do you agree with this assessment?

The Curious Analyzer

We remember only too well the macabre irony with which in the graveyard scene Hamlet contemplates Yorick's skull; how for him it mocks the vaunt and leap of life, whether manifested in the court jester, the beautiful woman, or the mightiest of rulers.

Zionism Revisited: Herzl

It is appropriate to speak of the advent of Theodor Herzl. He was the hero of the Zionist movement-its only hero. So he was seen by its members and its adepts; and so he saw himself.

Zionism Revisited: The Historic Enterprise

Though a voluminous literature exists by now on the Zionist movement, it is one that has plainly generated a good deal more heat than light.

“An American Family”

As all the world must know by now, a production crew from WNET Television in New York spent two years and over $1,000,000, plus a prodigious amount of talent and energy, pursuing the William C. Loud family through better and worse to produce the documentary series, "An American Family."

A Mother's Vengeance

Midway through "The Passion of Anna," the first half of which seems to me as good as anything Bergman has done and enormously impressive, we suddenly become aware of a gap in our information.

On the Democratic Idea in America, by Irving Kristol

Irving Kristol's collection of essays, lionized in the Wall Street Journal, vilified in the New York Review of Books, and discussed critically only in the National Review, has received scant attention elsewhere in the many months since its publication.

The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905, by Henry J. Tobias

A not uncommon political phenomenon, cutting across a variety of national lines, is that of the revolutionary movement around which there evolves an aura of romance and myth.

Marinetti: Selected Writings, edited by R. W. Flint

Futurism began as a one-man movement of revolution in the traditional relations of the artist and society.

A Woman Named Solitude, by Andr\'e Schwarz-Bart

After the shattering conclusion of The Last of the Just (1959), it was hard to imagine what more, if anything, Andre Schwarz-Bart would be able to write.

Housing and the 70s

Foreign Policy

The Photographer's Art

Irony & the Irish

To China, With Love

What, precisely, is it that this endless flow of books and articles has to tell us, aside from noting that there are no flies or dogs in China today, that beggars are gone, the streets clean, the fields tilled, the peasants well-fed, and the children looked-after--all impressive, but hardly news. The fact is that beyond these surface observations, most visitors are offering us a heady mixture of their personal reactions and enthusiasms.

On the Rights of Minorities

Sometimes the only right a minority seems to want is the right to become a majority; and sometimes the minority achieves this by bringing about a change in the political context, including by means of civil war. But apart from the rights which minorities actually claim, or want, what rights should they have?

Rethinking Israel's Position

The influential and outspoken Secretary General of Israel's Labor Federation (Histadrut), Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, recently shocked many of his countrymen when he suggested that Israel consider withdrawing unilaterally from the occupied territories, particularly in the West Bank, even before the signing of a peace treaty.

Marriage and Household

After so many centuries, and so much reflection and experience, after so many marriages, is there anything left to be said on the subject?

Kafka's True Will

It was Kafka's last will that neither his letters nor his diaries should survive him; nor, for that matter, his unpublished stories and unfinished novels.

The Year of Europe

The Nixon administration has proclaimed 1973 the "year of Europe," but the proclamation may be considered a bit rash.

The Jewish Vote (Again)

Before the 1972 Presidential election, the thesis became popular that Jews were at long last about to vote according to their economic interests. This thesis, however plausible it may have seemed, was not borne out by the results of the election.

The Kennedy Promise, by Henry Fairlie

Inevitably, the search for an answer to the question of what went wrong in the 1960's must lead us back to John F. Kennedy.

The Study of Judaism: Bibliographical Essays, Introduction by Jacob Neusner

The purpose of this collection of bibliographical essays, as stated in the introduction by Jacob Neusner, is to provide guidance for "serious students in the field of religion who are not experts in the study of Judaism."

Paul Nizan, by W. D. Redfern

It often happens that we come to the work of a neglected writer through the tributes of an eminent one: T. W. Adorno on Walter Benjamin, Saul Bellow on Isaac Rosenfeld, and in Paul Nizan's case, Jean-Paul Sartre.

Dorothy Thompson, by Marion K. Sanders

No one with a memory of America in the 1940's can be quite free of associations to the name of Dorothy Thompson.

Trotsky and the Jews, by Joseph Nedava

Of the disproportionate numbers of Jewish revolutionaries who surged into European society in the wake of the Emancipation, only Leon Trotsky, ne Leib Bronstein, achieved supreme eminence.

IQ, Lysenkoism & Liberal Orthodoxy

“The Cousinhood”

Collective Guilt

The Masada Complex

It may seem surprising that an archaeological site should provide the focus of debate on basic issues of national policy, but given the peculiarity of Israel's location in history and geography, there is a certain appropriateness in that odd link between ancient events and modern politics.

Science versus Justice

An anti-fascist exile, Nicola Chiaromonte had appeared in New York in 1941 after the fall of Paris. What distinguished Chiaromonte at the time in New York intellectual circles was his commitment to politics, together with his refusal to commit himself to Marx.

The Body Politic

A story.

Encounter Groups and Other Panaceas

Shortly after World War II, behavior in small groups became the focus of an exceptional amount of interest in several fields of the social sciences. Within the psychoanalytic community, group psychotherapy came to be regarded as an alternative to the traditional one-to-one relationship between therapist and patient.

Key West, With Cubans

A diary of a visit to Key West.

The Question of the Judenrate

Of all the harrowing chapters of the Holocaust, that concerning the Nazi-imposed institutions of Jewish "self-government" in occupied Eastern Europe is probably the most painful and the most puzzling.

Deep Tango

The meaning of the sensation caused by "Last Tango in Paris," of the febrile character of its reception quite apart from the character of the film itself, seems to me unmistakably clear: we want pornography.

The Fellow Travellers, by David Caute

The 20th century has had its share of atrocities, but certainly Hitlerism and Stalinism deserve to be placed in a category all their own.

A Contemporary High Holiday Service, edited by Sidney Greenberg and S. Allan Sugarman; Mahzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, edited by Jules Harlow

Rabbi Sidney Greenberg and S. Allan Sugarman have surely found a need, but they have not filled it. They have determined that many young people wish to participate in Jewish worship--at least on the High Holidays--but that these young people cannot "relate" to the "traditional" services of the Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox persuasions.

Looking Back, by Joyce Maynard

At nineteen, Joyce Maynard has achieved a not wholly undeserved publicity.

Honecker and the New Politics of Europe, by Heinz Lippmann

Erich Honecker succeeded Walter Ulbricht on May 3, 1971 as head of the ruling party in East Germany. The event marked the third time in a little over three years that the long-established personal ruler in a Communist state of East Europe was forced from power by political forces that he could not control.

The Inspector, by Saul Steinberg

There is almost no artist alive," wrote E. H. Gombrich almost twenty years ago, "who knows more about the philosophy of representation than this humorist." Saul Steinberg is as far from being merely a humorist today as he was from being a cartoonist then.

A. Philip Randolph, by Jervis Anderson

A. Philip Randolph, who Murray Kempton once suggested may be "the greatest man who has lived in the U.S. in this century," arrived in Harlem from Jacksonville, Florida, in 1911, within a year of the time of the founding of the NAACP, and he lived there for almost sixty years until he moved to an ILGWU housing project on lower Ninth Avenue.

On the Nature of Black Progress

Nuclear Weapons

Margaret Mead

Government and the People

We shall never learn what needs to be learned about the American political system until we understand not only what the system does to the people, but what the people do to the system.

Mrs. Virginia Woolf

No recent biography has been read more thirstily by readers and writers of fiction than Quentin Bell's account of the life of his aunt Virginia.

George Lichtheim, 1912-1973

As a student of Marxism and historian of ideas, as an original thinker and a writer of exceptional brilliance, George Lichtheim, who died in April of this year, first came to the attention of general readers with the publication of "Marxism" in 1961.

The Growth of the Day-School Movement

Writing in these pages thirteen years ago, Milton Himmelfarb took the measure of what was then a newly emerging phenomenon on the American-Jewish scene, the Jewish day school. The time is ripe to cast another look at the day schools and the range of issues associated with them.

War Fictions

To Clausewitz war was very simple, to Stephen Crane it was kind, to General Sherman it was all hell.

Reading Lionel Trilling

The Italian novelist Ignazio Silone once remarked that most writers keep telling the same story over and over again: it is the story that releases their controlling sense of existence, their springs of anxiety and dilemma.

Modern Jews and Their History

All kinds of people have complained about history, and probably none more justifiably than the Jews.

News from Nowhere, by Edward Jay Epstein

The public image of American Journalism has always included a good proportion of myth.

The Face of Defeat, by David Pryce-Jones

To the detached observer, the search for truth in the Arab-Israeli conflict must seem a short road to madness. What ultimately will be held to have happened in the Middle East, what may actually indeed have happened, will depend on which proves to be the stronger in the great clash of national wills.

When Even Angels Wept, by Lately Thomas

For a book that bases itself on a false premise, Lately Thomas's account of the rise and fall of the late Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy stands up fairly well, is reasonably solid in its facts and warranted in most of its assumptions.

Unsecular Man, by Andrew M. Greeley

In his most recent book Andrew M. Greeley takes on the ghost of positivism and tries once and for all to lay it to rest.

Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT, by John Newhouse

In the ten years since the Cuban missile crisis, the prospect of nuclear war has become more and more remote from the public mind.

The Op-Ed Page

Looking at China

Attica

Rewriting “Hamlet”

Symposium

Letters on Letters

Nursing Licenses

An Appointment With Watergate

As the witnesses testified before the Ervin Committee, one could hear the rustling of a two-hundred-year-old American ghost. The Watergate affair, standing as it does for the whole bag of "White House horrors," was not just the creation of evil men; it was the symptomatic rumbling of a deep strain in American society, of which Richard Nixon has come to seem the almost perfect embodiment.

The Conversion of the Jews

Nothing, it would seem, ever goes away; and thus it was that American Jews, living in a society where interreligious friction has been reduced to a minimum and secularism is rampant, recently found themselves again rallying, as in former, less enlightened times, to oppose Christian conversionist efforts.

The New Egalitarianism and the Old

When I was an undergraduate in the 30's, we used to hoot at yokels who said that socialism meant that everyone would have the same income. Some of us were socialists, some weren't, but we knew the difference, we thought, between "scientific" and "utopian" socialism, and didn't suppose that the cure for America's problems consisted in organizing it like a kibbutz.

Moral Education and the Schools

The trustees of the Free School Society, a philanthropic organization that established tuition-free schools in the early 19th century for poor children in New York, knew perfectly well what to expect of their teachers: only to have "the most unblemished characters with regard to moral conduct," to be truthful, sincere, frank, open, self-controlled, firm, reasonable, loving, and kind.

A Dissent on Pynchon

The acclaim conferred upon Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" probably reveals more about the uncertain state of our literary culture than about Pynchon's novel itself, which is brilliant in parts but confused and exceedingly tedious as a whole.

Mumford in Retrospect

Lewis Mumford is probably best known as a critic of architecture and city planning, but he has regretted being identified with these subjects alone on the grounds that "if I have any field of specialization at all, it is the all-inclusive one of the social philosopher."

Politics on Film

It is the climax of "The Day of the Jackal," and the paid political assassin, code name "Jackal," brilliantly disguised as an elderly, one-legged, French army veteran, closes in on his target of General de Gaulle at a populous location where the General is to make a public appearance.

The Future While It Happened, by Samuel Lubell

According to Samuel Lubell, who has been doing polling and interviewing for decades, "the scope and intensity of discontent in the country was astonishing" in the autumn of 1972.

A Mediterranean Society, by S. D. Goitein

The entire field of Arabic and Islamic studies is studded with ironies. To begin with, there is the fact that the science was pioneered by Occidental Jewish scholars who, until recently, very nearly dominated the field.

State of Grace, by Joy Williams; The Summer Before the Dark, by Doris Lessing; The Hothouse by the East River, by Muriel Spark; The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch

Joy Williams's "State of Grace" comes with the imprimatur of the Paris Review Editions and carries fine promotion from George Plimpton and a number of equally prominent friends of writing.

Without Guilt and Justice, by Walter Kaufmann

What we need, according to Walter Kaufmann, is a new morality, and in his most ambitious book to date he sets out to provide us with one.

David Smith by David Smith, edited by Cleve Gray; David Smith, edited by Garnett McCoy; Terminal Iron Works, by Rosalind E. Krauss

No figure in the history of American art in this century has acquired greater stature than the sculptor David Smith.

The Question of Masada

“An American Family”

Mobilizing the Middle

Contemporary Prayer

Oil

The idea of using oil as a political weapon against "imperialism" and Israel is not new to the Arab world. In order to understand why this is so, and what it implies for the future, we have to examine the peculiar nature of the international oil business, as well as the politics of the oil-producing countries themselves.

Mailer's “Marilyn”

"She was a fruitcake," Tony Curtis once told an interviewer on BBC television, and there can't be much doubt that she was. Apart from conceding that the camera was desperately in love with her, professional judgments of Marilyn Monroe's attributes rarely go much further.

On Jealousy

To see one's mate across a crowded room, doing something else, with someone else, is to be forcibly reminded of the separateness of our lives, however persuasive may be the imagery of connection and joined fates when we are together.

Who Is Buckminster Fuller?

Buckminster Fuller, according to Hugh Kenner's estimable new study, "Bucky," has a collection of 3,500 clippings about himself, as well as 80,000 letters and virtually every other scrap of paper with his name on it that has ever come his way.

Gentlemen and Scholars

In the name of equality, some would admit students to college and professional school by lottery. Though egalitarians of this kind are not numerous, neither are they merely eccentric.

The New Philistinism

Poets, Shelley wrote, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. The quotation is embarrassingly well known. Few of those who invoke it, however, seem much embarrassed by the fact that Shelley's proclamation was made just at the time when an unprecedented gap was beginning to open up between poets and other imaginative writers as a class and the rulers of the societies they lived in.

Thinking About the City

Cities express an ambivalence in the American soul: we like cities and wish to live in them--or at least to visit them--but we also dislike cities and wish to avoid them, and live instead on farms or in suburbs.

The Making of the President-1972, by Theodore H. White

The many pleasures of reading Theodore White's accounts of our Presidential elections have in no way been dimmed by their repeated offering.

The New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe

During the early 1960's, working more or less independently, journalists like Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, and Tom Wolfe, and novelists-turned-journalists like Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin, were beginning to employ certain novelistic techniques in the writing of nonfiction.

Arthur Rubinstein: My Young Years, by Arthur Rubinstein

The mature Arthur Rubinstein presents so admirable a figure as a man and as a musician that one regrets his decision to confine this heavy tome of light reminiscence to his salad days.

Uncensored Russia, edited by Peter Reddaway; The Heirs of Stalin, by Abraham Rothberg

Ideas have a way of begetting offspring that prove embarrassing to the very people whose thought may have inspired them.

Ralph McGill: Reporter, by Harold H. Martin

Southern liberals have been all but canonized by the North, and it is important that they be seen for what they actually have been: people who struggled and often suffered in the cause of a decent South but who often had a limited understanding of its problems.

Vice Squad, by Robert H. Williams; City Police, by Jonathan Rubinstein; Serpico, by Peter Maas

These three books are the fruit of current interest in the police.

Virginia Woolf

Watergate and the Presidency

The Judenräte

Day Schools

Vaccination and Sacrifice

Trotsky as Jew

Last Tango

Israel, Zionism & Masada

On Soviet Dissidence

"The West, the West," my guest chimes, looking indolently on. "I was in the West." He likes our country house, he is sitting at his leisure, arm winglike over chair back, to get the good of it, shedding words.

Afterthoughts on the 20's

The publication last spring of Malcolm Cowley's "A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation" has reopened a question most of us might prefer to leave closed. Yet it continues to obsess us like the puzzle of some notorious unsolved crime.

The Stalemate Society

At the beginning of this century, most people living in America worked with their hands, either in factories or on the land. By the middle of the century barely half did so. By 1980, little more than a third will do so if present trends continue. The imperatives of modern technology seem to be creating a new sort of society, transforming social structure as much as physical environment.

To the Country

It so happens that my mother's oldest and dearest friend, Little Bertha, lives on a farm not ten miles from the summer cottage where my sons and I are staying in the country, and I hadn't seen her in fifteen years. At least.

A Poet of the Holocaust

The relation of Hebrew poetry to the Holocaust is a peculiar one, largely because many readers and some writers of Hebrew poetry tend to have rather special expectations of it as an instrument of response to national calamity.

The Working Critic

Since the publication, some thirty years ago, of "On Native Grounds," Alfred Kazin has been an important, working critic of American literature.

Two Conductors

The context I find necessary for an evaluation of Pierre Boulez and Michael Tilson Thomas begins with the remarkably perceptive statement Bernard Shaw made at the age of twenty: that the "highest faculty of a conductor" was "the establishment of a magnetic influence under which an orchestra becomes as amenable to the baton as a pianoforte to the fingers."

Jews and the Tragic Sense

Throughout its history, Judaism has been haunted by a dilemma--at whose door shall its troubles be laid?

Nostalgia and Adultery

"Where were you in '62?" the ads for "American Graffiti" ask. Wherever I was I recall doing my best to stay out of earshot of the kind of Alan Freed-style music which washes over the film from start to finish as pervasively as the very air that's breathed.

The Idea of Fraternity in America, by Wilson Carey McWilliams

This enormous volume, "pretentious" and "intolerably long" by its author's admission, is really two distinct books bound together.

Travelers, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written seven novels and three collections of short stories, yet she has remained relatively unknown in this country.

The Dialectical Imagination, by Martin Jay

On February 3, 1923 a decree of the Education Ministry marked the official creation of the Institut fir Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt, Germany.

The Country and the City, by Raymond Williams

Early in The Country and the City Raymond Williams quotes a couplet by George Crabbe (from The Village, 1783): "No longer truth, though shown in verse, disdain, But own the Village Life a Life of pain." The lines are an apology for pastoral poetry's idyllic picture of the countryside.

Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, by Donald Bogle; The Only Good Indian ... The Hollywood Gospel, by Ralph and Natasha Friar

The distinctions between these two books are infinitely more important than their similarities.

SDS, by Kirkpatrick Sale

In April 1967 someone at the National Office of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) came across a cartoon showing dozens of smiling children fleeing through a school gate and six angry guards helplessly chasing after them.

Understanding Watergate

Key 73

Teaching Values

From 1967 to 1973: The Arab-Israeli Wars

Every Arab-Israeli war has been haunted by the previous one. In the end, each of these wars--1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 may be thought of as extended battles in a long war. For this reason, a fuller understanding of one can contribute much to a fuller understanding of all.

Kissinger & the Politics of Detente

Henry Kissinger's appointment as Secretary of State, confirmed by Congress last September, was accompanied by a wave of publicity unprecedented in recent American history. Never before on similar occasions had there been such interest, so much comment for and against, and it was probably also the first time that the personality of a future Secretary of State had attracted several biographers even before he took office.

Auden's Achievement

For a long time before his death, the fact that a homosexual was the greatest living English poet had the status of an open secret: anybody with better than a passing knowledge of W. H. Auden's writing must have been in on it, and in his later essays he was teetering on the verge of declaring himself outright. Nevertheless, Auden is a long way beyond being a crackable case.

Men, Women, and the Parental Imperative

"Beware of the man who praises liberated women; he is planning to quit his job." Thus, Erica Jong in a recent poem. The sharp attacks on men launched by radical feminists have so far been answered, when they have been answered at all, mainly by women.

Images of Einstein

Albert Einstein is probably the only 20th-century scientist whose name would be recognized by a majority of the population.

TV Verite

Since the release of "Titicut Follies" in 1967, the work of the documentary filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman, has been receiving consistent, and consistently favorable, attention.

The Soviet Cage, by William Korey

Large numbers of people in this country have by now become aware of the situation of Soviet Jewry, yet one may question how well this situation is understood.

The Politics of Lying, by David Wise

A great deal of attention of any kind invariably ends up making a social class nervous.

The Ferrari in the Bedroom, by Jean Shepherd

Jean Shepherd, from Indiana originally, is a radio monologist whose show has been broadcast "live" every night for years by a strong AM station in New York City.

Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, by Emil L. Fackenheim; If Not Now, When? by Mordecai M. Kaplan and Arthur A. Cohen

God and the Jews, world history and its creator, pure eternity and suffering temporality--these are the poles which define the scope of Jewish theology and within which the arguments of Jewish thinkers must be situated.

Ethnic Enterprise in America, by Ivan H. Light

The magazine "Black Enterprise" recently had occasion to list the one hundred largest black-owned and -managed businesses in the country.