The New Ethinicity

On "Delmore"

India

Susan Sontag and Israel

The Work of Levi-Strauss

Self and Ego

Leo Strauss

Oil: The Issue of American Intervention

Do the changes that have occurred in the world oil market during the past year, and the world's response to those changes qualify as a "significant event"? To most observers, the answer would seem clear.

The Palestinians and the PLO

The name "Palestine" is first attested in the history of Herodotus, and appears in the works of later Greek and Latin writers. Palestine does not occur in the Old Testament. Palestine does not occur in the New Testament.

Driving Toward Jerusalem

The recounting of a journey through the West bank.

The Communard

A portrait of a young man.

The "New History"

Whatever advantages history may once have enjoyed, it is rapidly disburdening itself of them all. In fact, it seems bent upon transforming itself into something like sociology.

How Good is Alison Lurie?

There is some firm evidence in the five novels she has so far published that Alison Lurie should be a better novelist than she is.

Four Europeans

Caveat emptor. Around 1960, when the Bergman bandwagon was gathering full steam, this writer made room for one more convert to climb aboard by jumping off. Since then, I've admired some of Bergman's films, and loathed some others.

Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene D. Genovese

The subject of Negro slavery exerts a peculiar fascination over contemporary American historians.

The Yom Kippur War: Israel and the Jewish People, edited by Moshe Davis

The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924-1941, by Sander A. Diamond

The Sociology of Emile Durkheim, by Robert A. Nisbet

Men and Marriage

Women and Success

Jewish Studies

Lenny Bruce

Torah and Talmud

Karl Marx

The Defense Budget and Israel

There is a huge and increasingly notorious contradiction at the very core of mainstream American Jewish political attitudes. The vast majority of American Jews passionately support Israel's struggle for survival and are permanently concerned for its security. At the same time, most American Jews are liberals, and qua liberals, they are prominent in calling for the "reordering of national priorities"-a slogan which in practice translates into the attempt to make further cuts in the defense budget and further to reduce America's general activism overseas.

A New International Order?

It is a matter of general agreement that traditional patterns of inequality in international society are widely challenged today. The contemporary challenge to inequality has been almost as sudden as it has been pervasive.

The Democrats' Dilemma

In most elections, it is said, people do not so much choose which candidates they are for as eliminate those they are against. On the face of it this notion seems adequately to explain both the 1972 Presidential election, and the mid-term election of 1974, when large majorities voted against Richard Nixon even though his name did not appear on the ballot. Still, the conventional analysis leaves much to be desired.

Christianity and the Jewish People

Solomon ben Moses was not an advocate of dialogue. For most medieval Jews, however, no matter what crises they may have had to endure, the identity was not one of them.

Visiting the Hirshhorn

Modern art is now officially in residence in the nation's capital: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has opened at last, in Gordon Bunshaft's round structure on the Mall in Washington.

Shtetl and Revolution

Paris in 1923 hardly seems a likely place for the gestation of a novel written in Hebrew that would offer a searching panoramic vision of the shtetl's disintegration in the historical maelstrom of the Russian Revolution.

The English Invasion

Each year the American theater season becomes less and less a result of native effort and more and more indebted to English ingenuity.

Peace in the Middle East?, by Noam Chomsky

Washington: The Indispensable Man, by James Thomas Flexner

This admirable biography is condensed from James Thomas Flexner's earlier four-volume work, which began to appear in 1965 and was finished two years ago.

W-3, by Bette Howland

Black Mafia, by Francis A.J. Ianni

Professor Ianni's thesis is that control of organized crime is slipping from the increasingly bourgeois and respectable Italian-Americans and is being taken over by Cuban, Puerto Rican, and black gangsters.

Jews and American Politics, by Stephen D. Isaacs; American Jews: Community in Crisis, by Gerald S. Strober

Social Science and Scholarship

"Duddy Kravitz"

Marx and Marxism

"The Agunah"

On "The Jewish Catalog"

The United States in Opposition

"We are far from living in a single world community," writes Edward Shils, "but the rudiments of a world society do exist." Among those rudiments, perhaps the most conspicuous, if least remarked, are the emerging views as to what kind of society it is.

Further Reflections on Oil & Force

Only a fool could address himself to so complex and novel a situation as the one we are presently confronted by in the oil crisis and believe that he has nothing to learn from those views which differ markedly-even radically-from his own.

Kabbalah

Popular handbooks of Kabbalah are not always very exact in their learning, and tend to be dangerously eager to mix Kabbalah up with nearly everything else in current religious enthusiasms, from Sufism to Hinduism

The People vs. the Interests

At its mini-convention in Kansas City in December, the Democratic party focused its attentions on economic issues, or it did so to the extent, at least, that the media and certain minority factions within the party allowed it to get beyond the sensitive problem of representation for racial minorities, women, and young people in party affairs. It is among the distinguishing characteristics of the American experience that economic issues and conflicts have normally been defined not in the rigorous class terminology of European Marxism, but rather in a more generalized populistic fashion.

On Teaching Politics Today

My relatives and other worthy people who still maintain a certain awe, tempered with skepticism, about higher education, are given to asking me what one can do with an advanced degree in political science.

Godfather II

I had some substantial reservations about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, though they were outweighed by my admiration for it.

Political Woman, by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

The study of women and politics poses a dilemma for anyone who wants to see more women in positions of political power.

Prisoner #7: Rudolf Hess, by Eugene K. Bird

As a young student in Munich A in 1920, Rudolf Hess joined the fledgling Nazi party, attracted by its strident policy of anti-Semitism and the charismatic personality of its leader, Adolf Hitler.

Anya, by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

Three Mobs: Labor, Church, and Mafia, by Wilfrid Sheed

For many years American Catholics, painfully aware of living in an immigrant ghetto, rough in manners and low in aspiration, awaited the coming of a generation of intellectuals who would be urbane, cosmopolitan, and witty.

Emancipation and Counter-Emancipation, edited by Abraham G. Duker and Meir Ben-Horin

Oil and Force

Politics and Planning

Stalin and the Jews

The United States & Israel

The United States has become the main front in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is not to say that the United States has for the past three decades been far from the struggle in the Middle East. What has happened, however, is that the United States itself has become the center of the struggle.

The Return of Heroin

On September 11, 1973, President Richard Nixon announced to a White House conference on the heroin problem that "we have turned the corner on drug addiction in the United States." Now, a year and a half later, it is no longer so clear that we have turned the corner.

Golden Age

Old Mrs. Alonzo, in a voice that scared the daylights out of you, called and asked me to come and see her in the Home. It was a gruff, deep, billy-goat croak (though male or female, you couldn't tell).

The Muse of Ocean Parkway

A story.

In Memory of Richard Tucker

In our house, during the war, we listened to the radio on Saturday nights, and at ten o'clock, nine o'clock Central Time, on Mutual, there was the Chicago Theater of the Air offering condensations of the great operas and operettas in English.

Burying the Hatchet

Having grown up in the depression, I share certain poignant experiences with many who were young in that American decade.

Our Actors and Theirs

At the Actors' Studio some years ago I listened to a discussion that had as its subject national styles of acting.

Global Reach, by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller

The subtitle of this book is "The Power of the Multinational Corporations," and its authors present their work as a serious and significant report on the broad and startlingly rapid growth of companies that operate as producers or sellers or both in a number of different countries.

Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, by Ladislas Farago

Aftermath deals with the thousands of Nazi war criminals who have found asylum-or at least a refuge-in South America since the end of World War II.

Freud: Living and Dying, by Max Schur

In a remarkably prescient essay, "Freud and the Crisis of our Culture"-first delivered as a Freud Anniversary Lecture at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1955-Lionel Trilling warned of a growing encroachment by the culture upon the individual's separate sense of self.

Ideas of Jewish History, edited by Michael A. Meyer

The aim of this volume is an excellent one-to assemble a selection of writings reflecting diverse conceptions of Jewish history (and, incidentally, of history in general), beginning with the biblical period and ending with Jewish historians of our own time.

Taking Sides, by Richard J. Whalen

That American political parties are pragmatic rather than ideological is not only a truism, it is also the premise of most standard interpretations of American politics.

The Palestinians

U.S. Defense Policy

Fear of Fiction

Historians

Vietnam: The Final Reckoning

At last, the final reckoning in Vietnam is at hand. Barring some unforeseen and unexpected reversal, the last act in what has seemed a never-ending drama has begun. How should we behave in the concluding phase of a conflict whose outcome we have for so long sought to influence? How should we act toward those we chose to support and whose destiny we presumed to guide?

The Revenge of the Philistines

Midway through the 1970's, it looks more and more as if the present decade is destined to become the graveyard of all those illusions and chimeras spawned in the radical culture of the 1960's.

Was the Holocaust Predictable?

Almost anyone who lived through the period of the Holocaust, observing it from either near or far, will readily testify that information concerning the Nazi murder of the Jews, when it first came out seemed absolutely unbelievable. In retrospect, however, as we look back on the exact sequence of events that led to the tragedy, we tend to conceive of it as the culmination of a predetermined and unavoidable march of destiny.

Tom Wicker's Attica

It is not widely recognized that there is more than one kind of racial attitude among whites in America. Not only do many of the most eminent blacks who have codified white-black relations derive from Southern culture, many of our most outspoken white liberals, too, those who are, as it were, almost fixated on this issue, have been Southerners: men like Lyndon Johnson, Bill Moyers, Garry Wills, Larry King, Willie Morris, Ramsey Clark, and Tom Wicker.

In Search of Moderate Egyptians

THE recent breakdown of Secretary of State Kissinger's step-by-step negoti- ations in the Middle East

Notes on Ravel

OF THOSE composers I most love, Ravel is the single one through whose sound I feel the man himself. The

Heroines & Their Hairdresser

IT SEEMS I waited too long to write my obligatory piece on "The Vanishing Heroine in Amer- ican Movies,"

Before the Fall, by William Safire

WILLIAM SAFIRE, a former Nixon speechwriter and now a columnist for the New York Times, has published

Into that Darkness, by Gitta Sereny

IN 1970, the Diisseldorf court sentenced Franz Stangl to life imprisonment for his role as com- mandant

Discriminations, by Dwight Macdonald

Discriminations is a ragtag col- lection of Dwight Macdon- ald's past feuilletons, essays, book reviews,

The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages; The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, by Samuel Eliot Morison

THE community of historians has long been ambivalent toward Samuel Eliot Morison. His scholar- ly credentials

Popular Culture and High Culture, by Herbert J. Gans

THERE are residual virtues in this slender, imperfect book that even the most critical reader cannot

Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918-1933, by Walter Laqueur

IN A rare moment of brutal can- dor, Adolf Hitler told repre- sentatives of the press in Novem- ber 1938

The Future of Israel

McGovern and the Democrats

Anti-Semitism in Film

"Paterson"

Leonard Schroeter

Dialogue

The Exposed American Jew

UNTIL four or five years ago, it could be argued-and I myself did so argue -that the concern of some

The New Despotism

WHEN the modern political commu- nity was being shaped at the end of the 18th century, it was thought

Translating the Ancients

IN A letter to Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig once remarked, "Only one who is profoundly convinced

Mahler for Moderns

CHANGES of fashion and public taste are often ephemeral and resistant to analysis, but they are among the more sensitive gauges of our collective internal weather.

Ivanov's "The Adventures of a Fakir"

ONE of the nicer things that happened to me when we moved was meeting Mr. Michael Pim, the extremely competent but reticent reference librarian at the Fairfax library on Gardner Street here in Los Angeles.

Liberals & Libertarians

TODAY WE know we must not interfere with consenting adults. We have pretty well established the principle G. B. Shaw's actress friend: do whatever you want, as long as you don't scare the horses.

The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

LucY DAWIDOWICZ' meticulous historical study is an indis- pensable book for understanding both the peculiar

Social Policy, by Richard Titmuss

THIS brief book consists of a group of introductory lectures which the late Richard Titmuss gave in similar

The Twenties, by Edmund Wilson

FEW writers have been so com- pelling that everything they wrote was certain to be of interest; and of

The Bankers, by Martin Mayer

IF, as we are still on occasion told, war is too serious to leave to generals, banking, Mr. Mayer sug-

Europe's Inner Demons, by Norman Cohn

TO BE against Norman Cohn is to speak up for sin. No other recent scholar has been as resource- GERALD

Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life, by Sidney Hook

FOR as long as I can remember I have read Sidney Hook's books and articles fairly systematically. Perhaps

The U.S. and the UN

Women in Politics

Post-Literary Theater

America Now: A Failure of Nerve?

IN recent months, a number of developments have occurred which seem enormously significant in their implications for the future of the United States in particular and of Western civilization in general.

Mediacracy, by Kevin P. Phillips

After Kevin Phillips wrote The Emerging Republican Majority in 1968, he went to work for Attorney General John Mitchell for two years to do what he could to help make his predictions come true.

The Jew in American Society, edited by Marshall Sklare; The Jewish Community in America, edited by Marshall Sklare

Marshall Sklare is unique among ranking sociologists in that his reputation is based exclusively on the scholarly study of American Jewish life.

The Life of Emily Dickinson, by Richard B. Sewall

This work, which recently won a National Book Award, is biography on the grand scale-two volumes and over 800 pages.

Mercier and Camier, by Samuel Beckett

Mercier and Camier was the first of Samuel Beckett's novels to be written in French. Completed in 1946, and withheld from publication until 1970, it is also the last of his longer works to have been translated into English.

The Ascent of Man, by Jacob Bronowski

The public image of science is in one of its periodic declines. For the past thirty years the fear aroused by the destructive powers of modern technology has cast the entire enterprise of science into the role of the chief villain of modern times.

The Third World

Defense Spending

Business and the People

On Richard Tucker

"Global Reach"

Oil and the West

Was Alger Hiss Guilty?

It is time to think again about Alger Hiss. While committees publish advertisements demanding posthumous justice for the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss acts for himself. Let me try to winnow answers to the two questions which are the subject of this article. What was the evidence? Does the evidence justify the verdict of guilt?

Israel's Rights and Arab Propaganda

It id one of the ironies of the Arab-Israeli conflict that the popular slogan, "the right of all peoples to self-determination," has become a battle cry raised, precisely, against the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. Strangely enough, on this particular battlefront there has been virtually no Israeli counterattack.

The West in Retreat

Intellectual confusion, Auguste Comte once wrote, is at the bottom of every historical crisis; the crisis of American foreign policy is no exception.

Notes on the Constitution

Two diverging traditions in the mainstream of Western political thought-one "liberal," the other "conservative"-have competed, and still compete, for control of the democratic process and of the American constitutional system; both have determined the direction of our judicial policy at one time or another.

Manners & the Jewish Intellectual

Jewish historical experience involves such an abundance of anomalies that when it has not elicited resentment or suspicion it has repeatedly teased observers into thought, or at least conjecture.

Looking Back at "The Waste Land"

In his preface to the publication of a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts of The Waste Land, Ezra Pound described the manuscript's history of disappearance and secret acquisition as "pure Henry James."

Antonioni '75

Ambiguous clues point to a murder having taken place, and a photographer sets out to establish if it has. A young man, sought by the police for his involvement in a campus protest which has erupted into violence, steals an airplane to make his getaway.

The Great Detente Disaster, by Edward Friedland, Paul Seabury, Aaron Wildavsky

Multiple authorship rarely succeeds; haste and passion are the enemies of thought. But this book, written in obvious haste by three dissimilar authors, and evidently strongly felt, has one great merit that easily outweighs its faults.

Samuel Johnson, by John Wain

"There is no research in this book," John Wain tells us frankly in his Note on Sources, and he positively avoided reading modern studies of Johnson while writing it.

Japan: The Fragile Superpower, by Frank Gibney

Many more people should read this book than will. Mr. Gibney has set out to tell us everything about the modern Japanese, and to a very considerable degree, he has succeeded.

Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, edited by Menahem Milson; The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement 1918-1929, by Yehoshua Porath

It is frequently charged that the Israelis have helped bring about their perpetual conflict with their neighbors by ignoring the Arabs' existence, by not studying their language and culture or trying to understand their views.

Pyramids of Sacrifice, by Peter L. Berger

Social scientists have frequently been criticized for their preoccupation with the present, and their fondness for static models and static analyses, but in fact a principal concern of sociologists, economists, and political scientists throughout this century has been the process of transition from "traditional" to "modern" society- hardly a static model at all.

Southern Liberalism

Moderate Egyptians

Culture and Policy

October 1973

Egalitarianism & International Politics

That the attitudes of Western liberal intellectual elites toward international inequalities have altered, and-on the surface at least-quite markedly so, is by now a commonplace.

Growing Up Crowded

If the upward trend of birth rates had proved a permanent phenomenon in American society, as the Census Bureau was predicting only yesterday, we would soon be facing exquisitely difficult decisions about the role of government in restricting production, resettling surplus populations, and allocating access to health services, recreational facilities, and ultimately water and perhaps food.

The Dagger of Ali Ibn Masrur

A story.

Japan After Vietnam

We do not know whether it was the right answer or not, for the most dramatic things that could have happened in the wake of Vietnam did not. Two things of considerable importance would seem to have happened, however: Korea has come to seem closer to Japan and the United States more remote and elusive. Japan has moved slightly to its own west.

Hannah Arendt's America

Hannah Arendt is our teacher. First, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she taught us about the great horror of our time; then, in The Human Condition, she taught us about how the Greeks understood the political life. But in addition to these matters, she also sought to instruct us on other themes and as she has moved into these other themes, her teaching has for many of us become increasingly obscure.

Herzl's Fate

In its general outline the story or legend of Theodor Herzl is well-known.

Trashville

Why make a film about-and full of-country music, if you don't like it?

Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by Robert Nozick

For better or worse, academic philosophers are intent on deepening our discussion of political and moral issues.

Black Fiction, by Roger Rosenblatt

Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies, by Elie Kedourie

Elie Kedourie is a political scientist who believes that one must first get to know the Middle East and its history before writing about it-a species rarer than one might suppose, and a precious resource amid the large company of instant experts on the Middle East whose views now fill our news magazines.

Roots of Art, by Andreas Feininger

The Rise and Fall of American Communism, by Philip J. Jaffe

Earl Browder, the most successful and powerful leader the American Communist party ever had, once confessed that "while I was in Moscow I was like a child."

Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form; Tales Told of the Fathers, by John Hollander

American Jews

Toward Equality

In Translation

The Holocaust

Libertarianism

Misogyny

Conspiracy Fever

How can one explain the extraordinary degree of political distrust and, beyond that, the pervasive taste for mystery and conspiracy which is everywhere so conspicuous in America today?

The Palestinian Myth

Stateless people, marginal to every society, carry with them the aura, the mystery, of the stranger. Seeming not quite human, they are regarded by "proper" humans with a mixture of repugnance and awe. In the case of Jews and Gypsies, repugnance has usually dominated, but in the case of the Palestinian Arabs, the balance is reversed, in that much of the world now regards them with a significant degree of awe.

Liberals & the Presidency

Among the many reversals of ideological role that have taken place in American politics in recent years, perhaps the most spectacular has been the abandonment by American liberals of their longstanding commitment to the strong Presidency.

The New Laureates

They are the two poets most closely attended to by poetry's present audience, the poets of their generation most often singled out for praise. But the election of A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery to such high favor is puzzling in many ways.

How to Increase Poverty

There exist at least eight reliable ways to increase poverty. The United States now pursues seven of them.

Pictures of the Jewish Past

Though words have always counted for more than pictures in the Jewish tradition, when photography came to Eastern Europe-a bit late, like everything else-the Jews, like everyone else, began to have their pictures taken.

Watching the Sit-Coms

Amos n' Andy are long gone, but changing tastes, increased sophistication, and the jading plenitude that television has provided over the years seem in no way to have altered the capacity of American audiences to be held in thrall, week after week, by "shows."

Christian Theology and the Holocaust

Within a year of the liberation of France from the Nazis, a book appeared in Paris by a prominent Catholic theologian expressing his abhorrence of anti-Semitism.

Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow

The hosannas that have greeted E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, elevating the book to instant commercial success and its author to literary stardom, have already prompted one early celebrant to caution readers against the extravagant claims being made on its behalf.

The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Vols. III-VII, General Editor, Meyer W. Weisgal

The letters and papers of Chaim Weizmann began to be collected for publication, under the guidance of his devoted disciple Meyer Weisgal, in 1949.

The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics, by Everett Carll Ladd, Jr., and Seymour Martin Lipset; Education and Politics at Harvard, by Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman

In the spring of 1969, after the most violent campus disruption of Harvard's recent history, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences refused the student strikers' demand that it grant amnesty to those who had occupied University Hall, and chose instead to reprimand or expel 138 of the participants.

The Intelligent Radical's Guide to Economic Policy, by James E. Meade

James Meade, a former president of the Royal Economic Society, has published (in England) one of those rare economics books that one can recommend to every thoughtful person who takes an interest in fundamental problems of contemporary societies.

Toscanini, by George R. Marek

In 1886, a nineteen-year-old cellist in a touring Italian orchestra was unexpectedly called to the podium before a performance of Aida to substitute for an absent conductor.

Race and Economics, by Thomas Sowell

Racial and ethnic relations in the United States have long been seen as a great morality play in which injustice is caused by, and will be ended by attacking prejudice.

"America Now: A Failure of Nerve?"

Socialist Myth

A Question of Civility

The Third World--Cont'd

Arab Propaganda

Critics and Comforts

Israel and the United States: From Dependence to Nuclear Weapons?

It is altogether likely that future historians will find in the Yom Kippur war, as most contemporary observers have already found, the great turning point in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The war, moreover, may be seen as the major precipitant that opened the way to implementing a new diplomatic design for the United States.

The New American Novel

Something decidedly peculiar has been happening to the American novel over the past fifteen years. The various labels attached to the new American fiction-black humor, satiric fantasy, fabulation, absurdism- have by now become the cliches of the weekly newsmagazines, and there is enough congruence among the competing terms at least to reassure us that they point to a common object.

Therefore Choose Life

Almost everybody who is interested in Jews at all sometimes asks the question, "Are Jews a people or a sect?" Is Judaism an identity masquerading as a religion-a national identity ("the Hebrews") or a cultural identity ("Jewishness")? Valid Judaism invalidates the question.

Intellectuals, Japanese-Style

Over Japan in the last years of the American occupation there hung an air of breathless expectancy. But what were they all going to say when the Americans left, these unquestionably intelligent people who had looked for so long as if they had all manner of interesting things to say?

Mann in His Letters

Following the publication of Buddenbrooks in 1901, it became Thomas Mann's daily custom, when his ritual hours at the writing desk had ended shortly after noon, to attend to the obligations which fame had brought him.

Out at Shea

Ex-football star Gerald Ford is said to think that Americans are sick of change and that they want to get back to the old virtues.

Man Bites Shark (& Other Curiosities)

If the fact that Jaws has now surpassed the U.S. earnings (it's not yet been released abroad) of any film before tempts one to consider the social significance of its phenomenal success, a little contact with the film itself should put a break on all such cogitation.

Humboldt's Gift, by Saul Bellow

Free style and fixed categories, will and idea, mental geography and urban reality, odi et amo, the heart's reasons and the mind's imperatives, carnal compulsion and theoretical need-these are only a few of the antiheses that come to mind when one thinks back upon the books that Saul Bellow has written during the last three decades.

The Imperial Achievement, by John Bowle; An Indian Summer, by James Cameron; Who Killed the British Empire?, by George Woodcock

Zion in America, by Henry Feingold; Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness, by Harold Gastwirt; American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust, by Melvin Urofsky; American Jews and the Zionist Idea, by Naomi W. Cohen

For the serious historian, as opposed to the mere antiquarian, the history of American Jewry poses weighty problems of interpretation.

After Babel, by George Steiner

Breach of Faith, by Theodore H. White

With his account of the decline and fall of Richard Nixon, Theodore White, that indefatigable chronicler of national political life, has not only succeeded once more in transforming presidential politics into best-selling nonfiction, but has also demonstrated that the loss of power can be made as fascinating and satisfying a story as its acquisition.

"Was Alger Hiss Guilty?"

Libertarianism

Anti-Americanism at Home and Abroad

If there used to be nothing more ludicrous than the English people in one of its periodic fits of morality, as Macaulay put it, these have been replaced in this century by the spectacle of the American people-at least a section of it-in one of its periodic fits of self-mortification.

The Slavery Debate

Beneath the debate that has been going on among English scholars over the state of the working classes during the Industrial Revolution lies a painful dilemma.

Our Contemporary, William James

What strikes us in reading William James now is at once how distant and yet how close to us he is. Some of his most famous essays, particularly on determinism and freedom of the will, were written almost a century ago. Their philosophic idiom is not our current one, and they speak out of a different historical and human ambience from ours.

From the Warsaw Ghetto

Resistance in the ghettos of Eastern Europe during World War II was born out of the desperate knowledge that the Germans had embarked on the destruction of all the Jews. After the Germans destroyed the Warsaw ghetto, a few survivors of ZOB and of the Coordinating Committee and its constituent bodies continued their clandestine activities on the "Aryan" side of Warsaw. There, in March 1944, Yitzhak Zuckerman wrote the report that follows.

A Literary Approach to the Bible

It is a little astonishing that at this late date there exists virtually no serious literary analysis of the Hebrew Bible. In making such a flatly negative assertion about biblical criticism, I may be suspected of polemical distortion, but I do not think this is the case.

Lonely Rituals

Arnold Bennett, reviewing Dodsworth, observed that the novels of Sinclair Lewis "have always one admirable quality: they are about something." What living novelist, intending praise, would make a remark like that about a distinguished fellow writer today?

Money, by John Kenneth Galbraith

For all his sophisticated wit and parade of scholarly erudition-enlivened by lovingly detailed anecdotes-John Kenneth Galbraith is fundamentally as anti-intellectual as any ungrammatical Archie Bunker.

Journey to the Trenches, by Joseph Cohen

This biography of Isaac Rosenwberg comes in the midst of a sudden revival of interest in the young English poet who died in World War I at the age of twenty-seven.

Political Money, by David W. Adamany and George E. Agree; ABA Symposium on Campaign Financing Regulation

The campaign-finance law signed by President Ford a year ago deals on its surface with the way people spend money on politics.

The Israeli Army, by Edward Luttwak and Dan Horowitz

One of the most widely held myths about the Arab-Israeli conflict has it that the Israeli army owes its superiority to its technological expertise which, in turn, is a function of Israel's Western orientation.

Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, by Cornelius Cardew

The subject of this book-the penetration of music by politics-is not new. It has a disreputable history in our time as an example of the subjection of ideas to state power.