Assassination Theories

The New Egalitarians

Romance and the Novel

Poverty in America

Out of Context

Western Guilt & Third World Poverty

The feeling of guilt has aptly been termed one of America's few remaining surplus commodities. Ubiquitous and repeated allegations that the West is responsible for the poverty of the so-called Third World both reflect and strengthen this feeling of guilt.

The Return of Islam

In the great medieval French epic of the wars between Christians and Saracens in Spain, the Chanson de Roland, the Christian poet endeavors to give his readers, or rather listeners, some idea of the Saracen religion. According to this vision, the Saracens worshipped a trinity consisting of three persons, Muhammad, the founder of their religion, and two others, both of them devils.

In Praise of Alexander M. Bickel

In The Morality of Consent, the late Alexander M. Bickel begins the task of constructing a liberal political philosophy that avoids the optimistic authoritarianism afflicting so much of contemporary liberal thought. Civil disobedience, in Bickel's view, was one method by which intensely held interests might be expressed.

Not All Jewish Families Are Alike-A Story

A story.

The Riddle of Dos Passos

Is it possible to read and admire a political novel without one's own politics getting in the way? Can a Populist read Henry Adams's Democracy, with its aristocratic tone and elitist views, without becoming enraged?

Wagner Comes to Broadway

The New York City Opera is presenting Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg in English this season at the New York State Theater, and in so doing it has put us in its debt both by the quality of its work and by making it possible to raise issues which might otherwise remain unconsidered.

A Dialogue on “Travesties” or, the Impotence of Being Ernest

The flat of Algernon Moncrieff III on East Seventy-Third Street. The room has a faded elegance about it, as does Algernon. He is seated in his reading chair.

Watching Lina Wertmuller

Like many members of Lina Wertmuller's American audience, I saw Love and Anarchy before seeing any of her other films, though it wasn't the first film she'd made.

A Ford, Not a Lincoln, by Richard Reeves

In writing about the Presidency, journalists tend with increasing frequency to confuse their physical proximity to the seat of power with a proximity to truth.

Writers and Revolution, by Renee Winegarten

The thesis of this book is stated concisely on p. 321: "The modern era since the French revolution has witnessed a strange confusion between the world of literature and that of political revolution, a confusion from which ultimately the latter has gained what the former has lost."

The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, by A. James Gregor

It is now some years since the radicalism of the 1960's, often called the New Left, ran out of steam. The idols of the era are now badly compromised.

Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue, by Saul Friedlander and Mahmoud Hussein

It was in 1939, I think, that the Arabs for the first time officially refused to talk with the Jewish Palestinians.

My Country and the World, by Andrei D. Sakharov; Dissent in the USSR, edited by Rudolf L. Tokes

"I had money . . . title, and everything which my work entitled me to have. But I had a very tragic feeling." This is how the Soviet physicist, Andrei Sakharov, once described the years which preceded his open break with the Soviet establishment.

Nuclear Weapons for Israel?

Appeasement & Detente

Appeasement became a dirty word in the 1930's. It had been, for centuries, a perfectly clean, even a virtuous term. How could a word that had meant peace and conciliation turn into its opposite?

China, the U.S. & Soviet Expansionism

China's highly idiosyncratic view of the world is epitomized-even if not wholly clarified-by a quip making the rounds of the underemployed Peking diplomatic community after two American state visits in a period of less than two months.

Palestine Before the Zionists

What are the facts of the Jewish or non-Muslim condition under Islam before the advent of modern nationalism? Specifically: what was the condition of Palestine, and of the Jews there, before the immigration of secular Zionists toward the end of the last century?

Fascism-The Second Coming

What is fascism, and have we seen the last of it? On the precise character of fascism there is no agreement to this day.

The Scandal of “Britannica 3”

The Encyclopedia Britannica is, despite its name, an American institution. For over half a century, it has been published in the United States under American ownership, including that of Sears, Roebuck and Co.

In Defense of Sports

Competitive athletics, currently under scrutiny, is being subjected to a method of investigation that assumes the most significant aspects of anything are those concealed from the eye.

Records and Performances

In an interview some years ago, Sir Rudolf Bing, the former and by now perhaps even lamented General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said that what made great singers different from you and me was that they suffered from a throat disease.

Why Potok is Popular

"The readiness is all": after the countless portrayals in American fiction of wandering and assimilated Jews-from Malamud's S. Levin to Bellow's Moses Herzog to Roth's Alexander Portnoy-the literary public, at least a large and enthusiastic segment of it, would seem to be ready for Chaim Potok's version of the American Jew-one who has never left the traditional religious community.

Can America Win the Next War?, by Drew Middleton

It is time, once again, to think about the next war. It has been at least ten years since it was possible to have a public discussion of this issue.

Idols of the Tribe, by Harold R. Isaacs

In 1915, at the height of a wartime mood of patriotism in this country, when Americanization programs were being undertaken by government and private agencies alike, the late Horace Kallen published an article criticizing the prevailing ideology of assimilationism and advocating in its stead the model of cultural pluralism.

Speech-Grille and Selected Poems, by Paul Celan; Selected Poems, by Paul Celan; Paul Celan, by Jerry Glenn

A Jew, born in Rumania, who wrote in German and lived in France. Victim of World War II, survivor of the death camps, suicide before he was fifty.

Presidential Advisory Commissions, by Thomas R. Wolanin

What is it about the Para-governmental device known as the presidential advisory commission that so endears it to modern Presidents?

Against Our Will: Men, Women & Rape, by Susan Brownmiller

The manifest thesis of this book may be simply stated: it is that the basic sexual relation between men and women is rape.

On Slavery

The Palestinians

The Presidency

Interpreting the Bible

The Greening of American Foreign Policy

Nearly everyone agrees that Vietnam represents a watershed in American foreign policy. Then the interpretations diverge.

Is Peace Possible in the Middle East?

One of the mysteries of world politics is the amount of attention being paid these days to the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to some estimates, almost half the time of the last session of the UN General Assembly was devoted to issues connected in one way or another with this conflict.

Homeless in the World

Alienation is one of the deepest themes in modern culture. It has also become, alas, one of the most hackneyed.

"The Giant Killer": Drink & the American Writer

America has always been a hard-drinking country despite the many places and times in which alcohol has been forbidden by law. Even in Puritan days Americans were amazingly hard drinkers.

The Judaism of History

Like Hillel of old, one is often challenged to sum up briefly what being Jewish means. One can get away with anything by answering, as Hillel seemed to do, in one sentence; but it is harder when everything has to be defined.

Naipaul's Guerrillas and Oates's Assassins

One does not have to read very far in V. S. Naipaul's new novel-the first short chapter will do-to experience that peculiar sensation, a mixture of confidence, anxiety, anticipation, empathy, pleasure, and suspense, that every confirmed reader of fiction recognizes and yearns for as the special satisfaction to be derived from this branch of literature above all others.

The Ragtime Revival

The renewed interest in ragtime, the American popular music of the first two decades of this century, among serious (or "classical") musicians, is one of the most curious cases of changing musical taste in recent years.

Kubrick and Peckinpah Revisited

I went to Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon with less than great expectations: Kubrick's last film was A Clockwork Orange, which I detested, and the fact that this one's cast was headed by a soap-opera graduate and an ex-fashion model seemed a bad-news bonus.

The Gulag Archipelago Two, by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

We hear what Solzhenitsyn says. But after all the cries, pleas, groans, pardons, commands, beatings, and pistol shots of The Gulag Archipelago Two, there is something additional to be heard.

The Image of the Jew in American Literature, by Louis Harap

The study of literary stereotypes is an easily abused form. Seeking to isolate condemnable attitudes toward a minority group wherever such attitudes may be found, the sociologist of literature tends to become indiscriminate in what he studies and to assign equal weight to expressions of wildly unequal import.

The Age of Sensation, by Herbert Hendin

"Alienation," as a term to describe the situation of American youth, first came into its Distorting justice.

Beyond Kissinger, by George Liska; The Kissinger Experience, by Gil Carl AlRoy

Henry Kissinger's foreign policy is an exercise in timidity. This is the conclusion reached by both George Liska and Gil Carl AlRoy in their otherwise very different books.

Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer

This book begins with philosophy and ends with cookery. Peter Singer, a young, Oxford-educated professor of philosophy, attempts to convince his readers to abandon the eating of animals, and then obligingly provides them with an appendix of vegetarian recipes.

Twilight of Authority, by Robert Nisbet

"Mundus senscit"-the world grows old-was the phrase employed by Gregory of Tours in the 6th century to describe the twilight of the Roman Empire.

The Wagner Question

The Palestinians- Cont'd

Anti-Americanism

The Third World

"Swept Away..."

Dos Passos

Making the World Safe for Communism

At the height of the opposition to the Vietnam war, government officials frequently warned that should the American effort be defeated there, the result would be a right-wing backlash at home and a lapse into isolationism. Obviously the right-wing backlash never materialized, but just as obviously an isolationist mood has taken hold of the country since we left Vietnam.

Moses for Moderns

Of the men who have imitated Moses recently, not all have done it unconsciously. In the speech which he delivered to the striking garbage men in Memphis, Martin Luther King said it was possible he wouldn't live much longer, but he didn't mind, because he had "been to the mountaintop," and he had "seen the Promised Land."

Salvation Unlimited

America, we know, is not simply a place in which one endures his fair share of the common burden of humanity while he works his way as best he can from the cradle to the grave. It is a church in which he hopes to find, not simply seek, salvation.

Philosophy, Religion & Harry Wolfson

When Harry Austryn Wolfson died in September 1974 at the age of eighty-seven, he left behind him a reputation for personal and professional eminence that bordered on legend. As professor of the history of philosophy at Harvard University Wolfson had become universally recognized as one of the greatest scholars of his generation.

Revisionist Literary Criticism

Barely a quarter-century after hopeful observers hailed the beginning of an "age of criticism" and with it the reform in the study of literature long needed in American universities and graduate schools, academic thinking and writing about literature in the mid-1970's suffer from a division within that is as profound as the similar divisions elsewhere in contemporary society.

Copland as American Composer

Though Aaron Copland has been an important figure in American serious music for more than fifty years, he remains, as Leonard Bernstein has said, "the best we have," and his career is the very model of the success to which an American composer may aspire.

Alas, Poor Hamlet

Is Hamlet, as T. S. Eliot concluded, ultimately an artistic failure, a work of unintegrated parts and layers, of mismatched borrowings and techniques that leave its central character vainly searching for a significant action and is author for a dramatic event that will encompass the play's breadth of emotion and intelligence?

Simple Justice, by Richard Kluger

It was in December 1952 that the Supreme Court first heard oral argument in the five cases that history would know collectively as Brown v. Board of Education.

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, by Daniel Bell

This book, a sequel to The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), rounds out Daniel Bell's panoramic picture of the present condition and probable future of Western civilization.

World of Our Fathers, by Irving Howe

There is a haunting phrase at the end of the introduction to A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, written twenty-two years ago by Irving Howe in collaboration with Eliezer Greenberg, which lingers in the imagination because it defines an impelling paradox of Jewish existence.

Making Democracy Safe for Oil, by Christopher T. Rand; Multinational Oil, by Neil H. Jacoby; The Seven Sisters, by Anthony Sampson

The giant oil companies are the prototypical multinational corporations, with integrated production, refining, and distribution facilities and billions of dollars' worth of investments spread over the whole world.

Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics, by James Weinstein

American Marxist movements, it is now almost universally agreed, have been a collective failure.

The Road to Ramadan, by Mohamed Heikal; The War of Atonement, by Chaim Herzog

In both these remarkably similar accounts of the events leading up to the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, fact and fiction are hopelessly entangled.

Radical Feminism

Detente

Palestine

Wager and Pound

Islam

The French Revolution

1947-48

Why New York Went Broke

"The commonest mistake of Europeans who talk about America," said Lord Bryce in 1888, "is to assume that the political vices of New York are found everywhere. The next most common is to suppose that they are found nowhere else." Thus, although nearly everyone considers the New York City crisis to be enormously significant, almost no one can say with confidence just what it signifies.

Democracy and European Communism

Bringing the Communist parties of Italy and France into their respective governments is apparently one of those ideas "whose time has come."

The Litvak Connection & Hasidic Chic

A Litvak, in prosaic terms, is simply a Jew whose family happens to come from Lithuania; mythopoetically speaking, however, being a Litvak is a state of mind.

Save Energy, Save a Soul

The only opponents of energy conservation seem to be the companies who are in the energy-supply business. Otherwise, there is not even the usual complement of cranks and reactionaries to hoot the idea down.

Biblical Narrative

In a previous article in these pages, "A Literary Approach to the Bible," I wrote about the general paucity of serious literary analysis of the Bible in contemporary scholarship, and about the difficulties that confront the critic in trying to understand and explicate the biblical text in literary terms. What I should like to do here is to extend that discussion by looking closely at one aspect of the literary art of the Bible, the use of repetition in narrative.

Bach in the Original

In those arts, such as music or drama, in which the interpretation of a work is necessary to its public apprehension, the interpreter is in a delicate position.

Obsessions

I fidgeted my way through at least two-thirds of The Story of Adele H., waiting for it to get off the ground.

Affirmative Discrimination, by Nathan Glazer

This important book is one of the first full-length accounts of the reverse discrimination known as "affirmative action," and of how that policy has operated in the fields of employment, education, and housing.

William Carlos Williams, by Reed Whittemore

The story of American literary modernism, as told until a few years ago, was doubly rare among intellectual histories: it was colorful and simple.

Courts of Terror: Soviet Criminal Justice and Jewish Emigration, by Telford Taylor et al.

According to the 1960 Soviet criminal code, no person may be subjected to criminal responsibility and punishment unless he has committed a crime.

History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented, by Bernard Lewis

If the task of the poet is to interpret our souls to ourselves, and that of the national historian to transmit our past to our present, the historian of foreign nations has the more difficult task of recounting the past of others, and explaining it to our own present.

On Human Conduct, by Michael Oakeshott

On Human Conduct is the most important work in the philosophy of politics to have been published in a long time.

Power Shift, by Kirkpatrick Sale

The notion that the various geographic regions of the United States are inhabited by people who share some distinctive interests and perspectives is familiar enough; indeed antagonism to the cultural distinctiveness and political influence of the Northeast is a basic premise of the authentic Populist tradition.

Capitalists and Communists

Heidegger

Israel's Options

Political Philosophy

October 1973 and May 1948

"Barry Lyndon"

Literature and Anti-Semitism

Soviet-American Exchanges

The Soviet-Egyptian “Rift"

For the fourth time since 1959 the Western public is being inundated with stories alleging that Moscow and Cairo have reached a point of irreversible rupture. The evidence indicates tha the full story of Soviet-Egyptian relations is much more ambiguous than the conventional wisdom would have it, and much less of a triumph for the U.S.

An Answer to Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman, in Scoundrel Time, tells the story of her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, and tells something, in flashbacks, of her political life, insofar as it involved dealing with Communists or persons she thought were Communists.

American Jewish Writing, Act II

The career of American Jewish literature would seem to have reached a turning point. Over the past three decades, Jewish writers have made their way into the mainstream of American fiction, and have now been canonized in university curricula.

Fear-A Story

A story.

Democracy According to Whitman

Although Walt Whitman was a journalist before he was a poet, and with the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 began defending, prefacing, explaining his poetry in highly oratorical prose pieces, one can argue that prose was not altogether natural to him.

Mumford's Utopia

The publication last year of Lewis Mumford's twenty-fifth book, Findings and Keepings, coincided with his eightieth birthday and provides the occasion for a brief look at the work of a man of whom it is easy to say that he has had an immense influence on his time.

Richard Strauss & His Critics

Though his later operas are all but ignored in current American musical life, the fact that no fewer than four earlier operas by Richard Strauss have been produced in New York City alone this season, raises the interesting possibility a new valuation of Strauss may be in the making.

“The Old Glory” Reconsidered

When The Old Glory, Robert Lowell's trilogy of plays, was first produced in 1964, it appeared to offer a new direction in American theater.

The Origins of Zionism, by David Vital

In modern Jewish history, the year 1881 is the great divide. The publication in Germany in the fall of that year of Eugen Duehring's Die Judenfrage als Racen Sitten und Kulturfrage heralded a new age of "scientific" racism.

Schooling in Capitalist America, by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis

Liberal critiques of American education typically stress either the inequalities or the brutalities of schooling.

Children of the Sun, by Martin Green

This study of the Bright Young People who came to prominence in British intellectual life in the years after World War I is curiously divided against itself.

Curtain, by Agatha Christie

It was a glorious moment in Conan Doyle's The Final Problem when Sherlock Holmes and the arch-villain Moriarity tumbled to their deaths at Reichenbach Falls, their bodies locked together in a wrestling embrace.

Anatomy and Destiny, by Stephen Kern

Stephen Kern's Anatomy and Destiny is a "cultural history of the human body" over the last one-hundred-fifty years.

Discriminating Against Discrimination, by Robert M. O'Neil

Marco DeFunis, Jr., a white Jewish member of Phi Beta Kappa with a high B average in undergraduate courses, applied for admission to the University of Washington's law school in 1971.

"Britanicca 3"

Religion and Liberalism

Harry Wolfson

Ragtime and the Critics

Mann, Reik and Moses

"Speciesism"

Freud's Jewishness

Hemingway and Roethke

Hamlet

Art and the Artist

The Abandonment of Israel

When, about a year ago, the United Nations declared that Zionism was a form of racism, a measure of comfort for the state of Israel and its supporters could be found in the fact that an impressive degree of opposition was mounted to this "obscene" idea. If, however, the Zionism-racism resolution was a victory for the Israelis, it was a victory of the type of which they might with perfect precision have said: One more such and we are undone.

American Values & American Foreign Policy

The United States is probably the only major country in the world in which it is taken quite as a matter of course that people will talk seriously about the relation of the nation's values to its foreign policy.

Why Allende Fell

Americans, it is said, will do anything for Latin America but read about it. And until recently, Chile was no exception to this rule.

Imagining the Holocaust

Throughout every facet of contemporary culture the Holocaust-the systematic murder of six million European Jews under Hitler-has become the particular image for the barbarism of our time, the modern paradigm of man's inhumanity to man.

Bertrand Russell the Man

The publication of three books Ton Bertrand Russell-one by his second wife, one by their daughter, and one by an admiring but honest biographer-hard on the appearance of Russell's three-volume Autobiography gives us more details about Russell's life and loves than about any philosopher who has ever lived.

Hugh Kenner's Modernism

One way to describe Hugh Kenner's immense influence as a critic is to say that, to a remarkable extent, he has had to himself the delineation of literary modernism in English.

From the Potomac to the Missouri

Some years before Richard Nixon became President, Robert Osborn drew a picture of him that remains to this day a masterpiece of political caricature.

The Surprise of “Streamers"

I went to Streamers with reluctance. The only other play by David Rabe that I'd previously seen, Sticks and Bones, had been an insufferably self-righteous exercise, a theatrically cliched study of our society and the Vietnam war that made the same arrogant generalizations about human life which it accused the average American of making.

The Spoiled Child of the Western World, by Henry Fairlie

Henry Fairlie's most recent book is in the tradition of Tocqueville, Bryce, and other European observers whose distance sometimes helped them to see us more clearly than we see ourselves.

The Jewish Woman in America, by Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel

In accordance with the first principle of Jewish sociology-vi es kristlt zikh, azoy yidlt zikh, as do the Gentiles, so do the Jews-the rise of feminism has given impetus to a Jewish feminism that transposes Women's Lib into Jewish terms.

Age of the Masters, by Reyner Banham

Age of the Masters is a brief, informal examination of traditional modern architecture and its underlying premises by an eminent English historian and critic of 20th-century building.

The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, by Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova; Trotsky, by Joel Carmichael

It is now thirty-six years since Leon Trotsky was assassinated by one of Stalin's agents. At the time of his death he was an exiled, isolated, and hunted figure, a victim of Stalin's desire to destroy him and everyone associated with him.

The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, by Hans W. Frei;

These two very different works are both concerned with the relationship between the Bible and literature: specifically, with the way the Bible was read and literature was written in England and Germany during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Character of John Adams, by Peter Shaw; The Adams Chronicles, by Jack Shepherd

Progressive American historiography down to the 1950's regarded not John Adams but Alexander Hamilton as the preeminent American conservative: though he defended the wealthy few, Hamilton at least looked ahead to dynamic economic growth and fashioned instruments of national power that were later useful for liberal reform.

The New Isolationism

Translating Bach

Energy Policy

“Eurocommunism" and Its Friends

The problem of cooperation between democratic and Communist parties is not new. Originally, in the 1920's, it was a major doctrinal issue for the Communists, but lately it has ceased bothering them and has now mainly become a problem for their prospective democratic partners.

The Poverty of Socialist Thought

Political labels are, like most things, subject to the law of civilization and decay. But what of the labels socialist and socialism?

An Exchange of Populations

More than sixty million persons have become refugees since World War II. Of these, most have been resettled and rehabilitated in the countries to which they fled, seeking asylum.

Carter and the Jews

By now the Democratic party will have nominated Jimmy Carter and everyone will have forgotten how remarkable it is that he should have won at all, let alone weeks before the anticlimactic convention.

The English Sickness: A Touch of Class?

Class is the leitmotif or even the exclusive theme of much critical comment about Britain.

Professing English

For the past three years at a large Midwestern university I have taught a course entitled "Advanced Prose Composition." In this course formal rules are not ignored.

Barthelme's Comedy of Patricide

Fatherhood, as we have lately been reminded by Martin Green in Children of the Sun, is the great bugbear of aestheticism.

Heifetz the Virtuoso

Although he is the most popular and widely-recorded violinist of this century, possessing, by general agreement, the greatest violin technique in living memory, Jascha Heifetz has been the subject of critical controversy ever since he burst upon the music world nearly sixty years ago.

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, by George H. Nash; Up from Communism, by John P. Diggins

What's a conservative? Some exceedingly good minds have pondered this question, and it seems unlikely that there will ever be a definitive answer, good for all contexts and occasions.

Unequal Justice, by Jerold S. Auerbach

Unequal Justice is a philippic against the American bar (with the exception of a few saints and martyrs like William Kunstler), particularly corporation lawyers.

The Last European War, by John Lukacs

John Lukacs has here attempted a diplomatic and psychological history of Europe during the first two years of World War II.

The Children of the Counterculture, by John Rothchild and Susan Wolf

The Adolescents who made up the "youth revolution" of the 1960's-the flower children, hippies, communards, self-styled radicals, and other assorted counterculture types-are now in their late 20's and early 30's.

Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, by Doris Kearns

It has been nearly a decade since the first public reports that then President Lyndon Johnson, one of the most influential political figures of the last fifty years, had chosen as a confidante and preferred biographer a comely White House fellow with Harvard connections and anti-war proclivities.

The 50's and Beyond

Writers and Critics

NYC: Who's to Blame?

The Soviet-Egyptian "Rift"

"Seven Beauties"

U.S.-Soviet Exchange Contd.

What Is a Liberal-Who Is a Conservative? A Symposium

Commentary recently asked a group of 64 intellectuals: Are you satisfied with the way terms like liberal and conservative, or Left and Right, are used today?

The Poverty of Power, by Barry Commoner

Arguments by environmentalists about public policy are often based on a line of reasoning which holds, first, that we are running out of natural resources, particularly fuels, and, second, that major government initiatives or basic political reforms are necessary to stave off consequent disaster.

Punishing Criminals, by Ernest van den Haag

While it is generally agreed that the continuing rapid increase in crime rates in recent years is an extremely disturbing phenomenon, there is wide disagreement about the causes of this trend and the ways in which it might be stemmed.

Israel Divided, by Rael Isaac

In her fine study of some of Israel's lesser-known political movements, Rael Isaac sheds much light on the singular character of Israeli politics.

Why Marxism?, by Robert G. Wesson

In the Decameron, Boccaccio describes a Jew named Abraham who travels to Rome to examine at first hand the claims of Christianity.

The Exploring Spirit, by Daniel J. Boorstin; Today and Tomorrow in America, by Martin Mayer

Bicentennial fever might be expected to infect writers and publishers along with everybody else, and this season may therefore see more than the usual number of slender hardbacks by thoughtful people who take the occasion not to unveil their latest research but rather to share with us their meditations on the state of the nation.

Israel and the United States

Music: Heifetz, Mozart and Joplin

"Finlandization"

Interpreting the Bible

Chile

Teaching Writing

Litvak vs. Galitzianer

Performing Abortions

Stepping off the elevator on the seventh floor of the abortion hospital, I find myself in the saline unit where I am to start my research on how people involved in the performing of legal abortions feel about the work they do.

Portrait of a Survivor

In September 1972 the U.S. Justice Department instituted deportation proceedings against Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan-who was-by then married to an American citizen and living in New York-in connection with war crimes perpetrated when she was Vice Kommandant of Maidanek and Ravensbrueck concentration camps. The hearings ended abruptly in March 1973, when the West German government asked for and obtained the extradition of Mrs. Ryan.

Justice (Again) to Edith Wharton

Nearly forty years ago, Edmund Wilson wrote a little essay about an underrated American novelist and called it "Justice to Edith Wharton." Wilson's idea returns only to hold, and it holds nowhere so much as among the literary proponents of the current women's movement.

Our Latin American Hairshirt

Where once Americans were content to dismiss Latin America's sufferings as the price to be paid for Roman Catholicism, Spanish colonization, chili peppers, Montezuma's revenge, and machismo, today they seem perilously close to accepting responsibility for the Latin American share in Original Sin.

Memoir of a Prosecutor

Although I had been appointed an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York under Eisenhower, I stayed on when Robert F. Kennedy took over the Department of Justice and Robert Morgenthau came in as United States Attorney.

The Yeshivah World

In the solidly middle-class suburb of Lakewood, New Jersey, there exists a remarkable institution of higher learning that is remarkable chiefly for what it does not do.

Bernstein-The Performer as Theorist

Since 1943, when at the age of twenty-five he became the assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein has been a dominant figure on the American musical scene.

Altman, Chabrol, and Ray

There's a sense in which, had Robert Altman's new film been better, I probably would have liked it less.

Diplomacy for a Crowded World, by George W. Ball

George Ball, who was Undersecretary of State under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and is currently a partner in Lehman Brothers, brings what might be called a liberal businessman's perspective to the problems of foreign affairs.

Me and Ralph, by David Sanford

Those who live by the media face the risk of dying by it, as Ralph Nader must by now be aware. After a running battle with Nader in the pages of the New Republic, David Sanford has written a pamphlet attacking Nader's life and works.

The Joy of Sports, by Michael Novak

In his latest book, The Joy of Sports, Michael Novak-theologian, political commentator, spokesman for the new ethnicity-attempts an especially difficult task: to do nothing less than become the definitive advocate of sports and sports fans.

The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, by Owen Chadwick

At the height of his campaign against Christianity, Voltaire took to concluding his letters with the motto, "Ecrasez l'infdme," often abbreviated as "Ecr. linf."

Truth Is for Strangers, by Efraim Sevela; A Hero in His Time, by Arthur A. Cohen

The Soviet Union may have lost its appeal to the political imagination, but something in its cultural life continues to compel the attention.

Israel and the United States-Cont'd

Socialisms

Carter's Populism

Moralism and Foreign Policy

On Lawyers

IREX Again

Bertrand Russel

Hitler and World War II

On Returning to Religion

Looking back, what fragments have I saved out of my life to shore up its meaning? What rituals, charms, incantations, or loves help me forward?

Is Democracy Doomed?

In the course of the last few years the intellectual classes of the West have been giving voice to doom-laden prophecies about Western civilization, lamenting (or rejoicing at) the decay of "capitalism," denouncing the weakness and corruption of "democratic" government. May the similar forebodings of the 70's ultimately have for their basis the same doctrine, which today more than ever is without serious rival as the opium of Western intellectuals?

The Dilemma of Conservative Judaism

One of the most striking and important developments on the American Jewish scene in the twenty years immediately following World War II was the emergence of Conservative Judaism as the most popular religious movement among American Jews. Yet today, at the very height of Conservatism's phenomenal popular success, leading spokesmen of the movement appear to have become plagued by self-doubt, disquiet, and gloom.

Italian Communism at Home and Abroad: The New Class

Italy, the poorest and the least productive of Western industrial nations, has a public payroll that is, in proportion to its population, ten times as large as that of the United States. Italy has become the first major Western country to produce a New Class; a self-appointed, self-serving state elite. All this has been brought about by the close cooperation of the Communists and the dominating left wings of the government parties.

Italian Communism at Home and Abroad: The Soviet Connection

It is becoming fashionable to speak of European Communism, particularly the Italian party (PCI), as if it were a major schism in the world Communist movement, and consequently a threat to the hegemony of the Soviet Union. Yet, while no one would deny that there are areas of dispute between PCI secretary Enrico Berlinguer and Leonid Brezhnev, far too much has been made of these disagreements.

Who is in Prison?

Prisons are usually newsworthy only when their inmates riot, but of late they have become the focus of more general, and on the whole more constructive, attention.

Israeli Culture and the Jews

There are signs that since the early 70's significant changes have been taking place in the perception many American Jews have of their relation to Israel.

Sinyavsky's Art

Our consciousness fills up all the space available to it, with whatever materials are at hand. It cannot do otherwise.

Schoenberg's Survival

There can be little doubt that this century's most consequential reputation in the field of serious music is that of Arnold Schoenberg.

Hitchcock in Retrospect

I'm usually skeptical about the authenticity of remarks some critics have a knack for overhearing in an audience, but then the comment I actually overheard from the audience at the conclusion of Obsession left me, at first, bewildered.

To Jerusalem and Back, by Saul Bellow

After Saigon disappeared as a byline from American papers, Jerusalem became the place where most front-page foreign news is filed, with Beirut second.

Disaster by Decree, by Lino Graglia

The case against the forced busing of schoolchildren is by now a familiar one, and was most persuasively set forth in Nathan Glazer's March 1972 Commentary article, "Is Busing Necessary?"

Vico and Herder, by Isaiah Berlin

The work and influence of Sir Isaiah Berlin are fundamental to the intellectual life of our time.

Medical Nemesis, by Ivan Illich

As the public-policy aspects of medicine loom larger day by day in the media, and the awe with which laymen have regarded physicians melts into suspicion, one turns with interest to any new book purporting to examine present-day medical conditions or to offer an alternative to our current health system.

Lying, Despair, Jealousy, Envy, Sex, Suicide, Drugs, and the Good Life, by Leslie H. Farber

The practice of psychotherapy seems to be in dreadful disarray. Cults proliferate, each of them helping some patients, harming others, but leaving most about where they were when they started-miserable.

Marxism vs. Pacifism

The Question of Abortion

What is a Liberal- Who is a Conservative?

Jews and Arabs

Seeing China Plain

It was not until we reached the "Sinkiang-Uighur autonomous region" in the far northwest corner of China that the elegant stage-management of our journey, which had begun in mid-September, finally broke down.

A Mirror for Presidents

Often as Jimmy Carter quoted Harry Truman in the recent campaign, he never mentioned Truman's favorite maxim: "There is nothing new except the history you don't know." With all due respect, I suggest that he and we might benefit if he took a little time to bone up on American history, and especially the history of the Presidency.

How "Partisan Review" Began

Partisan Review was born in the 30's in the decade that we look back on today with so much curiosity, nostalgia, misunderstanding. And if the time between the 30's and the 70's often appears foreshortened, it is because of the peculiar sense of contemporaneity that makes the whole modern period seem all of a piece.

The Making of a Dissident

Colonel Efim Davidovich, hero of World War II and in recent years a leader in the struggle for Jewish rights in the Soviet Union, died in Minsk on April 24 of this year, at the age of fifty-two. Davidovich was at work on the autobiographical fragment which follows.

Race and Truth

Is a truthful discussion of racial matters impossible in the present generation in this country?

Koestler's Jewish Problem

In the first half of his new book, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, Arthur Koestler tell the story of the Khazars' rise and fall.

Ophuls: Justice Misremembered

Toward the end of The Memory of Justice-the new four-and-a-half-hour long documentary film by Marcel Ophuls which, using old newsreels and film clips intercut with interviews in the present, attempts to cast light on the nature of war crimes in our time.

Brechtian Papp

A half-century has now passed since The Threepenny Opera was presented for the first time at the Schiffbauerdamm Theater in Berlin.

Roots, by Alex Haley

When Alex Haley was growing up in Tennessee during the 1920's, his grandmother used to entertain him with stories about his ancestors.

Saint Paul, by Michael Grant

At the beginning of Christianity stand two figures: Jesus and Paul. What was the relation between the two?

Adolf Hitler, by John Toland

The disparity between Adolf Hitler's enormous power and influence, on the one hand, and the repellent character of his life, on the other, poses a peculiarly difficult problem for the biographer.

The Dunne Family, by James T. Farrell

A landmark in American literature has just been achieved with the publication of James T. Farrell's fiftieth book, The Dunne Family.

The Next 200 Years, by Herman Kahn, William Brown, and Leon Martel; RIO: Reshaping the International Order, edited by Jan Tinbergen

These two books are the newest entries into the debate over whether economic growth ought to be intentionally curtailed.