The China Card

Thomas Jefferson

Camp David

Proposition 13

The U.S. and Latin America

Biblical Narrative

The Laffer Curve

Are Homosexuals Gay?

Writing on homosexuality is becoming a growth industry almost in the same class with self-help. The conclusion of a new study is already well known: that homosexuals are more diverse than they have been thought to be and on the whole much happier than is normally assumed.

Toward a Middle East Alternative

A peculiarity of the Camp David accords is that they lend themselves to two opposing visions of the future of the Middle East. These two positions are divergent in philosophy, outlook, and the policies they prescribe.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism

It is interesting that despite the huge variety of books, research projects, and monographs on socialism-political, economic, sociological, and so on-no one has thought to write on "the soul of man under socialism."

Judaism & Harold Bloom

Over the last several years, little by little, progressively though gradually, it has come to me that the phrase "Jewish writer" may be what rhetoricians call an "oxymoron"-a pointed contradiction, in which one arm of the phrase clashes so profoundly with the other as to annihilate it. Encountering the work of Harold Bloom tends to reinforce these still-shadowy views.

Redistributing Technology

For at least fifteen years, an effort has been under way to create a new international regime for technology-for its diffusion and development, its costs and its consequences.

Funding the Piper

Though in the United States all the arts are now publicly subsidized on a broad front, music has received a lion's share of the official cultural dollar.

Autumn Interiors

If, without knowing anything whatever about the work of either director, one had seen Woody Allen's Interiors and Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata in the order of their respective debuts in New York City, one might have easily concluded that the Swedish film-maker had attempted to imitate the American. Of course, the reverse sequence is the correct one.

Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice, by Charles E. Silberman

Charles Silberman sets out in this book to revive belief in the proposition that the only correct policy for government to adopt in dealing with crime is to attack its root causes.

The Jew as Pariah, by Hannah Arendt, edited by Ron H. Feldman

Ron H. Feldman, the editor of The Jew as Pariah, has undertaken a difficult task, the vindication of the late Hannah Arendt to the many Jews and non-Jews who found her stance toward things Jewish offensive and outrageous.

Reviewing the Forties, by Diana Trilling

The fascist menace dominated the books reviewed by Diana Trilling from 1942 to 1948, when she was fiction critic for the Nation magazine. But although American writers responded to the war with surprising speed, they failed to confront Nazism meaningfully at any time in the course of these six-and-a-half years.

Leon Trotsky, by Irving Howe

This little book, an expanded version of an essay Irving Howe wrote in the early 1960's, summarizes Trotsky's life as a versatile man of action, theory, and letters.

Worlds Apart, by Sara Lawrence Lightfoot

Worlds Apart is an interesting book, less for anything it has to say about the "relationships between families and schools," which is its subject, than for what it demonstrates about the educational establishment today and what the establishment will support.

American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, by William Manchester

Douglas MacArthur rose to the top in the small army of the interwar years and then retired in 1934, after serving his full term as chief of staff. It is very hard to retrieve the true dimensions of the man.

Nuclear Energy

Blacks and Jews

Foreign Aid

Camp David

On Revolution

Harold Rosenberg

Affirmative Action

Terror in Uruguay

Orthodoxy

The Catacombs

The Case Against SALT II

Over the last century, the yearning for peace has given rise to the belief that disarmament agreements, or agreements for arms limitation, are an important means for securing peace. It would be more accurate to say that settled expectations of peace between nations result in disarmament.

Singer's Paradoxical Progress

The award to Isaac Bashevis Singer of the Nobel Prize for Literature brings to a climax the most fortunate career in modern Yiddish letters. With deference to Singer's demons, it would be only proper to spit three times upon such provocation, and to dispel their impish envy with the formula, may no evil eye behold him.

American Politics, Then & Now

The administration of President Carter offers an appropriate occasion for asking a question that will be raised with growing frequency as this nation approaches the bicentennial observance of the writing of the constitution: has the American political system changed fundamentally?

The Trouble with Latin America

Latin America is generally included among the "developing" regions of the world. The term is an awkward one because, first of all, it suggests that a country's or a region's problems are primarily economic in nature, and second, it fails to distinguish among countries and even entire continents with enormous differences in their standards of living and their economic systems.

“Necessary Murder&rdquo : Spender and Auden in the 1930s

Spender's new book, The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People, 1930's-1970's, a collection of literary and political odds-and-ends that includes several pieces from the mid-1930's, revives the question: what was it that made these young men, the leading poets of their generation in England, write in this ferocious way?

Guardian Angel

A story.

A Reading of Ruth

Since Hebrew is not the second language of most of the educated world, the verbal virtuosity of the Scroll of Ruth is difficult to demonstrate and the average reader must take it on faith.

Literary Waifs

Short stories have singular virtues. They are short. They can be read-in one sitting.

A Time for Truth, by William E. Simon

Former "energy czar" and Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon has written a book that is part memoir and part manifesto.

Exile and Return, by Martin Gilbert

In a recent article on the fate of the British empire, Sir William Haley, the former editor of the (London) Times, paid tribute to "the understanding, the charity, and the magnanimity" shown by the British to their colonial charges.

The Poetry Anthology 1912-1977, edited by Daryl Hine and Joseph Parisi

The collection under review is a selective record from a single periodical, Poetry, covering sixty-five years under a succession of editors, beginning with its controversial founder, Harriet Monroe.

The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Cultural Revolution, by Chen Jo-hsi

The establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China is supposed to yield various strategic and economic returns. However that may work out, one wonders whether "normalization" will yield new insights into Chinese realities.

The Double Life of George Sand, Woman and Writer, by Renee Winegarten

Another book on George Sand? This famous lady, who survives in popular mythology because she wore trousers and was tempestuously involved with Alfred de Musset and Frederic Chopin, has never lacked commentators.

Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, by Robert Conquest; The Punished Peoples, by Aleksandr M. Nekrich; The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, Volume III, by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Of the three books under review, the first deals with one particularly horrible section of what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has so indelibly stamped with the title "Gulag Archipelago."

Kennedyism

Equality

Sadat and Nasser

Jefferson

South Africa

The New Philosophers

How Not to Make Peace in the Middle East

Why did the negotiations for a peaceful settlement between Egypt and Israel break down? Why has the breakdown been so difficult to overcome?

Lionel Trilling, A Jew at Columbia

If Lionel Trilling had lived to write the autobiographical memoir he had for a long time wanted to write-it was scarcely begun at his death in 1975-an important section of it would no doubt have been devoted to his early career at Columbia and the difficulties of establishing himself in the English-teaching profession.

Why the Shah Fell

The Iranian crisis is far from over; in fact it may still be in its early stages. Nevertheless, the mythmakers are already hard at work.

Welfare Reform and the Liberals

On June 22, 1978, Speaker of the House Thomas P. O'Neill announced that due to the lack of time remaining in the 95th Congress, further consideration of welfare reform would have to be postponed. Thus ended the Carter administration's first attempt to overhaul the domestic program which most Americans would place at the top of their lists of wasteful and ineffective public services.

What Women Want

Nowhere is the confusion that characterizes public discourse in the second half of the 20th century more evident than in the recent avalanche of publications on what the German social theorist August Bebel called the "woman question."

The Prophets in Modern Idiom

One greets every new translation of the Bible into English with excitement and foreboding.

Yesterday's New Music

Although the situation of music at the end of World War II was undeniably chaotic, there were important if superficial reasons for optimism.

A Dangerous Place, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan with Suzanne Weaver

For a few months in 1975 and 1976, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was United States Ambassador to the United Nations. His brief tenure, which forms the theme of this book, attracted to the United Nations a degree of attention which they have not often received before or since.

The History of Sexuality: Volume I, by Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault is a French intellectual who has become an international celebrity. A historian of ideas and institutions, Foucault has written in a clever and ironic way on madness and reason in the Enlightenment.

Watergate and the Constitution, by Philip B. Kurland

Charles de Gaulle once quipped that generals are always fighting the last war. Now comes Philip Kurland, inadvertently demonstrating that civilians are also prey to such myopia.

A Revolution in Taste, by Louis Simpson

"If you want to be a writer, write!" declares an obscure English novelist in one of Louis Simpson's poems. "Write reviews. Write articles. Write anything." This seems sound advice in a time when literature has succumbed to a sort of division of labor.

The Guns of Lattimer, by Michael Novak

Unlike its counterparts in other Western democracies, the American labor movement has never embraced revolutionary ideologies calling for the ultimate transformation of the economic order.

The Issue of Homosexuality

Passers-by

Selling Them the Rope

The issue of trade has figured prominently in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union ever since the Nixon administration initiated the policy of detente almost a decade ago. They saw increased U.S.-Soviet trade as an essential component of detente.

Zionism vs. Anti-Semitism

Ever since its emergence as a national movement, Zionism has had its ideological and political opponents. Recent events have turned the notions of anti-Zionist and anti-Semite into veritable synonyms.

Europe-The Good News and the Bad

Western Europe has entered a period of intense political activity. With France and Germany pressing for the new European Monetary System; with Spain, Portugal, and Greece asking for entry into the Common Market; and with Great Britain on the edge of making a genuine commitment to Europe, one has the sensation of a possible great revival.

An Extraordinary Catholic Childhood

I was born in Prague at the worst possible moment, four months before Hitler came to power.

Writing About Oneself

I do not know what "autobiography" is: the genre changes with each new example. What I myself have tried to write in my three "autobiographical" books is a personal history, a form of my own influenced by the personal writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman.

Arab Money and the Universities

A quiet but important change has been occurring in foreign gift-giving to American universities. Now, money coming primarily from Arabs is being given to establish programs, conferences, and centers that concentrate on the study of a particular land or culture.

Imaginings of Africa

It would be difficult to summon up a gathering of novelists more dissimilar in temperament, experience, and craft than Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Cary, Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, and John Updike. Yet at a crucial point in their careers each of these writers was arrested by the possibilities of Africa as a fertile new locus for some of his most ambitious and unexpected work.

A New Patriotism?

In 1891 the children of the Beach Street Industrial School near the docks on Manhattan's lower West Side voted by secret ballot on whether or not they wanted, each morning, to salute the American flag. The vote was 98 percent in favor of saluting.

The Culture of Narcissism, by Christopher Lasch

Who lost America? It wasn't the Left's fault, replies Christopher Lasch in his apocalyptic new book, The Culture of Narcissism.

Wanderings, by Chaim Potok

This history of the Jews is beautifully produced, with marvelous illustrations. The novelist's hand is evident in the flow of the narrative and the often felicitous turns of phrase.

The Three Worlds of Leonid, by Leonid Berman

These memoirs ought to have made melancholy reading. Leonid Berman was born into the doomed Jewish bourgeoisie of St. Petersburg twenty-one years before the revolution of 1917.

The German Problem Reconsidered, by David Calleo; Germany 1866-1945, by Gordon A. Craig

David Calleo's collection of essays, The German Problem Reconsidered, and Gordon A. Craig's Germany 1866-1945 are but two of the latest expressions of continuing interest in contemporary German history, though no two books could be less similar in approach.

A Season of Youth, by Michael Kammen

The differences between Michael Kammen's new book and his People of Paradox, which was published in 1973, reflect a sharp change in the climate of American intellectual life over the past five years.

Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kolakowski

Despite the importance of Marxism as the official ideology of the Soviet Union and its vast popularity among Western intellectuals, there has not until now been available for the lay reader a detailed, knowledgeable, clearly written, and easily accessible account of the doctrine and the ideas and contributions of its main adherents.

Political Change

Judaism and Revision

Schools and Society

Auden

Pluralism

Liberty and Intervention

Orthodoxy and Feminism

Race and the Court

Bukovsky

The Politics of Jonestown

On November 21, 1978, the New York Times-in a gesture normally reserved by that somber and august institution for the outbreak of war or the arrival of peace-carried a full seven-column front-page headline. The headline read, "400 Are Found Dead in Mass Suicide By Cult; Hundreds More Missing from Guyana Camp."

Converting the Gentiles?

Rabbi Alexander Schindler, in a presidential address to the Board of Trustees of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations on December 2, 1978, proposed that American Judaism actively seek converts from among the religiously unaffiliated: "I believe that it is time for our movement to launch a carefully conceived Outreach Program aimed at all Americans who are unchurched and who are seeking roots in religion."

Portrait of the Radical as an Aging Man

Philip Rahv might seem to be a figure of purely local and circumscribed interest. A recent collection of Rahv's writings serves as a timely invitation to rememberance.

Samson: A Pseudepigraphical Jest

The story of Samson, son of Manoah of the tribe of Dan, as handed down to us in our years and centuries of wandering in Edom, in Provence, Galicia, Lithuania, and Illinois, since the days when it was first related in the Book of Judges.

Literary Lives

There once was a time when what passed for critical discourse could be confidently subsumed under two neatly coordinate rubrics, the Man and his Work. Now, over the last decade and more, structuralism with equal effectiveness has displaced the writer from his work by its special emphasis on formal relations in literary texts.

How Rumkowski Died

Lodz was the first and the last Jewish ghetto in Nazi Europe. Rumkowski and Rosenblatt were included in the last transport of Jews to leave the Lodz ghetto for the death camp at Auschwitz in August 1944.

World War II-Soviet Style

This past year, a unique series of documentary films on World War II appeared on television stations in twelve major American cities. Entitled The Unknown War, the series is based almost entirely on footage assembled by Soviet photographers.

The State of the Art

Though in the world of pop culture fresh sounds would seem to appear with happy frequency, the central problem of serious music today is the absence of new music.

King of the Jews, by Leslie Epstein

I.L. Peretz, the dominating figure of modern Yiddish literature, has a story called "Stories" in which a struggling young writer finds himself between two conflicting literary aims.

Anyone's Daughter, by Shana Alexander

As a journalist, Shana Alexander has never been able to separate her private self from the public events and figures she has covered.

The Spanish Revolution, by Burnett Bolloten

The Spanish Civil War engaged the passions of an entire generation of European and American anti-fascists.

Democracy and the Novel, by Henry Nash Smith

With his 1950 study, Virgin Land, Henry Nash Smith won a permanent welcome on the shelves of readers who want and somehow still hope to find unusual, lively, and significant criticism of American literature.

The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts, by George F. Will

George F. Will is unquestionably America's finest political columnist. Anyone who doubts this judgment may easily confirm it by turning to Will's recently published book, The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts.

SALT II

Egypt and Israel

Lionel Trilling

Solzhenitsyn

Ruth

The Harrisburg Syndrome

In December, Westinghouse sold two reactors, saving the industry from the embarrassment of a year without orders. The reaction to all this has been predictable and can be briefly stated: nuclear opponents say that claims of the absolute safety of nuclear power are now proven false. Let us examine recent events more closely and try to determine the extent to which such reactions are justified.

Why Racial Preference Is Illegal and Immoral

The role of race in assuring social justice is again squarely before the Supreme Court. But the issues at stake here, touching the most fundamental rights of individual persons, are not to be decided by counting noses.

Sex According to the Song of Songs

In the course of the last 2,000 years, a voluminous literature has grown up around the Song of Songs, one of the shortest books of the Hebrew Bible. In eight brief chapters it recounts the story of a pastoral love affair, with speeches by a woman and by a man, and also, apparently, by a chorus.

Liberation Theology and the Pope

The Pope addressed the Conference of Latin American Bishops at Puebla on January 28th. At first his 8,000-word sermon drew words of disappointment and sarcasm from many of the "liberation theologians" he was taken to be attacking.

Jerusalem at “Peace&rdquo

Jerusalem: On the night of March 26, when a miracle that was half-expected finally took place and a treaty of peace between the Jewish state and Egypt was signed on the lawn of the White House, the weather in Jerusalem was fierce.

Jane Fonda & Other Political Thinkers

In the late summer of 1970 I was riding in a chauffeured limousine in New York with Jane Fonda. Her discovery of the world of radical politics was brand new.

Heller & Malamud, Then & Now

What would happen if reviewers of fiction were forced to abide by the blindfold rules of wine tasting?

Strategic Options for the Early Eighties, edited by William R. Van Cleave and W. Scott Thompson

This work is a compilation of papers presented at a conference, with some edited extracts of the proceedings.

Happy Endings, by Margaret Logan

One by-product of the women's movement has been the reevaluation of their mothers by women of raised consciousness.

Innocents of the West, by Joan Colebrook

For some lonely Americans who suffered incommunicado through the impieties of the 60's, Innocents of the West is, though belated, as welcome as Friday's footprinton the sands of Crusoe's Island.

Children of the Holocaust, by Helen Epstein

From its title, Helen Epstein's Children of the Holocaust would seem to be another book about the "war against the Jews." The title is ambiguous, however, and conceals the uniqueness of Miss Epstein's topic.

Heavy Sands, by Anatoly Rybakov

I first came across the name of Anatoly Rybakov in 1950 when I read his novel, The Drivers (Voditeli). This, a product of the late Stalinist era, was a boring description of the life and work of a group of truck drivers.

Foreign Aid

Women and Society

Politics and Literature

The War Against Zimbabwe

No election held in any country at any time within memory has been more widely or vociferously scorned by international opinion than the election conducted last April in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe Rhodesia.

Misreading the Middle East

The five years or so which have elapsed since the Yom Kippur War have seen the United States sustain two very serious setbacks in the Middle East. Nobody can tell what the repercussions of these remarkable events will turn out to be, but it is sure beyond peradventure that U.S. interests and U.S. influence in the region will have sustained a severe blow.

Sociobiology & Its Critics

The wheel of intellectual fashion turns and returns in universities-behaviorism, eugenics, the New History, the New Criticism, pragmatism, Marxism, logical positivism, existentialism, operant conditioning, revisionist history, structuralism. Yet something persists through fashions and affects the career of ideas both substantial and insubstantial.

Living with Intermarriage

To non-Jews, the attitude of the America Jewish community toward intermarriage must appear puzzling. If anything, there seems to be a growing sentiment within the community that attempts to halt the spread of intermarriage are doomed to failure and therefore the sensible course is to make the best of it.

From Avant-Garde to Pop

In music composition at the present time, anything goes. Vanished are the days of the enforced styles associated with post-World War II modernism-serialism, neo-Dadaism, and indeterminacy among them.

Freak Shows

The protagonists of the two most successful dramas this season on Broadway, Whose Life Is It Anyway? and The Elephant Man, are a paralytic and a physical monster.

Woody Allen in the Limelight

In 1952 Charlie Chaplin, after a long, historic career as a comic, for the first time signed a new film "Charles Spencer Chaplin."

Confessions of a Conservative, by Garry Wills

Garry Wills has written so much of late and received so much approbation that he is on the way to becoming a cultural phenomenon rather than a mere author.

Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel, by Simon Schama

Nothing is better for one's peace of mind about Israel than to turn from the current political and military headlines to the passionate dramas of years gone by, when the issues at stake were the acquisition of a few dunams of land, the provision of a well or gasoline pump, building a schoolroom.

Art and Politics in the Weimar Period, 1917-1933, by John Willett

John Willett, once an editor of the London Times Literary Supplement, is a Brecht scholar of whom one has the right to expect something of interest on the subject of his book.

The Cultural Pattern in American Politics, by Robert Kelley

Although one frequently hears it said that this is a time of greater social and political conservatism, with Americans fretting about high taxes, inflation, and rising welfare costs, another way of looking at the current scene is that we have entered an age of pluralism.

Public Nuisances, by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

The late Richard Hofstadter called ours an "Age of Rubbish," and with this view R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., is entirely in agreement.

Trade and the USSR

The Unknown War

Welfare Reform

Arab Studies

Music Criticism

Homosexuality, Cont.

Ten Questions about SALT II

As part of a campaign for ratification of the SALT II agreement, ten questions and answers pertaining to the treaty have been sent by the Carter administration to all members of the United States Senate. These questions and answers appear below, followed in each case by a critique by Edward N. Luttwak.

Myths about Minorities

Will Rogers once said that it's not ignorance that is so bad, but all the things we know "that ain't so." Much of what we "know" about racial and ethnic minorities in America is unsubstantiated and just plain wrong.

Watergate: Toward a Revisionist View

Few of us by now can muster the will to wallow any further in Watergate. However we feel about Richard Nixon and the series of events that brought him down, we want above all to be done with both of them.

A New Theory of Kashrut

One of the most memorable illustrations of the dialectical boldness that rabbinic literature could on occasion assume toward its own governing institutions is a statement of the 3rd-century sage, Rav, about the dietary prohibitions. Rav's daring is in his willingness to see the whole structure of dietary prohibitions as arbitrary.

Wandering Jews

The legend of the Wandering Jew, of his miraculous longevity and of the curse that drives him to travel ceaselessly through the centuries until the Second Coming of Christ, appears to have originated at a relatively late date and only in certain countries of Central and Western Europe.

Evil & William Styron

In an introductory note to The Confessions of Nat Turner, his brooding story of the Negro preacher who led the only significant slave revolt in American history, William Styron wrote that he had tried "to produce a work that is less an 'historical novel' in conventional terms than a meditation on history."

How Not to Do Shakespeare & How Not to Write a Play

By now it should be well known that the much-anticipated and short-lived production of Richard III with Al Pacino in the title role was something of a disaster.

Sideshow, by William Shawcross

With the collapse in 1975 of the American effort to preserve non-Communist regimes in Indochina, it became certain that subsequent developments there would come to be measured against previous American attitudes, presumptions, and predictions.

Being Jewish in America, by Arthur Hertzberg

The commitment of American Jews to liberal reform became something of a political axiom in the two decades after World War II.

The Streets Were Paved with Gold, by Ken Auletta

To reporters covering the New York City fiscal crisis, it was at first the most significant story in the country. Then as the thing dragged on, it seemed to recede into parochialism.

For Capital Punishment, by Walter Berns

In the case of this book, the title and subtitle give, for once, an accurate idea of the contents. The book is a frank plea in favor of capital punishment.

Nuclear Energy

The Weber Case

Romskowki: Fact

Rumkowski: Fiction

Jonestown

Iran

Oil and American Power-Six Years Later

It will soon be six years since the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised the price of its oil fourfold. In retrospect, the preceding years appear as a prolonged Indian summer, and a period during which preparations for winter were not undertaken or, for that matter, even generally acknowledged as necessary.

Justice Debased: The Weber Decision

A racial quota in the allotment of on-the-job training opportunities among competing employees, instituted by management-union agreement, was held lawful by the Supreme Court in the recent case of Steelworkers v. Weber. This was an important decision, and a very bad one.

The Illusions of SALT

I am not concerned here with unilateral disarmament or Soviet sympathizers, but with those who rationalize the inadequate handling of security in terms of the universal quest for peace. Just as the illusions of Munich were succeeded by the illusions of Yalta, so the illusions of "detente" are now being replaced by the illusions of the "SALT process."

Loneliness

A story.

“Human Rights” at Harvard Law School

In late January 1979, at the Harvard Law School, announcement was made of a forthcoming weekend conference, entitled "Third World Communities and Human Rights: A Commonality of Interests."

John Wayne's Image

At John Wayne's death, the President of the United States said that he reflected "the best of our national character." "In an age of few heroes," Mr. Carter said, "he was the genuine article."

In Defense of Decadent Europe, by Raymond Aron

This book, which Henry Kissinger called "one of the most important intellectual statements of our time," is written by the outstanding Western intellectual of the postwar period.

The American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews, by William W. Orbach

Bereft of their cultural and religious institutions, suspected of "cosmopolitanism" within a workers' state, denied even the charade of an "autonomous republic" while rendered vulnerable by the ethnic designation in their internal passports, and threatened with quotas that erode their educational and vocational opportunities, the Jews of the Soviet Union have begun to transform themselves from objects of fate into historical subjects and moral agents.

The Powers That Be, by David Halberstam

In days gone by, "the powers that be" meant bankers and the owners of huge corporations that produce steel, oil, motors, and the like-barons who through the power of advertising towered above the media and to whom the media were thought to be subservient.

The Heretical Imperative, by Peter L. Berger

Peter L. Berger is a sociologist of unusual depth and range who has written lucidly on a variety of subjects, including epistemology and development problems of the Third World.

Jews and the Left, by Arthur Liebman

For good or ill, Jews have historically been attracted in disproportionate numbers to radical movements.

The White Album, by Joan Didion

Joan Didion-or rather the reputation of Joan Didion-is a puzzle.

Watergate

Singer and American Jewry

Sociobiology

Liberation and Theology

Foreign Ade, Cont.

The Song of Songs

Music

Politics and the Novel

Soviet Writing

Cambodia and Vietnam

Black Anti-Semitism on the Rise

The virulence and intensity of the anti-Jewish attitudes expressed by black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Reverend Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came as something of a shock to many people who had long taken for granted the idea of a natural alliance between blacks and Jews in this country.

The Socialists and the PLO

The meeting in Vienna last July of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky with Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, will be remembered primarily as the PLO leader's first visit to a Western democracy. For the meeting with Arafat marked a decisive turn in their effort, undertaken in cooperation with other European Socialist leaders, to refashion democratic socialism into an international movement aligned with anti-Western revolutionary movements in the Third World.

The Lawyers' War Against Democracy

EVERY reader who followed the Bakke and Weber cases must have marveled -and not for the first time-at

A New Soviet Strategy

The reason for Russia's interest in the Middle East is solely that of power politics. Considering her

Women as Conservative Rabbis?

THE current controversy over the ad- mission of women to the rabbinate of the Conservative movement is

Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy

MORE than thirty years ago, Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy began their liter- ary careers with

Coppola's Folly

T S. ELIOT, in the very first of T. his Selected Essays, wrote: "The difference between art and the event

The Neoconservatives, by Peter Steinfels

FOR over forty years now, Amer- ica's liberals and conservatives have spent most of their time argu-

Surviving and Other Essays, by Bruno Bettelheim

FEW followers of Freud have had F as wide a range of concerns as Bruno Bettelheim. Out of his path- breaking

Senator, by Elizabeth Drew

THE campaign biography is a familiar variety of literature in this country. It usually lacks liter- JOSEPH

William Blake, by Jack Lindsay

DERIDED in his own time as a reli- gious crank teetering on mad- ness; rejected by critics and con- noisseurs

How the Soviet Union Is Governed, by Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod

WHEN Ibsen brought out A W Doll's House a hundred years ago, its denouement proved too strong for conventional

Letters

Zimbabwe Rhodesia

Weber and the Court

SALT

Joseph Heller and Woody Allen

Clarification

The Andrew Young Affair

No episode in contemporary American history has been marked by a greater outpouring of animosity against Jews, than the events which followed Andrew Young's resignation as United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

Dictatorships & Double Standards

The failure of the Carter administration's foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts, from time to time, about a policy whose crowning achievement has been to lay the groundwork for a transfer of the Panama Canal from the United States to a swaggering Latin dictator of Castroite bent.

Art vs. the Arts

Ibsen, who was one of the heroes of modernism, endowed it with a passionate belief in artistic sensibility and social purpose. The artist was defined by his opposition to middle-class society. There has been a spectacular change at our own end of the 20th century.

The Trouble with Reform Judaism

The last few years have marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the institutional origins of Reform Judaism in the United States. It is now possible, in retrospect, to see Reform Judaism on the American scene in historical context-where it has been, what it stands for, and what its evolution signifies in the larger perspective of American Jewish history.

Solar Energy: A False Hope

Solar power is the ideal source of energy for the Me Generation: riskless and cheap. Or so it is claimed.

Israelis in Exile

For a country like Israel, founded and built on the premise of continuing immigration, the rising rate of emigration in recent years has become a matter of serious concern.

Glenn Gould's Dissent

From the standpoint of originality and imagination, musical performance today is a pretty dull affair. Influenced by the widespread diffusion of music and the easy availability of recordings, recent performers of the most diverse backgrounds strive mightily to approach a common standard of accuracy, textual fidelity, and unobjectionable musicality.

Who Gets Ahead, by Christopher Jencks & Others

Seven years ago, Christopher Jencks and a team of collaborators published a much-noted and widely discussed book entitled Inequality, which sought to show that equalizing educational opportunity would not do much to equalize the distribution of incomes in American society.

Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, by David Biale

Many books could be written about the life and works of Gershom Scholem, who is perhaps the greatest Jewish scholar of the century, but David Biale's book happens to be the first devoted to this extraordinary and important figure.

Pat: A Biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, by Douglas Schoen

Through most of this century, the American Left has refused, often with good reason, to take conservatives or their ideas seriously. Of the leading neoconservatives, none has attracted more outraged liberal attention than Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis, by Chad Walsh

In 1933 an obscure thirty-five year-old Oxford don, whose only works at the time were two books of little noticed poetry, published The Pilgrim's Regress.

The Rabin Memoirs, by Yitzhak Rabin

Because its defense is of such crucial importance to the state of Israel, a Defense Minister wields an enormous amount of power in that country, more than any other member of the cabinet apart from the Prime Minister.

Afghanistan

Intermarriage

Business and the Soviets

Harvard Law School

Rumkowski in Auschwitz

Kennedy's Foreign Policy: What the Record Shows

SENATOR Edward M. Kennedy has begun his long and eagerly awaited campaign for the Presidency. He is offering

Jewish Denial and the Holocaust

ON APRIL 5, 1943, Hershel Johnson, the United States Ambassador to Sweden, sent a cable to Washington

The Politics of John Paul II

THERE are many grounds for disagree- ment with some of the statements made by Pope John Paul II during

Cubans in Arabia?

WHEN Senator Richard Stone began asking questions about Soviet do- ings in Cuba during his ten minutes

Moscow Night in New York

THE Russified professor of literature, Marius Bronstein, was the first to ar- rive, as usual. Irina stood

Roth & Baldwin: Coming Home

AT THE AGE of forty-six, Philip Roth has relented. He has written a short and touching novel, The Ghost

Tory Wit

IN EARLY October 1979, while the Pope toured the United States to great acclamation, the number- one

Restoring the American Dream, by Robert I. Ringer

A very great deal of publicity and praise has welcomed Robert Ringer's new book. Full- page ads in the

A Lion for Love, by Robert Alter with Carol Cosman

STENDHAL is an acquired taste but one not easy to sate; it's the spe- cial happiness of the French that

Radical Dissent in Contemporary Israeli Politics, by David J. Schnall

ISRAEL is engaged in a constant struggle for survival. Its very existence is still at stake. Yet strange

Moonstruck, by Allen Tate Wood with Jack Vitek

ALLEN TATE WOOD was a mem-ber of Sun Myung Moon's cult for about four and one-half years, from 1969 to

Small Futures, by Richard H. De Lone

DURING the course of the 1970's a new political outlook has in- creasingly come to dominate the political