Soviet Jewry

The Lawyers

The Socialist International

The Soviet Union

Liberalism & the Jews A Symposium

Recently, the editors of COMMENTARY addressed the following statement and questions to a group of American

The Man Who Kept the Secrets, by Thomas Powers

Thomas Powers has written a serious book about the CIA and one of its major figures, a book that is significant despite its author's inability to overcome fully the accumulated prejudice of a decade of unrestrained accusation--now revealed as very largely unfounded.

Literature Against Itself, by Gerald Graff

To anyone unfamiliar with the present depressive state of academic affairs in general, and with the current "deconstructionist" theory of literary criticism in particular, the stand taken by Gerald Graff must surely seem a curious irrelevance.

Disturbing the Universe, by Freeman Dyson

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is currently sponsoring a series of books intended to show the literate public how scientists' minds work by encouraging a representative selection of accomplished and articulate scientists to present themselves in their own words.

Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II, by Strobe Talbott

A quarter of a century ago, the prospect of nuclear annihilation was a subject of imaginative fiction and gloomy public forums. But now it is no longer fashionable to worry about this man-made doom.

U.S. Foreign Policy

Black Anti-Semitism

Women Rabbis?

Apocalypse Now

Afghanistan

Indochina & the American Conscience

Indochina has been a touchstone of moral anguish for large numbers of Americans who have never set foot in that part of the world. I am one of them.

In Defense of Intelligence Tests

Critics of intelligence testing have recently called for nothing less than its abolition in schools and elsewhere. However, as good as the intentions are, it is likely that intelligence tests are a net benefit to the disadvantaged and that their abolition would be precisely the wrong change for them.

Korah's Revolt

The revolt against Moses led by Korah, his first cousin, is the most dramatic of several such episodes in the Bible. The tale of Korah's revolt has much to say about the kind of commitment God demanded of the Israelites and, indeed, Judaism expects of its adherents even today.

Kissinger and His Critics

Success and failure in politics are seldom absolute categories; compared with his predecessors and his successors, Henry Kissinger acquitted himself well.

Inside Jewish History

Oh, for a slim, elegant little book about the Jews. This cri de coeur is not a general complaint about the huge volumes that publishers continue to offer us and to which, as it happens, I am rather addicted.

Mailer: Settling for Less

For some twenty years now, Norman Mailer has been promising the world a big fat novel about "the mysteries of murder, suicide, incest, orgy, orgasm, and Time." The Executioner's Song, though it deals with four of the mysteries and is by far the fattest book he has written, is not it.

The Russian Wave

For some time now the papers have been full of stories about the flight of Soviet performers from their homeland. But celebrated though they are, only a few dance stars have defected.

America Revised, by Frances FitzGerald

One of the more curious intellectual developments of the last few years is the recent outbreak of concern among writers on the Left about the decline of authority in American life.

Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, by Bernard Wasserstein

The theme of this book-albeit unspoken-is guilt. But not the immeasurable guilt of the principals.

Memoir of a Gambler, by Jack Richardson

When Jack Richardson's first play, The Prodigal, was produced in 1960, he was hailed as one of the most promising young playwrights of his generation. Three more plays followed, but then the author left the theater

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe

"All must hope," Jules Verne wrote, "that someday America would penetrate the deepest secrets of that mysterious orb...." A century later the prescient novelist could have watched the thing unfolding, live, before his eyes.

Kennedy's Record

Blacks and Terrorism

Funding Art

Reform Judaism

Glenn Gould

On Language

The Socialist International

Jewish Studies

The Present Danger

On November 4, 1979, the day the American embassy in Teheran was seized and the hostages were taken, one period in American history ended; and less than two months later, on December 25, when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, another period began.

Reading About Jews

Jews read like compulsive investors in a market that is rarely bullish. What is it, one may wonder, that they hope to find?

France's New Right

In the summer of 1979 a veritable storm broke out in the French media on an unlikely subject: a serious revival of the French Right. Whatever it was, the "New Right" was upsetting a great many people.

The Mysterious Messenger & the Final Solution

It has been known for a long time that the first authentic information about Hitler's decision to destroy European Jewry came from a German industrialist who visited Switzerland in July 1942. What follows is a report of my attempt to trace who he was, what made him act as he did, and what became of him subsequently.

Judy Blume's Children

Judy Blume is one of the most popular children's writers of the age. Since 1970 she has written eleven books: several are tales for small children, and one is an adult novel; the rest are extremely successful novels for little girls between nine and fourteen.

The 60's in Soft Focus

Not so long ago, the counterculture was being celebrated as heralding the birth of a new and better world. But judging by some new American films, in Hollywood, as elsewhere, a radical revision is under way.

Three from London

Betrayal, Harold Pinter's new play, is quite different from the main body of his work. It is not filled with the crossed monologues, portentous pauses, and insinuations of dark meanings that have come to form the Pinteresque style.

The Brethren, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong

The Brethren is, as it claims to be, a term-by-term account of the "inner workings of the Supreme Court from 1969 to 1976-the first seven years of Warren E. Burger's tenure as Chief Justice of the United States."

Prophets Without Honour, by Frederic V. Grunfeld; Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, by Carl E. Schorske

There is a certain amount of topical overlap between these two fine volumes of historical portraiture, but each has a very different story to tell.

Merchant Princes, by Leon Harris

Harris, in keeping with the rules of his genre, is short on whys and long on whats. He paints endlessly fascinating portraits of princes and princesses "moved by greed as well as generosity."

Annals of an Abiding Liberal, by John Kenneth Galbraith

Although John Kenneth Galbraith is best known for his books and articles on economics, he has also played an important role, both as writer and activist, in the promotion of political ideas, causes, and candidates.

Counting by Race, by Terry Eastland and William J. Bennett; Justice and Reverse Discrimination, by Alan H. Goldman

From the earliest days of the nation, the moral meaning of America has been intimately associated with the idea of equality among individuals. That ideal is now under severe challenge, not, as one might expect, from reactionary sources, but from individuals and organizations considered as exponents of humane liberalism.

Liberalism and the Jews

The Holocaust

Moscow to New York

Cults

Women Rabbis

Soviet Global Strategy

President Carter addressed himself to the Soviet leadership: Will it help promote a stable international environment in which its own legitimate, peaceful concerns can be pursued? That the President could seriously raise such questions with the record of over six decades of Soviet history at his disposal, suggests that he has yet to find out who they are and what they want.

After Afghanistan, What?

Those of us who have been warning for some years that the military balance was shifting in favor of the Soviet Union, and that the consequences would unfailingly become manifest in harsh reality, have been sufficiently vindicated by events to resist the temptation of celebrating successful prediction.

America Five Years After Defeat

Through failure [in Vietnam] we have now found our way back to our own principles and values and we have regained our lost confidence. President Carter, May 22, 1977. Of all the characterizations of the American experience in Vietnam, this is among the most misleading.

In Defense of Camp David

The Carter administration's Middle East policy began in the shadows of a report by the Brookings Institution which declared that "peace-making efforts should henceforth concentrate on negotiation of a comprehensive settlement."

Gospel and Midrash

Over the last decade or so, academic literary criticism has come increasingly under the influence of the French school of structuralism, which applies anthropological and linguistic insights to the study of both myths and fiction.

A Remarkable First Novel

The Nineteenth Elegy of John Donne, which provides Johanna Kaplan with the title of her remarkable first novel, O My America!, has nothing to do with America; the word serves as the unexplored terrain that is Donne's conceit for the "new-found-land" of his mistress's body.

On the Air

Ours is the age of the electronic transmission and reproduction of music. Where once the musical experience of the listener was formed by face-to-face contact between musicians and audience, today one artist can perform for the whole world.

The Fourth Man, by Andrew Boyle

Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess were high-ranking wartime and postwar British civil servants. All became Communists at Cambridge; and all were later spies for the Soviet Union.

Pilgrimage, by Perle Epstein

Zchneur Zalman of Ladi, the founder of the Lubavitch hasidic dynasty, likened the roles of law and mysticism in Judaism to meat and salt.

Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, by E. Digby Baltzell

E. Digby Baltzell, the distinguished sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has made a specialty of examining the role of leadership elites in American life.

Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemburg's Letters to Leo Jogiches, edited by Elzbietta Ettinger

The career of Rosa Luxemburg spanned the final decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th, during which time she played a guiding role in the development of the European socialist movement in imperial Germany.

High Culture, by William Novak; Grass Roots, by Albert Goldman

Fifteen years ago, marijuana was the drug of the alienated and daring few. Today, smoking dope has made it into the mass culture.

Indochina and Guilt

Peace, Justice, and the Pope

The Mysterious Messenger

Whose Palestine? An Open Letter to Edward Said

A letter to Edward Said on his book, The Question of Palestine.

The ABM Question

It is now some ten years since the last serious debate in the United States over nuclear strategy. Yet is it so clear that Americans should continue to congratulate themselves on the utter vulnerability of the North American continent to Soviet attack?

How I Came to the Kabbalah

My interest in the Kabbalah-Jewish mysticism-manifested itself early on, while I was still living in Germany, my native country. The existence of the Jews over the millennia is an enigma, no matter what all the "explanations," in such profuse supply, may have to say about it.

A Placebo for the Doctor

In medicine today there is a new spirit, a new openness to ideas and perceptions that come from the outside: from lay observers, from "the patient." But there are problematic aspects to this new spirit. What is it open to? When are laymen's ideas well received?

Isaiah Berlin's Enlightenment

Isaiah Berlin's third volume of collected essays, Against the Current, falls within the area of historical sociology. This is the last of the twelve divisions in which Arthur 0. Lovejoy, the father of the academic discipline known as the history of ideas, charted the interests and themes customarily explored under that rubric.

The Communists and the Klan

At 11:20 on Saturday morning, November 3, 1979, an out-of-town convoy of nine vehicles turned into a narrow street in the heart of the black community in Greensboro, North Carolina. Meanwhile, in front of a community center, a crowd of about fifty people, led by a Marxist group, was preparing for a noon march and demonstration.

Harold Schonberg & His Times

Though the official announcement remains to be made, the imminent retirement of the senior critic of the New York Times is already being widely discussed by the musical community.

Utopian Thought in the Western World, by Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel

Frank and Fritzie Manuel have written a learned, long, full, and (necessarily?) tedious account of utopian blueprints in the West.

The Jews of Arab Lands, by Norman A. Stillman

The history of Jews in Muslim countries conjures up two contrary images in the Western mind: on the one hand, the glorious achievements of medieval Spain in poetry, philosophy, and science; on the other hand, the degradation of recent times.

Academic Turmoil, by Theodore L. Gross

In 1978 Theodore L. Gross, then a dean at the City College of New York, published an article in Saturday Review that raised a storm of protest over its criticisms of his campus's Open Admissions program.

Amsterdam to Nairobi, by Ernest Lefever

For the past half-century, ecumenicism has been a preoccupation of top officials in most of the established American Protestant denominations.

A History of the World, by Hugh Thomas

Hugh Thomas is best known as the author of the magisterial The Spanish Civil War, Cuba, and numerous biting and perceptive articles on political developments in Hispanic countries. He now appears as a world historian.

The Present Danger

France's New Right

Original Sin

IQ Tests

Korah's Revolt

Argentina and the B'nai B'rith

Department Store Heirs

The New Class

Euro-Neutralism

Self-Finlandization, the voluntary subordination of the European political order to the interests and wishes of the Soviet Union, has made considerable advances in recent years.

Is American Literature an Equal-Opportunity Employer?

The Harvard Guide is organized, that is to say, rather like the curriculum of a university highly sensitive to public relations and worried about a ruckus with a touchy pressure group. By including essays on Jewish writing, black literature, and women's literature, the editor must have thought he was responding nicely to the time-spirit of the day.

Freud's Jewish Problem

Freud was suspiciously eager to lend support to far-fetched theories involving the murder of the father, or father-image. He believed, for example, that in primitive times sons murdered their fathers in order to have the women. Likewise, he thought that the Jews had murdered their father-figure, Moses, in the desert.

The Facts About Terrorism

If it is true that two sovereign governments were patrons of the man who murdered Mountbatten, why has this made such a slight impression on us.

The New Black Intellectuals

Following the race riots of the mid-1960's, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the famous Kerner Commission) declared that this country had become increasingly two societies, one white and the other black. The trouble with the analysis, however, is that it no longer speaks to the social, psychological, and economic changes that have taken place in American life in the intervening years.

In Defense of Progress

The idea of Progress-Progress with a capital "P"-has been in disrepute for a long time now. And with good reason, one would think.

The Curious History of Waldemar Haffkine

Had he lived to be a hundred and twenty, Waldemar Haffkine would have died this year. He was born in 1860, into the generation of men who found the means to prevent or cure rabies, typhoid, malaria, and yellow fever.

Screen Memories from Germany

After some four decades in which Germany was almost totally absent from the world cinema as a seminal force-decades during which waves of Italian, French, Swedish, and even Japanese films beat upon American shores-there has been a surprising turnabout.

Free to Choose, by Milton and Rose Friedman

Milton Friedman is the economist my intellectual mentors warned me against. The censors of the Left always spoke his name in a certain way: an ideologue, trapped in abstractions, out of touch with reality-dangerous, too.

Summoned to Jerusalem, by Joan Dash

Zionism has fallen on hard times of late. This is a curious and lamentable state of affairs for the most productive movement in Jewish life since Moses Mendelssohn left the ghetto in the mid-18th century.

The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, by George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi

While the stifling of free expression and the curtailment of intellectual activity are reasonably well-known aspects of cultural life in the Soviet domain, far less is known about the circumstances of those intellectuals who do not dissent but aspire to rule or to assist those who rule.

The Boer War, by Thomas Pakenham

The people who think about American foreign policy have recently emerged from their post-Vietnam hangovers, but it is not clear that they have come any closer to a realistic appreciation of limited war.

Democracy and Distrust, by John Hart Ely

The Burger era of the Supreme Court is now ten years old. Throughout its life, legal scholars have complained that the Burger Court is making a "counterassault" on the earlier work of the Warren Court.

The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels

Gnosticism, an esoteric movement in ancient religion, has achieved surprising topicality. It may even be regarded as the form of religion most congenial to the modern world.

The ABM and Defense

Soviet Intentions

Resolution 242

The South and Race

The Holocaust

The Rise & Fall of the New Foreign-Policy Establishment

When President Carter said that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had caused him "drastically" to alter his perception of Soviet intentions, many people wondered how a great power like the United States could have as its leader a man who did not understand the most important military issue facing the country. The answer, at once simple and dismaying, is that the President's pre-Afghanistan "perception" of the Soviet Union reflected the conventional wisdom of most government officials.

Analysis Terminable

To people who take their cues from the intellectual fashions of academe, any speculation about the decline and fall of psychoanalysis must seem premature or downright perverse. But given the diminished standing of psychoanalysis as a psychiatric modality and a theory of mind, it is questionable how much longer the Freudian vogue can last.

A Yiddish Poet in America

The decline of Yiddish in America Among all Jews except the Hasidim has had important consequences, some of which have only gradually come to light.

Living in Jidda

Many of us here live in compounds. This is not done, as in other colonial arrangements, to protect ourselves from the natives, but rather the opposite: to protect the Saudis from us.

Don Quixote & Other Jewish Memories

A story.

Marge Piercy and Ann Beattie

Marge Piercy is a prolific novelist and poet, a one-time organizer for SDS, who has become a spokesman for radical feminism. Though she presents herself as a revolutionary, her novels are surprisingly conventional.

Why Weill?

Suddenly, within the limited World of New York opera, Kurt Weill is all the rage.

Knowledge and Decisions, by Thomas Sowell

During the past decade Thomas Sowell, who is professor of economics at UCLA, has made evident through a considerable range of books and articles that he is one of our most penetrating social critics.

The Left Against Zion, edited by Robert S. Wistrich

Few who have watched it unfold can have failed to note that the international propaganda campaign against the Zionist movement and the state of Israel, which reached a preliminary crescendo in 1975, has long been couched in Marxist rhetoric.

Conscience and Convenience, by David J. Rothman

In recent decades two approaches have dominated the writing of American history. Nowhere is the second approach better illustrated than in the work of David J. Rothman.

Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, edited by Greil Marcus

Popular music in America now outgrosses the combined revenue of movies, theater, opera, ballet, and sport. "Rock criticism" is another ancillary endeavor of the pop music industry, but it has a unique and curious relation to that industry.

Marxism: For and Against, by Robert L. Heilbroner

This is an intriguing title: it arouses expectations of a judicious and balanced evaluation of the specific doctrines of Marx and Marxism from a scholarly and non-partisan point of view. Unfortunately, there is a fundamental ambiguity in the way the author understands the terms "for" and "against."

Vietnam

Whose Palestine

The Cousins Case

Politics and the Novel

Gershom Scholem

“Peace Now” & American Jews

The story of Yankele and the rabbi of Chelm came to mind on reading the prominent advertisement of the American Friends of "Peace Now," published in a number of Jewish newspapers. The ad did not identify any impediment to peace in the Middle East other than the policies of the Begin government, so it might be useful, to begin with, to recall the immediate context of events in which it appeared.

Czechoslovakia 1938-Israel 1980

In the new European commitment to Palestinian self-determination, there is a malevolent echo of the European homilies supporting Sudeten self-determination heard forty-two years ago.

How to Pay for Survival

Why should there have been a great struggle this spring in the Congress, and between the President and the Congress, about a proposal to spend a few additional billion dollars, one- or two-tenths of 1 percent of GNP, for defense?

The Travels of Malcolm Cowley

America in the 1930's presents an instructive instance of literature under the sway of ideology, for, at least in the major literary center of New York, this was the decade when revolutionary Marxism dominated writing as no formal ideology has dominated our literature before or since.

Paradoxes of Population

Over the centuries, the rules by which population affects national power have gradually become more complicated. In our time, population seems to be on its way back to a key role in the determination of national strength.

Lesson for the Day

A story.

From the Diary of a Softballer

Last Friday, when the sun was darting in and out of the blackish winter clouds and the infield was actually a slippery archipelago of mud left over from the storm that had swept Jerusalem the day before, an insufficient number of the usual personnel showed up.

Celebrating Defeat

In The Empire Strikes Back, a continuation of the Star Wars saga, George Lucas has made an original movie: the first space fantasy heralding the demise of Western civilization.

The Real War, by Richard M. Nixon

There is a growing retrospective tolerance, if not yet a genuine nostalgia, for the Presidency of Richard Nixon.

Militant Islam, by Godfrey H. Jansen

Islam, like Judaism, is both a faith and a way of life, and as with Judaism, the way of life has in recent times been severely reduced by the pressures and allure of modernity.

Selected Papers: I. Romanesque Art; II. Modern Art; III. Late Antique, Early Christian, and Medieval Art, by Meyer Schapiro

Over the past few years three volumes of historical and critical writings by Meyer Schapiro have been published under the daunting title, Selected Papers; a fourth and final installment, on the theory and philosophy of art, is due in about a year.

From Generation to Generation, by Arthur Kurzweil

Where once people struggled mightily to conceal their Jewish ancestors, today they devote the same energy to the laborious task of revealing them.

Playing to Win, by Jeff Greenfield; How to Win Votes, by Edward N. Costikyan; Who Votes, by Steven J. Rosenstone and Raymond Wolfinger

Two judgments about American politics have come, in this election year, to be widely accepted as descriptions of fact. The evidence cited for these judgments includes such things as the declining turnout among, and alienation of, voters.

The New Establishment

Euro-Neutralism

Literature and the 50s

Freud's Jewishness

“Our Hitler&rdquo

Marx and Maxists

A New Arms Race?

Too late to avert the predicament of weakness now upon us, the great debate over the facts of the military balance is finally over. More generally, the widespread presumption that the quality of American equipment is significantly higher than that of its Soviet counterparts is no longer justified in most cases.

The Boys on the Beach

When the homosexual-rights movement first burst upon the scene a little more than a decade ago, a number of people I used to know must have been-as I was myself -more than a little astonished.

Judaism in Extremis

Hasidism, a movement of Jewish religious revival that swept Eastern Europe in the 18th century, and that had a profound effect on the entire religious culture of the Jews in the modern period, has had a curious intellectual history.

East-West/North-South

In, May 1977 President Carter said that the threat of conflict with the Soviet Union has become less intensive," and that the greater threat to peace now came from a world "one-third rich and two-thirds hungry." In that same year, a commission was established to study this great new threat.

Balkanizing America

Once the principle of compensating minority groups for past discrimination became public policy, legislated by government and validated by the courts, it was inevitable that a struggle would ensue for a share in such compensation.

Homage to Robert Hayden, 1913-1980

People having their own children take what they get; those who adopt may pick and choose. That's what my parents said to make me feel good about being adopted, but I have often fancied that orphans should select their parents.

Aging Novelists

Old novelists never die, they merely repeat themselves or grow silent. A few noble exceptions -such indefatigable masters as Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Defoe, Thomas Mann-could go on writing well into their seventies or eighties.

The Spike, by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss

The Spike is what is known as a political thriller: a fictionalized account in which there are so many thinly-disguised real individuals that any habitual reader of the daily press will know what is going on.

Brandeis of Boston, by Allon Gal

Whatever the deficiencies of Zionism in the period preceding the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, it never lacked for charismatic leadership.

Authority, by Richard Sennett

The materials accompanying the publication of this new book by Richard Sennett, a sociologist by training and now a professor of humanities at New York University, describe him as "one of the most brilliant and provocative thinkers-a master of complicated interplay between politics and psychology."

America for Sale, by Kenneth C. Crowe; Financial Invasion of the U.S.A., by Earl H. Fry

Since 1947, ever increasing amounts of foreign money have been seeking an investment haven in American stocks, real estate, and bonds.

Jews of the Latin American Republics, by Judith Laikin Elkin

Since 1945 the numerical bulk of the world's Jewish population has resided in the Western hemisphere, and a far from negligible portion of that majority lives south of the Rio Grande, in the twenty-odd republics of Latin America.

The Zero-Sum Society, by Lester C. Thurow

To Adam Smith and the classical school, economics was thought to have much to teach about the creation of wealth, but relatively little about its distribution. Economists have long since abandoned such modesty.

Vietnam and Foreign Policy

Psychoanalysis

Soviet Strategy

Reagan and the Republican Revival

For perhaps the first time since Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican party has become the party of change.

Containment for the 80's

Whatever the result of the coming election, problems of defense and foreign policy will demand more of the time, thought, and energy of the President and his advisers than during any period since World War II.

The Jewish Argument with God

For some time it has been the fashion in liberal theology to emphasize the sameness of the basic teachings of the major religions. The polar view, that the true faith is unique, is equally groundless. Among Jewish teachings is one which is, however, virtually unique among world religions.

The Three Mile Shadow

As the United States debates its energy future-with a new strategic option emerging almost monthly, now biomass, now a vastly increased burning of coal, now the production of synthetic fuels, now nearly painless cutbacks in the amount of energy consumed per capita, now windmills-a shadow hangs over the one tried and functioning substitute for oil and coal: atomic energy. It is, of course, the shadow cast by Three Mile Island.

Radical Historians

In a situation of some uncertainty, one thing at least can be said with assurance concerning contemporary American politics: it is a bad time for radicals and radicalism. But they have not entirely been disbanded.

Versions of Walter Lippmann

When a military conscription bill finally cleared the U.S. Congress in May 1917, one of the measure's earliest and warmest advocates in the world of journalism suddenly realized that he himself might very well be called to the colors.

Singing the Same Old Songs

Joshua Then and Now is Mordecai Richler's eighth novel, but it so closely resembles his seventh, St. Urbain's Horseman, which came out in 1971, that it's often hard to remember who said and did what in which book.

Philosophy and Public Policy, by Sidney Hook

The earliest essays in this collection date back to 1945, while the latest include scathing attacks on such current follies as reverse discrimination in university admissions and hiring practices.

The Lean Years, by Richard Barnet

The myth of the Third World would seem to have fallen on hard times. Those who study the data on political and economic development go even further.

Helen and Teacher, by Joseph P. Lash

When she was seven or so, Helen Keller returned from a drive in the country and in sign language proceeded to give her family an enthusiastic description of the scenery.

Of Blood and Hope, by Samuel Pisar

Samuel Pisar is an international lawyer best known for his tireless advocacy of trade between the Soviet Union and the West.

Orwell: The Transformation, by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams

There remains something elusive and enigmatic about George Orwell, despite his own numerous autobiographical writings and allusions (about which the reader is well advised to be wary).

American Jews and Israel

Israel/Czechoslovakia

“Foreign Policy&rdquo

Literary Studies

Judaism and Ethics

Psychoanalysis

“Living in Jidda&rdquo

American Power & the Persian Gulf

In the immediate wake of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, there was a sudden and widespread disposition in the country to acknowledge that we were confronted with a grave international crisis centered in the Persian Gulf.

The Rise and Fall of Yiddish

By means of his magisterial scholarship, Max Weinreich disproves the old cavil against Yiddish, that it was not a true language but only a jargon. For so long regarded as the ugly duckling among languages, Yiddish emerges from this study as a graceful swan.

Turnabout in the Senate

A little more than ten years ago, a change in the mood of the Senate was one of the first decisive steps in a change in American political culture.

The Posthumous Victory of Albert Camus

The life of Albert Camus, who died twenty years ago in an automobile accident, reads like a 19th-century French novel in which the young man from the provinces conquers Paris.

Joseph and His Brothers

Although we are accustomed to think of the narrative sections of the Bible as sacred history, I would like to propose that it is at least as useful and as accurate to view them as prose fiction.

Mehta's Philharmonic

When Leonard Bernstein stepped down as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1969, to everyone's surprise-and to the dismay of many-the Philharmonic chose as his successor Pierre Boulez, famous both for the forbiddingly cerebral quality of his music and for a certain aesthetic, social, and political radicalism.

Facing Reality, by Cord Meyer

Cord Meyer a veteran of a quarter-century with the Central Intelligence Agency, has published two books. The second now appears some thirty years later, and is an account of what happened to Meyer, and to his world, in the interim.

The State of the Jews, by Marie Syrkin

Unlike others who have ventured lately to speak about the relationship between Israel and American Jewry, Marie Syrkin brings to the task a lifetime of impeccable credentials as a writer and a Zionist.

At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present, by Carl N. Degler

The thesis of this book, as indicated by its title and spelled out in the preface, is that the equality of women and the institution of the family have been at odds with each other ever since the Revolution.

Soviet Psychoprisons, by Harvey Fireside; Institute of Fools, by Victor Nekipelov; Punitive Medicine, by Alexander Podrabinek

Leonid Plyushch, a mathematician from Kiev and an active figure in the Soviet human-rights movement, spent nearly four years in psychiatric hospitals. He described his treatment in his memoir, History's Carnival.

Of Kennedys and Kings, by Harris Wofford

With the exception of his indefatigable apologist Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., historians have been much harsher toward President John F. Kennedy than pundits and journalists were during and immediately after his brief administration.

“The Boys on the Beach&rdquo

Freud

Jewish Genealogy

The Feminist Mystique

Feminism in its contemporary form is an empirical doctrine leading to recommendations for social action. Of course, the irrationality of today's feminism need not stop a determined feminist from ever more frenzied efforts to reach her goal.

Lies About the Holocaust

Every historical subject has undergone revision as each new generation rewrites the history of the past. But the term "revisionism" has applied specifically to dissident positions which are at variance with mainstream history. Three of these subjects have been politicized beyond the limits of historical truth-World War I, World War II, and the cold war.

How to Restrain the Soviets

For those who, in the wake of Afghanistan and Poland, seek to assess the present and future course of Soviet policy, there ought to be much room for thought in what might be described as the prenatal history of the Soviet state.

In Defense of Capitalists

The dream of socialism has given way not to a dream of capitalism, except among a minority of libertarian true believers, but to a kind of dreamless agnosticism toward all economic ideals-an exorcism of spirit from the economic world.

Socrates and Us

Socrates never wrote a word. We know of him because he taught Plato, who put him in some of the dialogues.

A New International Disorder

Before 1914 world politics was very much the politics of European states. The balance of power was destroyed during the war of 1914, and the Versailles settlement which followed, instead of reestablishing this balance, put the seal on its irremediable destruction.

“The Leading Jew in America&rdquo

The name means "blessed" in Hebrew, Bernard M. Baruch never tired of telling acquaintances. He was a blessed man.

Getting Ethics

A new spirit of moralism is stalking the culture. Increasingly these days one looks through one or another of the professional trade magazines-of the bar, of the medical profession, or even of business-to find articles about, pleas for, and speeches dealing with the ethics of the profession.

The Real Avant-Garde

Novels of protest-protest against oppression and injustice-have invariably taken the form of brutal realism, from a Zola to a Solzhenitsyn, since they seek to document horrors with a wealth of detail and fact.

Arabia, the Gulf, and the West, by J.B. Kelly

The recent outbreak of fighting between Iran and Iraq, and the manifest inability of the United States to influence events in that region, have led nearly everyone who thinks about these matters to conclude that American policy in the Persian Gulf is gravely deficient.

From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism 1700-1933, by Jacob Katz

Jacob Katz's new book enables us to discern the history of anti-Semitism with greater clarity than ever before, as he guides us through a bewildering maze of books and pamphlets reflecting every current of European thought.

Safire's Washington, by William Safire

In 1973, William Safire left the White House staff, where he had been one of Richard Nixon's main speechwriters, and joined the New York Times as a regular columnist. As it turned out, Safire won a Pulitzer Prize.

Unelected Representatives, by Michael J. Malbin

In 1981, the third Senate office building will open, expanding Senate office space by 50 percent. Since the number of Senators has remained fixed, the new building is a monument to the growth of staff.

Peter the Great, by Robert Massie

Robert Massie, a historian educated at Yale and Oxford, belongs to the endangered, if not extinct, species of the gentleman scholar.