The State of the Novel

Egalitarianism

On Jealousy

Plato, Marx & Kaufmann

Prisons and Attica

The Philosopher

Oil

Watergate and the Legal Order

Months ago, when the scandals of the Nixon administration were fewer and relatively simpler, there was some self-serving talk of a commonalty of error among the Watergate perpetrators, as the arresting officers might have called them, and the radical Left of the 1960's. The point was most vividly if plaintively called to attention by Jeb Stuart Magruder.

Is Israel Losing Popular Support?

Perhaps the clearest lesson of the Yom Kippur war is that Israel is now almost absolutely dependent on the United States for its very existence. The firmness of the American commitment to Israel has, then, become more crucial than ever. How firm is that commitment?

Prisoners of War

A trip to New York City, to see what light may be thrown by recent returnees from Vietnam upon a kind of psychological warfare peculiar to the 20th century.

Family Reunion

Social critics often decry the absence of ritual in our culture, noting that our hunger for ritual leads us to devise all manner of pomp and circumstance, some of it as foolish as a conclave of Shriners in funny hats, some of it as ominous as a troop of Ku Klux Klanners in hoods. By far the most powerful ritual to celebrate the institution of the family is the family reunion, a gathering of interconnected family units, spanning several generations, related by blood or marriage.

The World of I.L. Peretz

It is customary to speak of three figures -Mendele Mokher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz-as the founders of modern Yiddish literature, but for those readers who must encounter them mainly through the rough lens of English translation, they are by no means equally accessible or attractive.

That Old-Time Religion

Developments in American popular religion in the past five years seem designed to confound anyone's confidence in his own prophetic powers.

O'Neill Reconsidered

I first saw Long Day's Journey into Night in Paris. The time was the late 50's and some sort of international theater festival was being put on by the French government, the purpose of which was, I believe, to bring together productions that were currently on the stages of various countries and treat them to a month or so of multi-lingual repertory.

Season's End

Around September every year, I begin to recognize the symptoms. My palms sweat. I'm nervous, irritable. Above all, I'm filled with a powerful premonition that I'll soon be seeing more movies than I want to, and enjoying them less.

Economics and the Public Purpose, by John Kenneth Galbraith

Success must be very frustrating for Professor Galbraith. He has now spent a lifetime attacking the "conventional wisdom" of society, criticizing his fellow economists for clinging to outmoded ideas, and advocating a variety of heterodox policies.

The Oath, by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel has been working at his fiction of suffering for a quarter of a century. His personal project has been to keep the wounds of Auschwitz open by repeatedly pouring the salt of new literary reconstructions upon them, and thus to prevent the collective Jewish memory from quietly letting the wounds heal.

Responses, by David Cairns

The music critic is the professional listener, presumed to have an equipment of perception, judgment, and taste which the nonprofessional listeners who read him don't have, which he uses to make them aware of what they might miss in a piece of music or a performance.

Roberto Clemente: Batting King, by Arnold Hano

What comes to mind first, and most vividly, is the way, during his last years, Roberto Clemente would roll and jerk his head preparatory to stepping into the batter's box.

Family and Community in the Kibbutz, by Yonina Talmon

With certain exceptions, academic interest in the kibbutz has by and large not been impelled by a desire to understand the internal workings of this institution, still less by a desire to comprehend how it grew out of a Jewish society, or what its role is in the national life of Israel.

Kind and Usual Punishment, by Jessica Mitford

Scarcely a single social critic has a good word for the American penal system; its glaring defects, virtually all agree, stand in urgent need of change.

Male and Female

Kissinger & Foreign Policy

Ethnic Enterprise

The Road to Geneva

In one way or another, every phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been linked with the United Nations. The current Geneva conference is but the latest in this tradition-with a difference.

America, Europe, and the Middle East

The October war in the Middle East was a Pearl Harbor, an explosion which revealed acute tensions between reality and the models for reality which have dominated many minds. Like a flash of lightning, it illuminated the contours of a landscape large sectors of European and American opinion, in particular, were firmly resolved to ignore.

Do the Arabs Want Peace?

Every Arab-Israeli war is immediately followed, at least in the West, by sharply heightened expectations (soon dashed) of a long-term peaceful solution to the conflict. Now, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, we are again gripped by the great expectation that peace is about to come to the Middle East.

The Problem of Euthanasia

Although the death of close friends and relatives may have vanished as a vivid firsthand experience for most of us, almost everyone knows, or knows of, someone who is being kept alive by machines or tubes. Euthanasia means deliberate intervention in this process.

Berrigan's Diatribe

Surely one of the most shocking documents of American response to the latest Middle East war is Daniel Berrigan's October 19, 1973 speech to the Association of Arab University Graduates.

The Presidency & Professor Schlesinger

"This book," Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. tells us in the single clear statement of his theme in The Imperial Presidency, "deals essentially with the shift in the constitutional balance.

A Crown of Feathers, by Isaac Bashevis Singer; A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, edited by Ruth R. Wisse

In the mind of the English-speaking reader, Isaac Bashevis Singer stands almost alone, the single representative of Yiddish writing; as a result of this uniqueness he has both benefited and suffered from the peculiarly awed and mystified response that might well be accorded a literary Martian.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment, by Michael Meltsner

We are a litigious people, and we relish legal argument. We have, moreover, a Constitution which, as construed by the Supreme Court, may compel or prohibit political decisions which in other countries are entirely in the hands of politicians.

Pentimento, by Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman's second volume of autobiographical pieces has its ups and downs, but on the whole it is really bad-there's no getting around that.

Stay of Execution: A Sort of Memoir, by Stewart Alsop

Stewart Alsop is the author of a number of books on contemporary American politics and has been a columnist for Newsweek since 1968.

A Journal of the Plague Years, by Stefan Kanfer

In 1947, with World War II over and the cold war begun, the House Committee on Un-American Activities began investigations into what a former member, the anti-Semitic John Rankin, had called "one of the most dangerous plots ever investigated for the overthrow of the government."

1967 and 1973

Soviet Dissidence

O'Neill

Evaluating Kissinger

Public Opinion and Israel

The Specter of Eugenics

One of the often noted anomalies of our society is its capacity to develop extraordinary new technologies while failing to find ways to perform elementary services in a minimally decent fashion. Indeed, whether or not biomedicine's immediate practical significance has been exaggerated, the hopes, fears, plans, and prophecies it has provoked are themselves an illuminating avenue of entry into some of the more important fads and fallacies of current moral outlooks.

Israel After the War: 1 Peace With Egypt?

Any discussion of the current prospects for peace between Israel and the Arab countries has to begin by rehearsing the history of the Middle East between the Six-Day War of June 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of October 1973.

Israel After the War: 2 Back to Abnormal

Yom Kippur in Israel will never be the same again, at least not for my generation, whose sense of the world came from two decisive experiences: first the Holocaust, then the establishment of the Jewish state.

Israel After the War: 3 The Need for Political Change

David Ben-Gurion was dying before the fighting had stopped, and there were few in Israel-at any rate among the older half of the population-who failed to comment that his death marked the end of an epoch with almost sublime precision. What kind of epoch it was in contrast to the one that had now begun it is still much too early to say. But the contrast may come to appear a sharp one.

England in Crisis

These are exceptionally gloomy and exceptionally perplexing days in Britain. Indeed, the gloom and the perplexity are linked.

Literary Terrorism

"After the national toasts had been given, the first official toast of the day was the Old Man of the Mountains-drunk in solemn silence.... The next toast was-the Jewish Sicarii.

Spinoza and the Colonel

A few summers ago a Jewish scholar was in Germany, doing research in the family papers of a former colonel in the Wehrmacht. When he was through, the scholar prepared to leave and thanked his host. "Tell me," said the colonel, do Jews still pray in synagogues?" The curiosity was understandable, in a descendant of Moses Mendelssohn.

The Myth of Malcolm Lowry

Oscar Wilde once suggested that it was second-rate artists who were most interesting as personalities; in the case of greater artists, he implied, their fascinating eccentricities were subsumed in their work. Malcom Lowry is one of the cases in which Wilde appears to have been proved wrong.

“The Exorcist” and its Audience

Though I saw The Exorcist before it opened, I saw it with an audience which filled a large theater, and I was aware while the film was being shown of sharing in a rare experience: the experience of seeing a film which has its audience reacting as one, completely in the palm of its hand.

Burr, by Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal once described himself as a "border lord" in the "dying kingdom of literature." While the kingdom may in fact be dying, Vidal's rank in it is of course far more baronial than his modest trope suggests.

Paradise Lost, by Emma Rothschild

For almost as long as anyone can remember, the automobile industry has been the primary symbol of American economic power and technological advancement, even as cars themselves have long been symbols of their owners' prosperity.

The Mask Jews Wear, by Eugene B. Borowitz

Every so often some development on the American-Jewish scene is hailed as yet another indication that American Jewry has come of age.

The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution; Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny, by Richard B. Morris

We have become so accustomed in recent years to discounting American political leaders' professions of concern for the rights of all mankind, that we probably find it difficult to take seriously the idea that the American Revolution was not only a struggle for independence but a movement for fundamental political and social change both in America and throughout the world.

The Seduction of the Spirit, by Harvey Cox

Har Cox's first book, The Secular City, sold a half-million copies and was the most widely discussed book on religion of the 1960's. In that work Cox set himself against the increasingly common portrayal of the city as an environment hostile to man.

The Devil and John Foster Dulles, by Townsend Hoopes

The full-length biography is a serviceable if somewhat elaborate tool of political exposition, and Mr. Hoopes is candid in revealing to us right at the beginning exactly what kind of ax he means to grind.

Watergate and the Law

World Politics

Religion in a Free Society

Comprehending the Holocaust

Liberated Marriage

The End of the Postwar Era

When the Egyptians captured the thinly-held Bar-Lev Line, they shattered more than the illusions which a great victory had nurtured in Israel. They destroyed a pervasive illusion that most of us had clung to: the illusion that the postwar world, as it had come into being twenty-five years earlier, would somehow remain intact-with changes, of course, but in its essence, intact.

Journalism and Truth

The problem of journalism in America proceeds from a simple but inescapable bind: journalists are rarely, if ever, in a position to establish the truth about an issue for themselves, and they are therefore almost entirely dependent on self-interested "sources" for the version of reality that they report.

Is Isolationism Possible?

A small power restricts its ambitions to physical survival and the preservation of its legal independence and its institutions. A great power, over and above physical security, moral survival, and the well-being of its inhabitants, acts to achieve an ill-defined purpose, which I should call the maintenance or creation of a favorable international environment.

Sylvia Plath Reconsidered

As a general rule, no writer is responsible for the vagaries of his posthumous literary reputation. Sylvia Plath, martyr and archetype in the imagination of many, dangerously courted some portion of the blame for these irrelevant labels in more than one aspect of her poetry.

Nuclear Strategy: The New Debate

For many years there has been a broad consensus on strategic policy among academics, professional strategists, and their intellectual clientele in the media, Congressional staffs, and in many parts of the Executive. A majority in all these groups agrees that the only proper strategic doctrine for the United States is McNamara's "mutual assured destruction."

Emancipation and Jewish Studies

Modern Jewish experience, to be fully understood, must be viewed under the aspect of emancipation, that process, starting in the late 18th century, whereby the Jews of Western and Central Europe achieved civic and social rights, thus paving the way for their entry into the larger society.

Stalin Under Western Eyes

A Western scholar studying Russia after 1917 (or China after 1949) is in many ways in a worse position than a historian studying ancient Babylonia or Egypt under the Pharaohs.

Reviewing Plays

When G. B. Shaw retired as drama critic for the Saturday Review, he told his readers that he had come to feel, because of the narrow life led by a theater reviewer, like a goose with one foot nailed to the ground.

Four Reforms, by William F. Buckley, Jr.

"Give it up" was John Kenneth Galbraith's advice, William Buckley reported in Cruising Speed. "The whole thing. National Review, journalism, television, radio, lecturing. Come to the Academy and write books. It is only books that count."

A History of Jewish Costume, by Alfred Rubens

The very idea of Jewish costume seems a little ridiculous at first glance (a caftan and shtreimel? custom-tailored suits? rags? mink?), but Alfred Rubens has made a most satisfying attempt to organize and describe the extraordinary variety of Jewish dress in history.

Mental Institutions in America, by Gerald Grob

History may not travel in cycles, but interpretations of history generally do. The last decade especially has been a fertile period for historical revisionism, not least in the area of social institutions and public policy.

Closing Time, by Norman O. Brown

In 1959 Norman O. Brown published Life Against Death, an attempt to take Freud's principles beyond Freud, to explain how man had been enchained by his repressions, and how he might be freed from them, to be resurrected into a kind of pan-corporeal sexuality.

The Americans: The Democratic Experience, by Daniel J. Boorstin

After fifteen years and three quarters of a million words, Daniel J. Boorstin has completed his trilogy, The Americans.

The Arab Mind

Euthanasia

Israel Between the Wars

The USSR & the Middle East

Capital Punishment

Yiddish Language

Liberalizing the Churches

Daniel Berrigan

Was Woodrow Wilson Right?

It is fifty years, since Woodrow Wilson died, but it does not seem fifty years: more like two-hundred-fifty. We are uncomfortable with Wilson in the 20th century, he seems more the kind of man who came early rather than late in our national life when of a sudden we were to find that far from being the youngest of governments we had become virtually the oldest. Yet none would disagree that he shaped this century as no other American has done.

The Real Solzhenitsyn

The full text of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Open Letter to the Soviet Leaders was first published on March 3 by the London Times, which described it as "a testament of astonishing power, with uncanny relevance to our own problems in the West." It is worth trying to understand, both for what it tells us about him and in order to revise certain faulty Western perceptions of recent Soviet events.

Farewell to Oil?

With their uncorrupted faith in the sublime dynamics of perfect competition, the editorialists of the Economist in London have been proclaiming a coming age of energy abundance in which oil producers will come hat in hand to sell their stuff at declining prices. According to this bastion of classic English liberalism, the present expectations of ever-higher oil and energy prices caused by increasing scarcity are based on the "third-rate political economy of linear projections," which take no account of the inevitable reactions to high prices and their long-run effect on the market.

Building Blocks

A story.

The Trouble With France

More than a century ago, Alexis de Tocqueville said that "the French constitute the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation in Europe, and the best qualified in turn to become an object of admiration, hatred, pity or terror, but never of indifference." More recently the French have not been especially brilliant or especially dangerous, and have inspired neither terror nor admiration. Yet it is still impossible to be indifferent to France.

Is There a New Anti-Semitism?

American Jews have been experiencing "a certain anxiety" since about 1967. General political violence was then at a peak.

Quotas and Soviet Jewry

Although quotas linked to the proportion of a given ethnic group in the population have governed admission to the universities in the Soviet Union for more than two decades, in the past few years it has begun to take a greater and greater toll.

Our Best-Known Neglected Novelist

John Hawkes is perhaps this nation's best-known neglected novelist.

Cagney & Other Movie Stars

He moved more gracefully than any other actor in Hollywood," Kenneth Tynan said of him, and excluding only Chaplin, Keaton, and Astaire, he couldn't have been speaking about anyone but James Cagney.

The American Condition, by Richard N. Goodwin

The first purpose of philosophy is to clarify; the purpose of rhetoric is to arouse. In this murky but mellifluous book, Richard Goodwin, who once wrote speeches for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, has aspired to philosophy but produced only rhetoric.

Songs of Jerusalem and Myself, by Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai was born in Germany in 1924, and in 1936 emigrated to Palestine, where he eventually fought in the Palmach during the War of Independence.

Fragments of the Century, by Michael Harrington

Almost a decade ago, in 1965, Daniel Callahan edited a brace of autobiographical essays by "young Catholic leaders," including Andrew M. Greeley, Wilfrid Sheed, Garry Wills, and almost twenty others.

H. G. Wells: A Biography, by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie

H. G. Wells was the son of a professional cricketer and of a housekeeper to a wealthy family. Mrs. Wells, a pious and melancholy woman, had one great ambition for her youngest son.

Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company, by James R. Mellow; Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas, edited by Edward Burns

Gertrude Stein! The name rings like a bell announcing a procession of the avant-garde, heralding, in fact, the most striking figure in that most exemplary avant-garde, the Paris of the early 20th century and l'entre deux guerres.

Plain Speaking, by Merle Miller

It was only to be expected, once the spirit of nostalgia entered politics, that its first victim should be the memory of Harry S Truman.

Eugenics

Israel After the War

Spinoza's Jewishness

Detente

Not since World War II has there been such an era of ill feeling between Western Europe and the United States as there has been in the past year. According to so experienced and respected a student of international affairs as George F. Kennan, the United States "now has relations with the Soviet Union fully as cordial as those with most of the European NATO members"-which is another way of saying that we are no more cordial with the latter than with the former.

The Truants: “Partisan Review” in the 40's

Philip Rahv is dead, and Mary McCarthy has given us a moving tribute, a public love-letter to redeem her cruel caricature of him years ago in The Oasis. Delmore Schwartz is also dead. Death begins to gather us into a generation. A young sociologist, Steve Longstaff, has been going the rounds taping us on our memories of Partisan Review in the late 40's and 50's.

Holy Land

Shortly after the end of the October war, my wife, I, and our six-month-old daughter moved into the house we had built on nearly an acre of land in the hilltop village of Z. There are no foxes on our present acre in Israel, and while our hilltop location allows us to see for tens of miles over the better part of the compass dial, one can practically throw a stone from our house to any of our borders.

The Fear of Affluence

In this time of shortage there is, God knows, no shortage of prophets of doom. It is a relief, therefore, when someone like James Reston, with the weight of the Times behind him, can look the grim situation squarely in the face and still see the bright side of it, as he did in one of his columns last November.

Mandelstam's Witness

There is something oddly legendary about the life and posthumous career of Osip Mandelstam, as though he had died not in a Soviet concentration camp in 1938, with a death certificate issued in due form by the totalitarian bureaucracy, but in some shadowy recess of medieval mystery.

Bright Events

Since most of what is to follow will be a happy report, I will begin with a short diatribe so that I will be able to sustain my present theatrical enthusiasm without having to anticipate sour qualifications.

Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram

Writing in 1963 about Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt invoked the banality of evil. Eichmann was, it seemed to Miss Arendt, a petty bureaucrat, tragically given power over the lives of thousands of helpless people.

The Question of Palestine 1914-1918, by Isaiah Friedman

The triumph of 1948 turned Zionism-and Zion-from an affair of a distinct minority of Jews to the concern of all.

There Could Have Been Peace, by Jon Kimche

For Jon Kimche, the recognized enfant terrible of Zionist journalism, this book is par for the course.

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, by Samuel Katz

This book has little to do with military strategy or tactics, yet Mr. Katz has given it an appropriate title.

The Wonder-Worker, by Dan Jacobson

Dan Jacobson's new novel The Wonder-Worker is a highly unusual, exhilarating book, and in a subtle, understated way ultimately so radical that it is at first difficult to connect with the author's previous works.

The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War, by Daniel Aaron

Daniel Aaron has written a book about the impact of the Civil War on American writers in order to demonstrate the perfectly valid thesis that the war actually had very little impact on American writers.

The Age of the Avant-Garde, by Hilton Kramer

The explosion of artistic talent in this country in the 1940's and 50's, with the accompanying thrill of America's suddenly finding itself at the center of the art world, raised an especially acute question as to the proper role in all this of the art critic.

Peace in the Middle East?

Sylvia Plath

Apologetics

Drama Critics

“The Exorcist”

Did the Press Uncover Watergate?

A sustaining myth of journalism holds that every great government scandal is revealed through the work of enterprising reporters who by one means or another pierce the official veil of secrecy. The natural tendency of journalists to magnify the role of the press in great scandals is perhaps best illustrated by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's autobiographical account of how they "revealed" the Watergate scandals.

Against the Neo-Malthusians

The past few years have seen a spate of claims that the modern era of population and economic growth is about to be halted by scarcity of resources and environmental pollution. Like any diversified group of thinkers, the neo-Malthusians differ considerably among themselves, particularly on the question of which sort of catastrophe will hit us first and how soon.

Israel-With Terrorists

Inside the Athens airport, the baggage of a small group of passengers is being subjected to a minute search by security agents (an opening of screw-top jars, a running of hands along linings). Although these passengers joke and compare notes, they suffer from a mild hilarity caused by nervousness; in fact they obviously share the El Al anxiety which seems so out of place in an airport redolent of Greek laissez-faire.

Vonnegut & His Audience

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons is the name of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s new book, a collection of essays, reviews, speeches, etc. Only a writer with Vonnegut's power base could get a book of occasional writings published today, let alone get away with giving it such a title.

Crime and the Criminologists

The "social-science view" of crime is thought by many, especially its critics, to assert that crime is the result of poverty, racial discrimination, and other privations, and that the only morally defensible and substantively efficacious strategy for reducing crime is to attack its "root causes" with programs that end poverty, reduce discrimination, and meliorate privation.

Voices of Orthodoxy

For as long as one can remember, Orthodoxy has been regarded as the poor relation of American Judaism, a sectarian minority pursuing its own parochial concerns, less numerous, less affluent, altogether less "popular" than its Reform and Conservative counterparts. But all this is now changing.

Coppola's Progress

The Conversation is Francis Ford Coppola's sixth film as a director, and something of a departure in a career which seems to grow not more but less easy to pin down.

Choosing Our King, by Michael Novak

In 1970 Michael Novak went on leave from his academic post as professor of philosophy and religious studies at Old Westbury to work as a speech writer for Sargent Shriver, who was campaigning that fall for Democratic Congressional candidates.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, by Grace Paley

The first collection of Grace Paley's short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man, appeared in 1959, and was greeted with lavish critical enthusiasm.

The Provincials, by Eli N. Evans

Eli Evans is clearly the man to have done this very good book-part biography, part history, part sociology-about Southern Jews.

Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, by Fawn M. Brodie

The time has come, it seems, to erect a new tombstone for Thomas Jefferson.

Ethnic Conflict and Political Development, by Cynthia H. Enloe

Ethnic nationalism, with its accompanying toll of racial and religious conflict, would seem to be on the rise everywhere in the world today.

Elsewhere, Perhaps, by Amos Oz

Amos Oz has emerged in recent years as the best known of the younger Israeli novelists and a leading spokesman for the generation of sabras who grew up along with the State of Israel.

The Price of Perfect Justice, by Macklin Fleming

Ex California semper aliquid novum. This time it is a book about the defects of American justice.

The Role of the Press

Nuclear Strategy

The New Anti-Semitism

The Gathering Storm

Almost two years ago, in October 1972, Victor Zorza announced in a column in the Washington Post the coming of a new "golden age." Of Mr. Zorza's ten years that might be needed to convince the skeptics, only two have passed and some will argue that all we need is a little patience. But the interim balance is not encouraging.

Notes on American Innocence

The first American I met outside was a professor of sociology with whom I struck up a conversation on a Roman streetcar we lived in Rome while waiting for our American visas.

Stefa and Pomeranz

A story.

Lawyers at the Bar

In recent months the legal profession has been under the most severe attack in years-from the press, from the politicians, and even from itself. Of course lawyers as a class have rarely received a kind word from anyone.

Culture and the Abyss

No matter what the range and virtues of English literature, it is not a literature notable for tragedy. Shakespeare and a few others aside, even when we come to the "darker" literature in English more often than not the writer turns out to be not so much "English" as Gaelic.

On Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss died in October 1973, at the age of seventy-four. His name is known chiefly to two groups of scholars whose interests do not normally converge, political scientists and specialists medieval Jewish thought.

Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery; Time on the Cross: Evidence and Methods-A Supplement, by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman

The main themes of Time on the Cross are already familiar: they have been presented in book reviews, in newspaper reports, in television programs.

The Future of the Jewish Community in America, edited by David Sidorsky

Three years ago the American Jewish Committee, sensing a need for a general re-evaluation of policy, established three study-commissions to examine the relations of American Jews with the international community.

Seduction and Betrayal, by Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick's new collection of essays, all first published in the New York Review of Books, is a work of diverse and contradictory features.

Alive, by Piers Paul Read

There are many opportunities for instruction about the psychology of survival in this story of sixteen Uruguayan young men who lived for 71 days on the frozen slopes of the Andes following the crash of their plane bound for Chile for a rugby match.

Moses Mendelssohn, by Alexander Altmann

The name of Moses Mendelssohn-philosopher, man of letters, "Father of Jewish Emancipation"-is undoubtedly familiar to anyone who has even a cursory acquaintance with the highlights of Jewish history.

An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, by Robert L. Heilbroner

Only a decade or so ago it was still fashionable to look at the competition between the United States and Russia, between a capitalist society based on a market economy and a planned society controlling the means of production and distribution, as a race between two rival economic systems.

The Great School Wars, by Diane Ravitch

Since 1805, when New York's leading families established the Free School Society, the city's schools have played a social, as well as an educational, role.

Woodrow Wilson

Russian Realities

Oil

American Catholics

The Definition of Palestine

Science and Art

Kissinger & the Yom Kippur War

What happened in October 1973? Or rather, what happened in Washington between October 6, 1973-when fighting erupted on the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights-and 3:30 A.M. on Saturday, October 13, when the definitive orders to start the USAF airlift of arms to Israel were finally issued?

Delmore: A 30's Friendship and Beyond

"We were never more free than under the Occupation." Change the last word to Depression, and you have the truth of the 30's-at least for some of us.

Ethnicity and the Schools

It is not easy to find the words that would accurately describe the current wave of ethnic feeling which seems now to be sweeping over America. Even the word "wave" may strike some as exaggerated.

Erik Erikson's America

The name of Erik Erikson has been associated ever since the 1940's with a number of major innovations in the field of psychoanalytic theory. He is most closely identified with the concept of ego identity but he is also the chief begetter of the new field of psychohistory.

The Idea of Decadence

Nowadays, when people actually line up to see an exhibition of paintings by Gustave Moreau or Edvard Munch, or to say goodbye to Berlin for the umpteenth time it might seem otiose to inquire whether our Western culture, as a whole, is decadent.

Everyman in Chinatown

Some months ago, in a generally unenthusiastic survey of the highly acclaimed work of some young American directors, I mentioned Terrence Malick's Badlands, one of the great successes of the last New York Film Festival, and a film I hadn't the seen.

Vested Interests

All my childhood was spent among Communists, in Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A.

Political Organizations, by James Q. Wilson

As recently as a decade ago discussion of American government by political scientists was dominated (though never preempted) by a set of interlocking propositions then called pluralism.

My Life as a Man, by Philip Roth

In 1961, Philip Roth published in these pages a remarkable essay entitled "Writing American Fiction" which attracted considerable attention at the time and has since come to be regarded as something of a classic critical statement.

Invitation to the Talmud, by Jacob Neusner

Sir Moses Montefiore was supposedly once asked by a Gentile friend: "If the commandments of Judaism and Christianity are the same, wherein lies the difference?" "The difference," he is said to have replied, "is that we obey them."

Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Levi-Strauss

There is no trick in matching the name Levi-Strauss with structuralism.

The Pope's Jews, by Sam Waagenaar; The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 1922-1945, by Anthony Rhodes

One of the more neglected facts concerning Italian Fascism is that 10 percent of the country's Jews joined the party, attracted by the same strident nationalism that attracted other Italians.

The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory of Radical Activism, by Philip Rosenberg

The epigraph to this latest and much-praised book on Carlyle is a quotation from Sir John Seeley: "Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalized by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics."

Detente

Politics & Poetry

Theories of Crime

The British in Palestine

Watergate

Science & Authority

Emancipation

Why Ethnicity?

Ethnicity seems to be a new term. In the sense in which we use it-the character or quality of an ethnic group-it does not appear in the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Still, one may wonder how useful this new term really is.

Guerrillas and Terrorists

Guerrilla warfare is as old as war itself: according to the Anastasi Papyrus, the Hittite King Mursilis complained, "The irregulars did not dare to attack me in the daylight and preferred to fall on me by night." Although whole libraries have been written on guerrilla warfare since it was rediscovered in the Second World War, the literature is of little help in the search for a new definition.

Women and Success

In 1911 when Martha Graham was seventeen, she went with her father to see Ruth St. Denis dance. Stories like this come to mind as a background for the contemporary preoccupation with women's opportunities for achievement in the professions and public life.

From Plato to Las Vegas

I wrote the above formula while I was a student of philosophy in Munich. The formula seemed at the moment of its conception to be a legitimate way of describing Nothing, Nullity, Nothingness, or any of the other theatrical concepts of total absence of matter and spirit, human or divine.

What Jewish Studies Can Do

"At a time of gathering-in, spread out"-a suggestively enigmatic pronouncement of one of the early rabbis-is peculiarly applicable to the present situation of Jewish studies in the American universities.

Susan Sontag's Israel

Unintentionally and successfully, the Israelis have resisted the efforts of moviemakers to capture the drama of their lives, be it in so-called "documentaries" or in made-up treatments written for the occasion or based on novels or short stories.

On Liberty and Liberalism, by Gertrude Himmelfarb

This book is an intriguing combination of textual criticism, biographical sleuthing, and ideological commentary.

A Musical Season, by Andrew Porter

"Editors," as Bernard Shaw wrote, "by some law of Nature which still baffles science, are always ignorant of music"; and so "an editor who can tell at a glance whether... a leading article... is the work of a skilled hand or not" will accept from a music critic "every conceivable blunder and misdemeanor that a journalist can commit."

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig

Questions of respective merit aside, the quick popularity achieved by both these books is surely symptomatic of more than purely literary preferences.

Lincoln Steffens, by Justin Kaplan

We should not be surprised to find Lincoln Steffens undergoing a modest revival, for there is much in his career and character that is apposite to our own situation and congenial in principle to the political sentiments of today's liberals and radicals.

Three American Moralists, by Nathan A. Scott, Jr.

There can be no doubt that the liberal, literary intelligence that came to maturity after World War II has declined in prestige and influence during the past decade.

Ladies and Gentlemen-Lenny Bruce, by Albert Goldman

Several years after Lenny Bruce was found dead in his bathroom, a needle sticking out of his right arm, Albert Goldman set about to write his biography in collaboration with Lawrence Schiller, a man who had, like Goldman, written a good deal on the subject of Bruce while he was alive.

Growth and Population

Mandelstam as Poet

Justice and the Courts

Moving North

Orthodoxy

In Defense of Monogamy

No way of life has been more glowingly celebrated in recent years than that of the "liberated" single male. Yet the truth is that men without wives in America generally seem to have a far harder time of it than married men.

The Problem of Kenneth Clark

Kenneth Clark has been so frequently celebrated in public that one scarcely knows by now just which of his burdens may be more difficult for him to bear-the weight of his collected honors or the authority that has been settled upon him by the gracing touch of officiality.

Beggar Moon

A story.

Of Graves and Poets

It is no small part of the beauty of the so-called Protestant Cemetery in Rome that Keats is buried there. The word felicity comes to mind around this fact, because it is of that order of experience to be brought up against all the tough intellectual rigor, the nearly impossible demands of vision and fitness of thought, that went into his sense of "beauty" and could make it equate with "truth."

Moliere and Magic

Les Fourberies de Scapin is not one of Moliere's great plays. Put together to keep his troupe employed while they waited for the scenery to be prepared for Psyche, the elaborate tragedy-ballet that Louis XIV had ordered, it is a hodgepodge of borrowings and outright thefts.

The Importance of “Duddy Kravitz”

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a lumpy, styleless film made from a lumpy, styleless novel, yet it seems to me important.

Something Happened, by Joseph Heller

The famous hero of Joseph Heller's spectacularly successful first novel (Catch-22 has sold eight million copies in the thirteen years it took Heller to write this second novel) is residing today in the suburbs of Conneticut.

The Captive Dreamer, by Christian de la Maziere

Christian de la Maziere is the self-possessed young man in Marcel Ophuls's movie The Sorrow and the Pity who admits to having been a fascist during the war.

Pictures from a Brewery, by Asher Barash; The Agunah, by Chaim Grade

The Eastern European Jewish town, or shtetl, which survives today only as a vestige of the imagination, was the locale in which Yiddish literature first arose and from which it drew its first stock of characters and themes.

Religion and Revolution, by Guenter Lewy; Christianity, Judaism, and Revolution, by Wilfried Daim

The fascination which revolution once more exercises over Western intellectuals has inevitably made itself felt in theology, for reasons both obvious and obscure.

Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, by Steven Marcus

Marx continues to exert influence even-or especially-in countries without experience of revolutions undertaken in his name.

Kissinger & th Yom Kippur War

The Role of Lawyers

Weizmann

American Innocence

Ethnicity

Culture and the Present Moment: A Round-Table Discussion

Last September, Commentary, in conjunction with the Humanities Program of the Rockefeller Foundation, held an all-day symposium on the state of high culture in America at the present time. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion between all seven participants.

The Greening of Judaism

Seldom does the appearance of a book become a major public event, and rarer still is the book that can be singled out as marking a turning point of any kind in public experience; but this, within the world of American Jewry, has been the happy fate of a 319-page volume entitled The Jewish Catalog: A Do-It Yourself Kit.

Feminist Fiction

Unlike older forms of "woman's fiction," written not only by and about but primarily for women, a new kind of woman's novel that has been appearing with increasing frequency in recent years, avowedly "feminist" in orientation, has aspired to and won a place for itself in the literary mainstream.

Conversations in Cairo

A few hours outside Cairo, the captain of our BEA flight makes an announcement over the loudspeaker: fifty pieces of luggage have been left behind at London airport. One of the passengers, an American, bangs his fist against the armrest in a rage.

Plural Establishment

In two months three substantial articles bearing directly or indirectly on the New Ethnicity have appeared in Commentary. Ethnicity seems to be topical.

The Power Broker, by Robert A. Caro

The sheer size of this book is the first sign that something is amiss.

The Last Exodus, by Leonard Schroeter

Leonard Schroeter's The Last Exodus ranks among the important books of Jewish interest in recent years.

Love-Hate Relations, by Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender's Love-Hate Relations can be taken in at least two ways.

Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, by David McClellan

Karl Marx had a very hard life. Born in 1818, he spent virtually his entire political existence in exile from his native Germany.

Who's Minding the Children?, by Margaret Steinfels

"People seem to feel that because children are little things, they are of little consequence"-so observed Boston's Infant School Society in 1828 in its abortive effort to stir public interest and secure government financing for its enterprise.

Justice Under Fire, by Joseph W. Bishop, Jr.

In recent years, for reasons having to do largely with U.S. military conduct in the Vietnam war, public discussion has focused in a particularly heated fashion on the question of military justice.