Getting Roy Cohn

More on Abortions

Tsaylemkop

The Engergy Crisis

Author's Reply

Oil and American Power-Three Years Later

It is now exactly three years since the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised the price of their' oil fourfold. The rise came in the aftermath of an embargo of sorts undertaken during the Yom Kippur War by the major Arab producers of the Persian Gulf. Taken together, these events represented the onset of what soon became known as the oil crisis.

Are the Courts Going Too Far?

The last two decades have been a period of considerable expansion of judicial responsibility in the United States. What the judges have been doing is new in a special sense.

The Rise of Brazil

In a relatively short period of time, Brazil has become a new political force in the Western Hemisphere.

My Grandfather Invented the Telegraph

On August 25, 1952, walking home from the Boston Public Library, I picked up an early afternoon edition of the Boston Traveler, as was my daily custom. The front page was uninviting.

Against Presidential Greatness

Until election day is past, candidates for President campaign among their fellow citizens with the simple end in view of being elected. Once they are inaugurated, however, Presidents yearn for an even higher office.

The Texture of Jewish History

Is there some way for an ordinary reader to get on top (as it were) of Jewish history, taking it all in, adding it all up? The answer is probably no, for the complexity of the subject matter leaves even the best historians hard put to convey both its unity and diversity.

The Performer's Predicament

In order to understand the situation of performing musicians today, it is necessary to realize that there is now, to a historically unparalleled extent, no relationship between the music famous artists perform and the music serious composers are writing.

American Activities

Some fifteen years ago, I interviewed a director, Abraham Polonsky, whose first film, Force of Evil (he'd previously written Body and Soul), merits inclusion, I think, with Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon in any mention of the handful of most remarkable directorial debuts in American movies.

The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, by Herbert G. Gutman

From 1955 to 1965 the civil rights movement seemed to promise a new era in race relations. The romantic impulse of that period found expression in the expectation of quick remedy.

The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger, by Edward R.F. Sheehan

When parts of this book were published in Foreign Policy last March, they made a stih.

The Deadly Innocents, by Muriel Gardiner

In this discomforting little book, Muriel Gardiner, a practicing psychoanalyst, recounts eight true stories of murderous children, many of them killers of their parents or other family members.

The Essential Talmud, by Adin Steinsaltz

The late Abraham Joshua Heschel once argued that Judaism is the least known of the world's major religions; he might have added that the Talmud is the least known aspect of Judaism.

Freedom Spent, by Richard Harris

The dust-jacket of Freedom Spent bears the subtitle, "Tales of Tyranny in America," and the tone of the work is set in the prologue: "Congress is today blind to the people's needs, the Presidency contains the power to bring about a personal form of despotism, and the judiciary nearly always serves the interest of the state rather than its citizens."

Conservative Judaism

Schoenberg

Building Prisons

Peace and the Marxists

Populism

The Abortion Question

Anglocommunism?

I am sad to confess that every time I fly back to London from any other major Western capital, my heart sinks. The more I compare Britain with the countries that it still regards as it peers, the more I succumb to the uneasy feeling that Britain is becoming a Third World country.

Why the New Right Lost

In the years between 1969 and 1975 Kevin Phillips, William A. Rusher, Patrick J. Buchanan, and Richard J. Whalen all wrote books assessing the strengths, weaknesses, and prospects of the American conservative movement as they understood it. Although there are differences in approach, style, and strategy among these writers, they share certain qualities characteristic of what has come to be called the "New Right."

Jewish Sons

A story.

Third World Fantasies

A recent visitor to a Scandinavian university, after a heated debate with a group of students who had complained bitterly about the lack of freedom in their own country and in the West in general, asked which country in the world they most admired. The answer was Albania.

Poet of Exile

When Charles Reznikoff died in January 1976, at the age of eighty-one, he had only recently begun to be generally recognized as an important American poet of the mid-century decades.

Party & International Politics

It is common nowadays to hear the world described in images suggesting that it has grown smaller: a global village; spaceship earth. A succession of sages discover that we are become interdependent.

In Praise of New York

Different cities acquire great symbolic significance at different moments in human history.

Ann Beattie & the 60's

Ann Beattie's stories have been appearing in the New Yorker for the past few years, and have now been collected in a volume called Distortions, published simultaneously with the author's Chilly Scenes of Winter, a novel.

Blind Ambition, by John Dean

The veterans of the Nixon-administration scandals have displayed almost the full range of possible reactions: Nixon has been defiant, Agnew vulgar, Krogh apologetic, Ehrlichman inventive, Mitchell silent, Colson reborn, and Dean descriptive.

A History of Israel, by Howard M. Sachar

Howard Sachar's monumental study, which deals with the history of Zionism, the rise of Arab nationalism, British diplomacy in the Middle East, and the military, political, social, and cultural vicissitudes of the state of Israel from 1948 to the present, is an extraordinary work, a triumph of comprehensive scholarship which is also a delight to read.

America In Our Time, by Godfrey Hodgson

After years of reporting on life in America for British newspapers, Godfrey Hodgson has now attempted to tell, and to explain, the story of the postwar period in this country.

Khrushchev: The Years in Power, by Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev

It is doubtful that a gang of thugs ever exercised greater power in the course of modern history than Stalin's Politburo in the Soviet Union.

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, edited by George Plimpton

Such are the Paris Review interviews. A strange mixture of the profound and the inane, insight and absurdity.

Norman Thomas, by W.A. Swanberg

If an autobiography is the story of a life written by its subject, there should be a word to describe the story of a life which must be written by its readers.

China Watchers

The Memory of Justice

Communism, Italian-Style

Tsaylemkop Contd.

America and the World: The Next Four Years: Confronting the Problems

"Critical" is one of those adjectives whose value has been severely depreciated by overuse, yet in speaking of the importance of future developments in American foreign policy no other word will do. In the past few years there has been a marked deterioration in the position of both America and its allies and new problems have by now emerged on top of the old familiar ones which remain unresolved.

America and the World: The Next Four Years: Beyond Detente

Do we live in a new world? To a growing number the question will appear little more than rhetorical.

America and the World: The Next Four Years: Defense Reconsidered

The great revelation of the 1976 elections, both primary and general, both congressional and presidential, was that the majority opinion on the worth of military power, and on the present adequacy of American forces, was no longer marked by the discouraged inattention of the late years of Vietnam and Watergate.

Bakke vs. University of California

Few issues today have generated more widespread debate or created more difficult problems than the issue of special preference for "minority groups" in employment and education. This past year, the various complex issues involved in the theory and practice of preferential treatment and "reverse discrimination" were focused dramatically in the decision rendered by the California Supreme Court in the case of Allan Bakke.

Vanadium-A Memoir

A memoir.

Abu Daoud and the Law

On January 7 of this year, Abu Daoud, a Palestinian revolutionary and leader of Al Fatah, was arrested in Paris, where he had arrived to attend the funeral of another Palestinian.

German Wartime Broadcasts

Basf-the record label owned by the giant German chemical combine Badische Anilin-und Sodafabriken-has recently made available on the American market nearly one hundred LP's containing vocal performances recorded on early magnetic tape and broadcast on German radio during World War II.

1976 Minus One

By common consent, last year was the worst year for movies within recent memory-that is, unless one remembers the year before, and the year before that.

On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, by Gershom Scholem

It may seem odd that the Jewish love affair with Germany and German culture should, after all that has happened, still exert a strong influence over contemporary Jewish consciousness.

Tweed's New York: Another Look, by Leo Hershkowitz

On July 8, 1871, the New York Times announced a journalistic and political coup: it had managed to get its hands on documentary evidence of enormous frauds committed against the taxpayers of New York City by the Tweed ring.

Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963, by Lawrance Thompson and R.H. Winnick

This volume concludes a venture begun "officially" in 1939 when Robert Frost asked Lawrance Thompson to become his official biographer, and unofficially in 1926 when Thompson, a young undergraduate at Wesleyan, sat in the audience listening to "The Freedom of the Moon."

Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, by Joseph Frank

In recent years, Dostoevsky criticism has tended to downgrade the role of ideas in the novelist's work and to concentrate instead on the formal aspects of his prose. This has been true not...

Crooked Paths: Reflections on Socialism, Conservatism, and the Welfare State, by Peter Clecak

Peter Clecak is a chastened socialist. In his previous book, Radical Paradoxes, Clecak was critical of some influential American left-wing thinkers, arguing that they were insufficiently committed to democracy.

Thought Control

Oil

Inventions and Datelines

Music and Art

Life Under Slavery

Semitic

The Third World

Born Again

Court Costs

Saint Paul

Norman Thomas

Against the New Economic Order

The declaration on the establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) was adopted in May 1974 without a vote at the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly. Indeed, the resolution envisages elimination of this imbalance-that is, the equalization of per-capita income between rich and poor countries.

The American Stake in Israel

The place of Israel in the evolution of American foreign policy since 1945 is a cautionary tale for all who study the art, or practice it, and for all who must live with American foreign policy as citizens, as allies, or as adversaries. It is the perfect case history through which to observe the development of our foreign policy since Truman.

Rediscovering Mencken

The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, and thus it was written at a time when H.L. Mencken, two years into his ten-year stint of editing the American Mercury, was at the zenith of his fame.

The Man Who Refused to Watch the Academy Awards

A story.

Why Breira?

Ever since the end of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, pressure has mounted around the world for a final settlement of the Middle East conflict; scenarios and counter scenarios have been proposed, the merits of step-by-step diplomacy have been weighed against the merits of an overall settlement achieved at once and among each of the parties, and in this country an agonizing debate has gone on over the proper role of the United States with regard to the contending sides, and especially with regard to Israel.

Science and Defense Policy

The 20th century has been called the age of the common man, but a more accurate appellation might be the age of the physicist.

In Praise of Chaim Grade

Yiddish literature, which flowered a century ago in Eastern Europe as an impulse of modernization, has now become largely commemorative, bearing favorable testimony to the world of traditional feeling and practice which Yiddish writers once rejected and sought to reform.

Class Struggle on Broadway

Since the late 50's, the English theater has been staging contemporary studies in class warfare. Spokesmen for those whom Max Beerbohm called "the unmentioned by Debrett" have by now accustomed even America ears to the social tensions of U and non-U dialogue.

Selected Poems, 1923-1975, by Robert Penn Warren

There is something anomalous in the poetic achievement of Robert Penn Warren, and it is not the anomaly of his being simultaneously a serious poet and a bestselling novelist.

Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky, by Robert Wistrich

That Jews were involved in great numbers in the development of the socialist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries is well known. But it is hard to know what exactly to make of this phenomenon.

The Fall of Public Man, by Richard Sennett

Americans have always been chided both for their bad manners and their weak sense of social complexity. If Henry James thought the texture of American life thin, many foreign visitors spoke about the average American's lack of civility.

My Mind on Trial, by Eugen Loebl

In February 1948 the parliamentary government of Czechoslovakia was overthrown in a Communist coup. A year later the country's rulers, their political futures seemingly secure despite a straitened economy, attempted to improve their Soviet trade agreement and to normalize financial relations with the U.S.

Islam and the Arab World, edited by Bernard Lewis

A widespread popular interest in the Middle East and in the larger realm of Islam was a feature of Europe's romantic period as well as of its imperialist age.

Anglocommunism

Party and Faction

Interviewing Auden

The Abu Daoud Case

China and Tibet

The Holocaust

On the Right

The Issue of Human Rights

On June 15 in Belgrade, representatives from the thirty-five signatory countries of the Helsinki pact will assemble to review the progress achieved since the final act of that agreement was signed in 1975. If Belgrade represents a test for the Soviet Union, it represents an even greater challenge to the United States.

Losing Sight

A chronicle.

Zionism and Jewish Identity

Jewish identity is problematic in the modern world as it was not in premodern times.

Europe Breaks Apart

Amid the general clamor surrounding the unleashing of the Carter administration's new foreign policies, a major anniversary slipped by with little fanfare; in Rome late in March, the members of the European Common Market celebrated the passage of two decades since the establishment of that institution.

The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story

The incident that suggested Henry Morgenthau, Sr., as a focus of the modern Jewish dilemma is one of history's classic ironies: that by his alert dispatch of assistance to the Jewish colony in Palestine of August 1914, he saved it from starvation and probable extinction.

King of Pianists

Vladimir Horowitz is the king of pianists. Tickets for the limited number of concerts he chooses to play are sold out as soon as his enthusiastic public is informed; the prices charged are higher than those for any other solo instrumentalist.

Redemption According to Cheever

When, in John Cheever's new novel, Falconer, Ezekiel Farragut's impossibly beautiful wife Marcia returns from three weeks in Rome with her lover, Maria Lippincott Hastings Guiglielmi, she at first wants nothing to do with Ezekiel.

Fellini's Fall

By now, given the mass defections from the already thinned ranks of the Fellini camp that have been caused by Fellini's Casanova, the "sociology" of Fellini's reputation has almost replaced the film itself as a subject of interest.

Gold and Iron, by Fritz Stern

Gerson Bleichroder, Jew, German patriot, and leading banker of his day and country, was Bismarck's expert for all money matters, personal, political, or national during almost thirty years.

Utopia and Revolution, by Melvin J. Lasky

Intellectuals are perhaps more susceptible than other classes in society to the rhetoric of revolutionary change, especially when what is promised is nothing less than a radical transformation of all existing human relations and social institutions.

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, by Tom Wolfe

In contemplating existence thirty or forty years hence, one is struck dumb by the prospect of having to explain to a new generation, insane in its own right, what the 60's and 70's were like.

The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy, by Walter Berns

The recent First Amendment decisions of the Supreme Court have met with criticism both from those who think the Court has gone too far and from those who think it has not gone far enough.

Memoirs, by Pablo Neruda

An autobiography, as Cardinal Newman once confessed, is an exercise in self-justification. Ours is an age sorely pressed for alibis, and neither publishers nor public seem to tire of reading the "circumstances" which purportedly explain everything from personal indiscretions to genocide.

Survey: A Journal of East and West Studies, edited by Leopold Labedz

The publication of the 100th issue of Survey magazine is a noteworthy event, both because it is a milestone in the history of this distinguished journal of East-West studies, and because the issue is of exceptional value.

Breira: Pro and Con

O Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-Ling-a-Ling?

A word about my title-a line from a British soldiers' song, popular in World War I. Clearly it is an irreverent version of a passage from St. Paul, one of the West's early great thanatologists.

Churchill and Us

On December 5, 1938, in the fifth year of his preaching for an accelerated British rearmament, Winston Churchill rose yet again in the House of Commons to berate the government, this time for laxity in preparing London's anti-aircraft defenses.

Settling the Arab-Israeli Conflict

The future of the Arab-Israel conflict will be shaped by the course of events at three levels: first, that of relations between the state of Israel and the Arab states, more particularly those which are its neighbors; second, the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians; and third, the policies and actions of the great powers, and in particular of the United States and the Soviet Union.

How Important Is Soviet Dissent?

Western experts and journalists have oscillated between two extremes in their estimates of the scope of dissent and of the human-rights movement in the USSR. When that movement first began to assert itself with a voice both loud and clear, there was a tendency to regard it as a powerful social force capable of influencing the development of Soviet policies.

The Sanctification of Literature

I sometimes find myself wondering at which point in the history of modernity secular literature, in particular poetry, became elevated into the realm of sanctity.

The Hostage Mentality

When, against a din of pealing church bells, the Hanafi Muslims released their prisoners in Washington, D.C., last March, it was understood by everyone who had paid attention to the recent history of domestic terrorism that only the first and most crucial stage of the drama had ended.

What Makes Vidal Run

In those journals in which they appear, Gore Vidal's essays are the intellectual equivalent of the comics. Intellectual journals are not noted for providing many laughs, but laughter is Gore Vidal's specialty.

Simone Weil: A Life, by Simone Petrement

The nose, the hairdo out of the cartoons, the eyes swimming in myopia-but a rather nice mouth, round as a rosebud. The flat shoes, the dowdy cloak, the thickish fingers.

Guerrilla, by Walter Laqueuer

The notion that Mao Tse-tung either invented or somehow perfected guerrilla warfare is a myth-one of a number of myths punctured by Walter Laqueur in his new book.

Community and Policy, by Daniel J. Elazar

Since 1945 a corporate revolution has transformed the character of American Jewry. A communal structure that once bore the features of ideological pluralism and institutional autonomy is now marked by ideological consensus and bureaucratic centralism.

Traditions of American Education, by Lawrence A. Cremin

One might suppose the history of American education to be a quiet scholarly backwater, dominated by academics far removed from the intellectual battles that rage both in other branches of history and in contemporary studies of educational policy, and one would not be entirely wrong.

Synagogue Life, by Samuel Heilman

There is a nice irony in the fact that Samuel Heilman's Synagogue Life appears under the auspices of the University of Chicago Press, for it was that publishing house which in 1928 issued Louis Wirth's sociological classic, The Ghetto, a book which argued in no uncertain terms that Judaism and the Jewish community were anachronisms slated for inevitable extinction.

The Gamesman, by Michael Maccoby

Michael Maccoby is a disciple of Erich Fromm, and in this book he applies Fromm's hypotheses about the nature of modern life to an analysis of one segment of the American managerial elite.

The Third World

Art and Politics

The Bakke Case

Jews and Revolution

Containment

Middle East Policy

Breira

Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight & Win a Nuclear War

In a recent interview with the New Republic, Paul Warnke, the newly appointed head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, responded as follows to the question of how the United States ought to react to indications that the Soviet leadership thinks it possible to fight and win a nuclear war. "In my view, this kind of thinking is unrealistic." Even after allowance has been made for Mr. Warnke's notoriously careless syntax, puzzling questions remain.

Carter and Israel

One of Jimmy Carter's talents, both as a candidate for the Presidency and now as President, has been the ability to state controversial issues in such a manner that each of two conflicting parties can believe he has taken its side. This is the case, certainly, with the President's pronouncements on the Middle East.

Henry Adams at Nuremberg-A Fantasy

A story.

The Real T.E. Lawrence

During his lifetime, and even more so after his death, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia," was the subject of a great deal of curiosity and speculation.

Portrait of a Prodigy

In April 1929, a twelve-year-old violinist made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic playing three concerti-Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms-accompanied by Bruno Walter. The boy was Yehudi Menuhin, and this Berlin performance was by no means his first sensation.

Joan Didion & Her Characters

Two paradoxes characterize Joan Didion's writing. The first concerns her subject matter. The other paradox concerns her way of writing.

Looking Back

Robert Kotlowitz's first novel, Somewhere Else (1972), was justly praised for its unsentimentalized evocation of shtetl life in turn-of-the-century Poland, and for its complex account of the impulse to escape from the confines of that life.

We Must March My Darlings, by Diana Trilling

In the lengthy note that Diana Trilling appended to her piece on "Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited" in her new book of essays, causing it to be rejected by her original publisher, she speaks with evident anxiety about a "new generation of readers" who are likely to be bewildered by "the very idea of writing in 1976 about something called 'anti-Communism.'"

Psychiatric Slavery, by Thomas Szasz; Schizophrenia, by Thomas Szasz; Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors, by Thomas Szasz

For all its trappings of scientific authority, psychiatry has always had influential detractors. Today it is often an object of ridicule and contempt.

Gates of Eden, by Morris Dickstein

Is a disinterested view of the 60's possible? At the distance of nearly a decade, it still seems unlikely.

Unity Mitford, by David Pryce-Jones

One of the most interesting things about David Pryce-Jones's book on Unity Mitford is the extraordinary row that it provoked.

The New Thanatology

Switzerland and Europe

The Hostage Mentality

The First Amenment

Ambassador Morgenthau

The Politics of Human Rights

Human rights as an issue in foreign policy was by no means central to Jimmy Carter's campaign for the Presidency. It was raised in the Democratic platform drafting committee, and at the Democratic convention, but in each instance the Carter representatives were at best neutral, giving the impression of not having heard very much of the matter before and not having any particular views.

On Being Blocked & Other Literary Matters

An interview with Henry Roth.

Russia-Beyond Brezhnev

Almost every new Russian ruler for the last two centuries has been hailed as a liberator upon acceding to power, and in almost every case initial euphoria has given way to disappointment, and worse. Now that yet another change in leadership is taking place in the Soviet Union, new commentators in the tradition of Sir Bernard Pares and Isaac Deutscher have appeared.

Iron-A Memoir

A memoir.

New York and/or Jerusalem

These are indeed troubled times for Israelis pondering their national future and for those Jews of the Diaspora who think much about their relation to Israel.

American Jews: Still a Distinctive Group

"As does the Christian so does the Jew." This insight into the social behavior of modern Jews, which we owe to the poet Heinrich Heine, has become something of a sociological axiom, in particular for students of American Jewry.

History Into Art

"One January afternoon in the year 1941, a German soldier was out walking, enjoying an afternoon's liberty, when he found himself wandering alone, through the San Lorenzo district of Rome." So begins Elsa Morante's History: A Novel.

Shattered Peace, by Daniel Yergin

Originally a Ph.D. thesis, the product of a solid course of study supervised or otherwise assisted by a large number of leading academics from Cambridge, Mass., Cambridge, England, New York, and Washington, Daniel Yergin's book is nevertheless astonishingly free of any trace of genuine scholarship.

The Dragons of Eden, by Carl Sagan

Among the ancients it was believed by some that the power of vision depended on invisible emanations issuing from our eyes and probing objects as blind people's canes do.

Loose Change, by Sara Davidson

Sara Davidson was graduated from the University of California in 1964, at about the time beatniks were becoming hippies and the staid and earnest civil-rights movement was giving way to the New Left.

Wake Up, Wake Up, to Do the Work of the Creator, by William B. Helmreich

When Mimi Sheraton, the New York Times food critic, writes that there are 83 kosher restaurants in New York and adds (realizing it does make a difference) that one of the most famous of them, while strictly kosher, is not glatt kosher, the one knows that the New Orthodoxy has arrived.

The Inequality of Nations, by Robert W. Tucker

This short and extremely well-reasoned book was written, as Robert W. Tucker announces at the outset, "out of protest against the intellectual confusion that has attended current discussions of equality in relation to international society." It succeeds brilliantly.

Taking Rights Seriously, by Ronald Dworkin

In recent years, appeals to rights on the part of individuals and groups have reached tidal proportions; Daniel Bell has referred to the swell of such claims as a "revolution."

The Totalitarian Temptation, by Jean-Francois Revel

Jean-Francois Revel is in the Orwell tradition-a European socialist implacably opposed to Communism-and The Totalitarian Temptation is, accordingly, an essay in heresy.

Interpreting Soviet Nuclear Strategy

Simone Weil

Quotas and College Admission

Churchill and Us

Gore Vidal

Carter and Israel

The War Against the Atom

Most discussions of nuclear power are conducted in a haze of misinformation: there are few areas of public controversy where so much of what everyone "knows" is not really so. Let us begin with a discussion of a few of the least controversial facts about the processes by which nuclear power is generated.

Looting and Liberal Racism

On July 13, 1977, at 9:30 in the evening, New York City went suddenly and totally dark. The electric power had failed throughout the entire city. Within minutes several neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn were aswarm with young men and little boys on a rampage of looting and arson.

Quebec's Jews: Caught in the Middle

Until very recently, the prevailing ethnic tension in Canada's province of Quebec-between the French-speaking Roman Catholic majority and the strong minority of English Protestants-stimulated the development of a large, cohesive Jewish community, perhaps the most vigorous in North America.

Are Human Rights Universal?

The current preoccupation with human rights raises very serious political questions, the most serious of which is whether this new emphasis in American foreign policy signals a turning away from the Kissinger strategy of orderly retreat, or, on the contrary serves as a smokescreen for the continuation of that strategy.

The Unknown Catacombs

Italian Jews are finding it very difficult to examine and preserve the records of their own history.

Socialist Surrealism

In a recent essay published in the Russian emigre journal Kontinent and titled "The Literary Process in Russia," Andrei Sinyavsky points out that labor camps and prisons are the predominant theme of the manuscripts that circulate unofficially in the Soviet Union.

Convention, by Richard Reeves; Marathon, by Jules Witcover

Anybody who says that the American political system is hopelessly mired in the status quo cannot have been paying much attention to presidential nominating politics.

The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, by Edward N. Luttwak

A friend of mine amused himself in his last years by collecting various people's reasons for the fall of Rome. His sources were mostly the orations of politicians, usually conservative ones, and the supply was surprisingly copious.

Hitler's War, by David Irving; The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, by Robert G. L. Waite

The Hitler boom continues unabated, but the man remains as elusive a subject for revisionists and psychohistorians as ever he was to more conventional biographers.

The Auden Generation, by Samuel Hynes

W. H. Auden wrote of the 30's -and of his own participation in them-that it was a low, dishonest decade.

The Future That Doesn't Work, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell

Many liberals today have an uneasy conscience about socialism, which as an ideal once seemed to be our best hope for overcoming the harshness of profiteering capitalism and cruel individualism.

Why They Give, by Milton Goldin

Philanthropy in Judaism is not so much an individual as a collective project, and has become even more of one in recent American Jewish life.

The Japanese, by Edwin O. Reischauer

"Someone has calculated," Edwin O. Reischauer writes, "that, whereas in 1934, there were only thirteen scholars in the United States capable of making substantial use of the Japanese language, by 1969 there were five hundred."

Human Rights

T. E. Lawrence

In the Synagogue

Anti-Anti-Communism

Churchill and Begin

Antidote

Judging Mailer

Does Washington Have the Means to Impose a Settlement on Israel?

The issue of possible American economic and military sanctions against Israel is in the wind once again. For some time, Arab leaders have called upon Washington, which in the view of President Sadat holds "99 percent of the cards in this game," to use its considerable powers of persuasion to force Israel to make territorial and other concessions that it does not otherwise seem prepared to make.

Africa, Soviet Imperialism & the Retreat of American Power

After years of being regarded by the United States as a continent of little political, strategic, or economic significance, Africa has quite suddenly become the object of considerable attention in Washington. Vice President Walter Mondale has been charged with the task of overseeing U.S. African policy.

The State of the Novel

Preoccupation with the state of the novel was until about ten years ago one of the major bores of American criticism.

The “News&rdquo About Eurocommunism

Many of our leading papers and magazines have lately been spreading the "news" that West European Communists have reached a point of no return in their relations with the Soviet Union, and are on the verge of becoming democratic, pluralistic, and pro-Western. This "news," to be sure, is hardly new.

Sexual Stereotypes

I understand that Dr. Benjamin Spock's completely revised Baby and Child Care will, among other things, warn parents about the danger of sexual stereotyping. Twenty years ago Spock readers confronted with bloody diarrhea in the middle of the night couldn't have cared less about the dangers of sexual or any other kind of stereotyping. Will it now be the other way around?

Creation According to Cosmology

Cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, deals with the largest questions which can be asked by science. Until very recently, attempts to deal with these questions have relied more on metaphysical presence than on physical principles.

Coover's Revisionist Fantasy

In the past two decades, the American writers dedicated to the kind of big, artfully disheveled, anticly serious novel which infallibly excites the Zeitgeist brigade have felt themselves brought to an impasse.

Arab Strategies and Israel's Response, by Yehoshafat Harkabi

Two complaints have become traditional when considering the writings of Yehoshafat Harkabi, probably Israel's most famous, possibly its most influential, commentator on the everlasting conflict with the Arabs.

The Serial, by Cyra McFadden

If William Thackeray were living in the age of Norman Lear, Vanity Fair might have been written along the lines of Cyra McFadden's The Serial.

It Didn't Start with Watergate, by Victor Lasky

It is now more than three years since Richard Nixon resigned from the Presidency as a result of the Watergate affair, and more than five years since the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters.

Music and Society Since 1815, by Henry Raynor

In the days when music was taken seriously, the interval of the augmented fourth was outlawed by the Church.

Perpetual Dilemma: Jewish Religion in the Jewish State, by S. Zalman Abramov

The phrase has become part of the Western vernacular: "Israel is the bastion of democracy in the Middle East." Not untrue in its description of Israel's leading national institutions, to be sure, its electoral processes, its Knesset, its secular judiciary.

A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo

The Vietnam war, a tragedy in the history of the Republic second only to the Civil War, has been a subject of continuing commentary, but few of the many books and articles about it have focused on the details of fighting the war.

Looting and Liberal Racism

Israel vs. the Diaspora

American Jews

The Catacombs

Carter vs. Israel: What the Polls Reveal

Even before the furor over the new Soviet-American declaration on the Middle East, there was considerable interest in the White House on the state of American public opinion on the Middle East conflict. What would happen if Jimmy Carter appealed to public sentiment in an open conflict with Israel? Would public opinion rally behind him and against the Israelis, or would he lose more ground politically than he would gain?

The Strange Case of George F. Kennan

George F. Kennan has sufficient claim to be taken seriously when American foreign policy is discussed: indeed, many consider him the most eminent commentator on the subject. It is therefore a matter of some consequence that Mr. Kennan is to a large degree an isolationist.

The Example of Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel fits perfectly into the landscape of Soviet literature of the 1920's. Thematically, his collection of short fiction, Red Cavalry, takes its place alongside the stories of Vsevolod Ivanov, and innumerable other works on the civil war.

Why Spinoza Was Excommunicated

On July 27, 1656 a sentence of excommunication was pronounced on a twenty-four-year-old Jew of the Portuguese community of Amsterdam and recorded in the communal record book as follows: By the decrees of the Angels and the proclamation of the Saints, we hereby excommunicate, ban, and anathematize Baruch d'Espinoza.

A Note on the New Equality

The words "problem" and "solution" still beset public debate and inquiry.

The Mahler Everyone Loves

Gustav Mahler, it would seem, is our most, successful 20th-century composer.

Philip Roth: Sonny Boy or Lenny Bruce?

Not so long ago, no one questioned the fact that the work of Philip Roth, whether damned or praised for its unrelenting comic assault on the Jewish family, Jewish attitudes about sex, and the mores of Jewish-American suburbia, aggressively represented, as well, less insular fashions in contemporary culture.

Big Story, by Peter Braestrup

This study of how the national press covered the Tet offensive sprawls through two weighty volumes and contains 41 appendixes, 23 enormous tables, 14 indexes, and a thousand footnotes.

The Feminization of American Culture, by Ann Douglas

It has become a commonplace of modern literary and historical criticism to speak of the dominant role women played in cultural affairs during the middle and late 19th century.

Hitler's Children, by Jillian Becker; Carlos: Portrait of a Terrorist, by Colin Smith

Terrorism has become a fashionable subject during the past few years, but only a few authors have attempted to explain the phenomenon or to place it in any sort of historical and/or political context. Both these books attempt to do just that.

Wartime, by Milovan Djilas

Wartime is a compelling story of civil war, of the internecine fighting among Yugoslavs of differing loyalties that began after the German invasion of April 6, 1941.

Agency of Fear, by Edward Jay Epstein

Many newspapermen are called "investigative reporters" these days, but their "investigations" generally consist in printing leaks handed to them by one group of bureaucrats trying to further their own interests against another group of bureaucrats.

Nuclear Energy

Liberals and Looting

Lionel Trilling

Europe: The Specter of Finlandization

The term "Finlandization"-meaning that process or state of affairs in which, under the cloak of maintaining friendly relations with the Soviet Union, the sovereignty of a country becomes reduced-has entered the political dictionary despite the protests of Helsinki.

Europe: The Collapse of the Social Democrats

Whatever happened to reliable old European social democracy? Only a few years ago it was thought of as the political model of development that would keep Western Europe free, affluent, stable, and forever linked to the United States and the liberal system in general.

Israel's Dilemma

The problems facing Israel's policymakers have not changed with the coming into power of the Likud-led government, and they will remain the same whether or not a Geneva peace conference is convened within the next months.

Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost

When I grew up-in the suburbs, at suburban schools-I heard adults mention one living poet, and only one. Professors might prefer Eliot; young poets might imitate Auden-but for the American public Robert Frost was the Great Living Poet.

Do the American People Know What They Want?

When President Carter announced his proposals for reforming welfare policy last summer in Plains, reporters were quick to take note of a peculiar feature of his statement. Not once in the course of what he had to say did he use the term "welfare reform."

Her Son, the Teen-Aged Ascetic

A story.

The English Sickness

If one reflects on "the great tradition" of the English novel (using F. R. Leavis's term more generously than he would approve), it is evident that the quality of British fiction in the 1970's has deteriorated into the great traduction.

Government by Judiciary, by Raoul Berger

Perhaps no other legal scholar has in recent years received as much attention from the press as Raoul Berger.

The Unmaking of a President, by Herbert Y. Schandler

Students of contemporary history occasionally talk themselves into canonical versions of significant current events. Sometimes these versions stand the test of time and are not much disturbed by subsequent revision.

Honor Thy Father and Mother, by Gerald Blidstein; Maimonides, by David Hartman; Theology in the Responsa, by Louis Jacobs; Tradition in an Age of Reform, by Noah Rosenbloom

Over the past year or so a number of books have been published in the field of Jewish studies which, although primarily scholarly or academic in nature, address themselves to issues of wide intellectual concern, and are of potential interest to a broad readership.

The First Duce, by Michael Ledeen

The period in European history between the two world wars has often been called the fascist epoch, yet even today the nature of fascism remains problematic.

The Never-Ending Wrong, by Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter has couched her reminiscences of the last days of Sacco and Vanzetti in a tone more nostalgic than elegiac.