Nuclear Power

Mheta and the Philharmonic

“The Empire Strikes Back&rdquo

Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

“Foreign Policy&rdquo

Alexander Podrabinek

The New American Majority

Despite the fact that the pollsters all said the election was too close to call, the Reagan landslide was predictable from the very beginning. I know that it was because I predicted it from the very beginning-that is, from the moment the two candidates were nominated.

U.S. Security & Latin America

While American attention in the past year has been focused on other matters, developments of great potential importance in Central America and the Caribbean have passed almost unnoticed. The deterioration of the U.S. position in the hemisphere has already created serious vulnerabilities where none previously existed, and threatens now to confront this country with the unprecedented need to defend itself against a ring of Soviet bases on and around our southern and eastern borders.

Judaism for the Mass Market

The almanac-an occasional compendium of useful facts and statistics, demographic and calendrical data, and brief essays usually of an informational rather than an analytic or polemical kind-is both a proffered guide to, and an interesting reflection of, its time. The almanac as an instrument of popular instruction has been an exceptionally attractive form of modern Jewish culture.

The Communists & the Committees

Just as some of those called to testify refused to discuss Communist party membership, or ties to the American Communist movement, so many chroniclers of the period-serious historians, journalists, and memoir writers alike-deliberately failed to address this issue. Contemporary treatments may be less obvious in their misrepresentations, but the distortions themselves are far more widely disseminated-in many cases they may be said to have taken on the aspect of received wisdom.

Maimonides Then and Now

Maimonides (1135-1204), known by the acronym Rambam (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon), is a figure the mere contemplation of whom is enough to restore one's faith in the possibilities of the human spirit and particularly of Jewish tradition and culture.

Race Relations at Harvard

The continuing debate over affirmative-action admission policies in colleges and universities has generally focused either on the issue of equity and justice, or else on the social and political consequences of such policies for American society as a whole. Except perhaps for Thomas Sowell's courageous account of the situation at Cornell, we have almost no hard evidence on this subject one way or another.

Does the City Opera Have a Role?

The New York City Opera, so the story goes, had its beginnings in a 1943 meeting in Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's office. Interrupting a rosy account of prospects for bringing culture at low prices to a large audience, the Mayor shouted: "This is all very well and good and I congratulate you, but where is opera for the people?"

Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, edited by Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin

The idea of producing an encyclopedia covering the innumerable ethnic groups that make up the American people-as the blurb on the jacket says, everyone from Arcadians to Zoroasters-is something that boggles the mind. But that is what has been done here.

Changing of the Guard, by David Broder

There is an unintended irony in the title of David Broder's new book, since it is his thesis that political leadership in the coming decade will be inherited by the veterans of the various liberal and leftist movements of the 1960's.

Jewish People, Jewish Thought, by Robert M. Seltzer

In the days when the Jewish world was socially cohesive and bound in religious observance, no one had much need to ask who was a Jew or what it meant. I am almost persuaded, however, that a perfect guidebook of this kind is now available in Robert M. Seltzer's newly published Jewish People, Jewish Thought.

Prison or Paradise? The New Religious Cults, by A. James Rudin and Marcia R. Rudin

In the mid-1970's, Rabbi A. James Rudin and Marcia R. Rudin, both students of religion and philosophy, received a number of phone calls and letters from parents distraught over their children's involvement with one or another of the then recently emergent religious cults.

Answer to History, by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; Paved with Good Intentions, by Barry Rubin

If a man can be said to have answered history, the late and last Shah of Iran did so on January 16, 1979, when he boarded a flight at Teheran's international airport on his way to final exile.

The Persian Gulf

Yiddish

Joseph and His Brothers

Arguing with God

“Joining the Jackals&rdquo

The view in the White House was that things were going well until March 1, when Ambassador Donald F. McHenry voted in favor of a particularly vicious anti-Israel resolution in the Security Council of the United Nations, followed three weeks later by the appearance of Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in which he refused to disavow the vote. Thereafter, everything spun out of control.

Pity the Poor Russians?

Aside from a few choice spirits, the Western world had never taken any interest in Poland. Recent discussions in the West over the future of Poland have all too often betrayed an ignorance of the facts.

Why Madame Bovary Couldn't Make Love in the Concrete

Poor Madame Bovary, one understands and sympathizes with her condition. It is very awkward-if not so awkward as that of the freshman student at my university who, in a term paper, spotted the difficulty when he wrote: "Madame Bovary's problem is that she cannot make love in the concrete."

Deformations of the Holocaust

Over the last year and a half, there has been a growing debate on what stance Jews should assume collectively toward the Holocaust, what role it should play in their institutional life, in their theology, and in their political thinking. I shall try to sort out the principal elements of this large and somewhat confusing picture.

Toward an Immigration Policy

Last March, President Carter signed into law the Refugee Act of 1980, which authorized an increase in the number of refugees admitted each year from 17,400 to 50,000 and, most importantly, eliminated ideological and geographic barriers to admission.

John Lennon's Mourners

Within hours of the news of John Lennon's murder last December, it became clear that an event was in the making that was something more than still another display of the kind of collective mourning that followed the assassinations of the 1960's.

The Aging of the New Wave

It was a historic event of sorts. The twentieth anniversary of the birth of the French New Wave, or Nouvelle Vague. What? Twenty years already? was the reaction of the French public, but not of the Nouvelle Vague's founding fathers.

Games Writers Play

Iris Murdoch has for many years been considered one of the major women novelists in the English-speaking world, along with Doris Lessing and, in the younger generation, Margaret Drabble. Primarily she is a prolific novelist, endowed with extraordinary energy and confidence, who has written twenty novels in the last twenty-six years.

Walt Whitman: A Life, by Justin Kaplan

The best opportunity a biographer has for appreciating Walt Whitman's unfolding sense of himself lies in the careful examination of his successive revisions of, and additions to, Leaves of Grass.

Radical Principles, by Michael Walzer

The author of earlier books on the Puritan Revolution, civil disobedience, and war, Michael Walzer has been since 1960 an editor of Dissent, where many of the present pieces originally appeared. They are of unusual interest because of the evanescent quality of what Walzer persists in describing as his "socialism."

Lewis Namier and Zionism, by Norman Rose

Perhaps the most celebrated cri de coeur in modern historical writing occurs in the opening chapter of Lewis Namier's study of England in the Age of the American Revolution. Few historians make fit subjects for biography, but Namier is clearly an exception.

Economic Welfare in the Soviet Union, by Alastair McAuley; Social and Economic Inequality in the Soviet Union, by Murray Yanowitch; Privilege in the Soviet Union, by Mervyn Matthews

Imagine a society with a wide disparity of incomes and wealth; where people in the top 10 percent earn three to six times what people in the bottom 10 percent earn; where poverty is widespread; and where "egalitarianism" is officially opposed by the government. The country being described is the Soviet Union.

Theater and Revolution: The Culture of the French Stage, by Frederick Brown

The theater has never been an important force in American culture, but in France, as Frederick Brown makes clear in Theater and Revolution, things are otherwise.

Lectures on Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), self-exiled from Russia at the age of twenty, was-with Einstein and Mann, Huxley and Auden, Stravinsky and Milhaud-part of the great cultural emigration that came to America during the rise of Nazism.

“The Feminist Mystique&rdquo

The Holocaust

“Foreign Policy&rdquo Cont.

The Election & the Evangelicals

Since last year's presidential campaign, many political observers have expressed deep concern over the growing political power of orthodox Christian groups in this country. And the worst-so the scenario concludes-is yet to come. This version of recent events, while not entirely inaccurate, contains several crucial flaws.

Carter's Last Capitulation

On January 19 and 20, James Earl Carter, Jr., then President of the United States, brought to what he evidently regarded as a happy conclusion a disgraceful episode in the history of two nations, Iran and the United States. He persuaded the government of Iran to accept several billion dollars and various humiliating and possibly unconstitutional promises by the United States in exchange for 52 Americans whom Iran had kidnapped.

What Happened to the Schools

It is only recently, and only by hindsight, that we have been able to appreciate the enormous stresses imposed upon the schools in the immediate postwar era. The most visible of these was demographic in origin.

Anti-Semitism and American History

The portrait of early America in many American Jewish history textbooks is an alluring one. No anti-Semitism mars the Eden-like national landscape; religious freedom spreads over the face of the country, expanding with the frontier; Jews luxuriate in the blessings of justice and liberty.

Healing

A story.

Portrait of a Hero

The general-information section of the Israel telephone directory contains a significant guide to the collective consciousness of the country. Because the demand for new phones has always exceeded the supply, each directory includes a priority list explaining the official policy of distribution.

American Music: The Years of Hope

On one of the accreditation visits which European guardians of cultural life periodically pay us, the polyglot literary critic George Steiner has measured America and found it, as ever, wanting. In his strictures, Steiner says a great deal about our musical life as well, and ventures a broad characterization of American efforts in composition.

The Prestige Press and the Christmas Bombing, 1972, by Martin F. Herz

In early October 1972, the United States and North Vietnam seemed on the verge of an agreement to end the Vietnam War. Hanoi had retreated from its longstanding demand that the United States participate in the overthrow of the South Vietnamese as its price for the return of American prisoners of war and a general cease-fire.

The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, edited by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz

There are at least two good reasons for extracting this book from the great pile of new college textbooks that accumulates each year. One stems from the trend in higher education which it exemplifies and which it is intended to serve.

Fire in the Minds of Men, by James H. Billington

Revolution and its political opposite, reaction, are usually approached by scholars in quite different ways. Where the revolutionary tradition tends to elicit analysis in terms of political ideas, reaction is often taken to be a problem of psychology, the response to change of frightened and often paranoid elites.

The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory

There can be little doubt that the least trendy literary talent of our century was the British novelist Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (1903-1966).

Group Memory, by Alston Chase; Education and the Democratic Ideal, by Steven M. Cahn

Anyone who spent part of the late 60's or early 70's on an American college campus, but has not been back since, may well wonder if the institutional decay so visible then was ever arrested. What exactly is going on?

Independent Journey: The Life of William O. Douglas, by James F. Simon

Many historians of the Supreme Court in the pre-New Deal era emphasized the relationship between economic interests and legal principles. Yet this point has failed to find expression in conventional histories of the Court since the New Deal.

“U.S. Security & Latin America&rdquo

Nationalism

The Puerto Ricans

Teaching Ethics

The Future Danger

In winning the Presidency by a landslide, Ronald Reagan confirmed that a new consensus had indeed come into being. Specifically, his election demonstrated that two related arguments which had been raging in the United States for the past decade or so were now finally settled.

Ideology & Supply-Side Economics

The terms being applied-by the media, by politicians, by economists-to President Reagan's economic program, and most particularly to the tax-cutting aspect of this program, are "bold," "revolutionary," "a risky experiment," and so on. There is nothing really bold, or revolutionary, or experimental about this program. Nor is it at all difficult to understand.

France vs. Israel

Since the end of the Algerian war in 1962, France has pursued a policy of steady rapprochement with the Arabs while periodically acknowledging the security needs of Israel and declaring an official neutrality in the Middle East conflict. The French notion, as elaborated in the Algerian crisis, would come very near to recognizing the Palestinians as a sovereign people, and could easily be interpreted as de facto recognition of the PLO.

Having Babies Again

Suddenly, having babies is back in fashion. In the red hot center of social enlightenment, where I live and work, the signs of a new trend are unmistakable.

“. . . Who Made Me a Woman&rdquo

Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who did not make me a woman." Jewish men have recited this blessing for centuries. Jews are not the only people who have said blessings of this type.

Napoleon Conquers America

During the royalist rising of the 13 Vendemiaire, an obscure young officer of the Republic named Bonaparte turned his trained artillery on a Paris mob and cut it to pieces. Now Bonaparte has stormed and conquered New York's Radio City Music Hall.

James Michener's Docudramas

James Michener's long and earnest novels, which can come to well over 800 pages, have not been found worthy of even the most casual mention in serious studies of contemporary American fiction, and neither do they appear on college-literature reading lists.

The Humanities in American Life: Report of the Commission on the Humanities

The appointment of a commission of inquiry is never a sign of health in the subject being studied. The more prestigious the inquirers, the sicker the patient is assumed to be.

The Jew: Essays from Martin Buber's Journal, Der Jude, 1916-1928, selected, edited, and introduced by Arthur A. Cohen

In 1916, in the middle of World War I, Martin Buber, then thirty-eight years old, launched the periodical Der Jude, with the cooperation of Robert and Felix Weltsch, Hans Kohn, and Max Brod. This was an extraordinary publication.

Ambition: The Secret Passion, by Joseph Epstein

Like a Hindu god, ambition takes many forms-some distasteful, others attractive, some dangerous, others benign. Shakespeare depicted ambition in all its variety: the destructive ambition of Iago, the "vaulting ambition" of Macbeth.

Soviet Dissidents, by Joshua Rubenstein

In totalitarian societies, political dissidence is not, ordinarily, a result of extreme repression. On the contrary, it usually makes its appearance when conditions improve somewhat, thus giving rise to optimistic expectations.

White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, by George M. Frederickson

Comparative history is one of those approaches that scholars freely praise, rarely attempt, and often criticize in practice. The history of slavery and race, however, is perhaps the one field where the benefits of comparison have been most widely recognized.

The U.S. and the UN

The New Majority

Russia and Reform

Jewish Women

How to Make Peace with the Palestinians

Negotiations among Israel, Egypt, and the United States concerning the autonomy plan for the West Bank and Gaza have been deadlocked for some time. This pause will have been well worth the while if it is used for a thorough re-analysis of the situation and of the reasons for the deadlock.

The Imperial Media

You can tell Superman is Superman in lots of ways. Perhaps the most singular of his qualities is the ability to do the transformation trick. Those things don't happen in the real world, and that fact says perhaps the most interesting thing there is to say about the imperial media.

Let Me Call You Quota, Sweetheart

It was said of the late Justice William O. Douglas, and it was said by way of praising him, that more than any other judge in our time he dared to ask the question of what is good for the country and to translate his answers to that question into constitutional law. Not everyone agrees that this should be so.

The Choice

A story.

The Universe and Dr. Sagan

Carl Sagan is probably the closest American equivalent of that English institution, the TV don.

Confessions of a Prodigy

Let others remember their growing up by houses, schools, and friends; I remember mine by piano teachers.

“The Uniforms That Guard Us&rdquo

"Making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep" was a phrase of Kipling's that caught in George Orwell's mind.

Growing Up Free, by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

This is a book about an imaginary society-an anti-utopia-which goes unnamed in the text but which I will name, in honor of its inventor, Pogrebinland.

Zionism in Transition, edited by Moshe Davis

Great revolutions, "by effecting the disappearance of the causes which brought them about, by their very success, become themselves incomprehensible." Thus de Tocqueville, in words that apply with peculiar force to, among other revolutions, the Zionist one.

The Road to Gdansk, by Daniel Singer

For a movement which took pride in its respect for freedom of expression and theoretical inquiry, the New Left contributed surprisingly little to the development of political ideas.

Ideas and the Novel, by Mary McCarthy

For several decades, Mary McCarthy has been warning that the novel, in the ample form in which it flourished in the 19th century, has been wasting away in the 20th, the victim of a harsh aesthetic.

Corporations and Their Critics, edited by Thornton Bradshaw and David Vogel

For most of the last decade, the American corporation has been the object of criticism unequaled in scope and intensity since the muckraker era.

The Holocaust

Vietnam

Immigration

The Schools

Bad History?

Music Critics

McCarthyism

The New Wave

America and Iran

Maimonides and Kant

Mexico & Other Dominoes

In the debate now raging in the U.S. over the Reagan administration's new policy toward Marxist gains in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and also toward Cuba's role in the matter, much is made of Mexico's position by North American supporters of Marxist movements in Latin America.

The Most Beautiful Woman in Vilna

A memoir of life in Vilna.

In Defense of Religious America

"Religion in American life, Mr. Cadwell. We need it." That is the concluding line of a radio commercial which for some, perhaps providential, reason I have had occasion to hear several dozen times over the past year.

Locke and the Law of the Sea

Powerful individuals and nations rarely have much need of philosophy; it is not usual for ignorance of philosophy to cost them much, if anything. But a rare moment in history is now upon us, a moment when access to resources worth billions of dollars could well depend on the right interpretation of an old philosophic formulation-that the oceans are "the common heritage of mankind."

IQ on Trial

We are all increasingly governed by judicial decisions. There is something to be learned by studying judicial decisions of large scope and significance.

Rehearsal for the Holocaust?

At a brief meeting near Berlin over and after lunch, one January day in 1942, a decision was taken to kill all the Jews in Axis Europe. That notorious "Final Solution" was a climax rather than a beginning.

New Jewish Voices

It is the character of our culture to be on perpetual alert for change, and so it is not surprising that we can now speak of a new generation of American Jewish writers whose beliefs and preoccupations constitute a distinctive set of Jewish voices unlike those of previous generations.

Updating James Bond

Ian Fleming, writer of single-mindedly anti-Communist pop thrillers, was a quintessential product of the cold war.

Solvency: The Price of Survival, by James Chace

This is a book that could only have been written in the Carter administration. Aside from a few last-minute additions acknowledging the outcome of the election, it clearly was.

Dostoevsky and the Jews, by David I. Goldstein

An exuberant twenty-three-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky related in a letter to his brother in 1844 the literary projects he planned to undertake now that he had completed his degree at the St. Petersburg School of Engineering.

Self-Destruction, by Cincinnatus

L. Quintus Cincinnatus, a landowning Roman who lived in the 5th century B.C.E., was famous for two things: leaving his plough to heed Rome's call when the Sabines threatened-and then returning home after routing the enemy.

The Life of John O'Hara, by Frank MacShane

Eleven years after O'Hara's death, academics may be coming around to something like a fair appraisal of him as an observer of American customs and aspirations in the 20th century.

High in America, by Patrick Anderson

One Saturday evening in November 1972, Patrick Anderson, a journalist, political novelist, former speechwriter for Robert Kennedy, and future speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, left his suburban Virginia home with his wife to drive into Washington for dinner and a private party.

Making Scenes, by Robert Brustein

Robert Brustein came to Yale in 1966 at the invitation of President Kingman Brewster to add a bit of life to a fading Yale Drama School. He brought with him a wide reputation as a student and critic of the theater, but he also possessed the personality that could attract attention to "Kingman Brewster's Yale."

The Evangelicals

Evolution and Dr. Sagan

Anti-Semitism

Docudramas

The Humanities

Language, Round 2

The Timerman Case

One morning in April 1977, twenty armed men in civilian clothes, claiming to be under orders from the Tenth Infantry Brigade of the Argentine army, invaded the Buenos Aires apartment of a well-known newspaper publisher and editor named Jacobo Timerman.

Hemingway's Private War

In the summer of 1924, Ernest Hemingway wrote to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas to report on the progress he was making with a long short story. The story was "Big Two-Hearted River," which in addition to being swell about the fish and as visually powerful as a Cezanne landscape, turned out to be a nice little masterpiece of psychological indeterminacy.

Thinking About Terrorism

For a decade or more, the United States government, like the governments of most Western powers, was largely silent on the question of Soviet complicity in international terrorism. Beginning in about 1979, and culminating in 1981 with the publication of Claire Sterling's book, The Terror Network, the evidence that the Soviet Union had provided substantial supplies and training to a broad spectrum of terrorist organizations became so compelling that it was difficult to deny it.

Hunger and Ideology

World hunger is not only a material problem, but an intellectual problem as well. To an extent we do not fully recognize, the hunger which stalks millions of wretched families and homeless drifters is related to a lack of understanding and a want of ingenuity.

Varieties of Jewish Verse

Once every few decades, an anthology appears that reaches beyond mere scissors-and-paste operations to restore to contemporary readers a lost literary past. The publication of T. Carmi's The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse is such an event of recuperation.

Singing Wolf

Like so many other forms of serious music, the German Lied-a musical setting of a short poem, often about love or suffering and their various combinations-can now be seen as having a completed history.

A Soviet “New Wave&rdquo ?

The prodigious achievements of 19th-century Russian literature were all made in the shadow of the Czarist censor-and were freighted with incomparably greater meaning precisely because press censorship made fictional stories the only vehicle for expressing certain social and political ideas.

Governing America, by Joseph A. Califano, Jr.

Anyone whose memories of the Carter administration zig-zag from pity to contempt to wistful regret, and who is not sure why, should read this book.

The Winding Passage, by Daniel Bell

"Already the sun is at midtierce." So reads the inscription from Dante at the head of this book, whose eighteen essays by one of the country's leading sociologists constitute a "winding passage" through scientific, political, and cultural disciplines.

At Home in America, by Deborah Dash Moore

For a long time it was standard in American Jewish historical writing either to ignore or to dismiss the so-called "second generation" in American Jewish life. Now, at long last, this trend is being reversed.

Real Security, by Richard J. Barnet

As a work of substance, this small book could easily go unnoticed, but as a case study in changing political styles it is a gem.

Wealth and Poverty, by George Gilder

As a work of entrepreneurship, George Gilder's book has succeeded far beyond the wildest expectations of Gilder himself or his publishers. A year ago, Gilder was known as the author of some rather idiosyncratic attacks on feminism.

“The Future Danger'&rdquo

Griffith and Coppola

Pogrebinland

Hollanditis: A New Stage in European Neutralism

Holland has become one of the weakest links in the Western alliance. The problem is deeper; a desire to keep out of world problems and an aversion to spending money on defense.

Are Jews Becoming Republican?

Everyone says that it remains to be seen whether the 1980 election was a watershed in American politics. It also remains to be seen whether 1980 was a watershed in the politics of American Jews.

Central America and Its Enemies

That there has been a dramatic increase in Central American revolutionary violence in the past four years is obvious to everyone. What is not so obvious, however, is that this increase has been accompanied by the presence of four international forces supporting the groups engaged in such revolutionary violence.

The Politics of Muslim Anti-Semitism

If notions of Jewish conspiracy are alien to Islam, they are now most often heard coming from Muslims. How has this come about? What significance does it have?

The Case of Janet Cooke

When "Jimmy's World," the story of an eight-year-old heroin addict, appeared on the front page of the Washington Post last September, it created quite a stir in the city. Miss Cooke, the young black woman who reported the story, later admitted that not only her resume but also her story was false.

The Noblest Distraction

The bookworm, like the tapeworm, is omnivorous. He joins Freud's appetitive types, those fornicators and feeders who wish each in their own fashion to devour the world, by virtue of his wish to devour all the books in the world.

Self-Seekers

For the past two hundred years, ever since Rousseau began his Confessions with the presumptuous word "I," the expression of the self has been a compulsive preoccupation in Western literature.

Kid Stuff

In the summer of 1981 American movies are enjoying flush times. The country is being bombarded with a series of blockbuster movies which, if thunderous opening weeks are any guide, seem destined to save the American cinema.

National Defense, by James Fallows

It seems strange but is undeniably true that now, less than a decade after Vietnam, responsible American political observers agree that our military forces require strengthening.

The Ethnic Myth, by Stephen Steinberg

This book is an attack on the doctrine of cultural, or ethnic, pluralism-an attack which is in principle long overdue.

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution, by Peter Shaw

On August 14, 1765, a Boston crowd protesting the Stamp Act hung two effigies from an elm tree in the South End. One represented Andrew Oliver, the newly designated stamp distributor; the other featured a devil's imp concealed in a boot.

The Engima of Felix Frankfurter, by H. N. Hirsch

Scholars of the law have long held that judicial decision-making depends at least as much on the political and social attitudes of judges as it does on the impartial application of legal rules and precedents.

Russia's Failed Revolutions: From the Decembrists to the Dissidents, by Adam B. Ulam; The Rise of the Gulag: Intellectual Origins of Leninism, by Alain Besan\ccon

As Adam B. Ulam acknowledges in his preface to Russsia's Failed Revolutions, "This book does not purport to be a systematic history of the Russian revolutionary tradition. Rather it seeks an answer to the question: what was it that at decisive moments has flawed the libertarian intentions of Russia's revolutionaries and reformers?"

Mexico and Latin America

The First Amendment

The New Motherhood

Supply-Side Economics

Jewish History

The Christmas Bombing

The Middle East: Carterism Without Carter?

Almost every great international crisis has its ebbs and flows. The crisis centered in the Persian Gulf is no exception to this pattern.

Human Rights and American Power

The United States, as Hans J. Morgenthau put it in 1974, is "repression's friend." His argument, like the multitudinous statements of other intellectuals supporting the myth of American repression, suffers from two basic deficiencies.

CBS vs. Defense

This past June CBS-TV News broadcast "an unprecedented documentary project, more ambitious than any CBS News has undertaken," entitled The Defense of the United States. The message was clear: it is Reagan's build-up that prompted CBS's "questions."

Philip Roth Then and Now

Philip Roth's was the first literary voice that seemed to speak for our bunch, our group, our set, the particular gang of adolescents with whom I shared a mutual affection and an idea of what we stood against.

The Quintessential Liberal

More than anyone else I can think of, including the late Hubert Humphrey, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., George McGovern, and James McGregor Burns, among others, John Kenneth Galbraith is the nearly perfect exemplar of American liberalism as we have come to know it since World War II.

From the Memoirs of an Administrator-A Fable

A fable.

John Hinckley-A Face in the Crowd

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the attempt on the life of President Reagan last March was the failure of anyone, in the days and minutes before it took place, to restrain his attacker.

The Mogul Who Loved Art

It is rare that highly successful businessmen possess or are able to satisfy the urge to create art. The worlds of business and art demand such different talents and are each so separately absorbing that success in one would seem to decree failure or only minimal success in the other.

The World Challenge, by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber is a French futurist, carrying on a profession that got off the ground when Joseph accurately forecast the course of fourteen years of the Egyptian economy.

Revolution in Judea, by Hyam Maccoby

Prior to the Enlightenment, Christian authors almost always minimized the Jewishness of Jesus, while Jewish sources regarded him either as an all-too-human impostor or else as an agent of the devil, and were indisposed to make fine distinctions between him and the church that arose in his name.

A Life in Two Centuries, by Bertram D. Wolfe

This is a disappointing book, but it is so for reasons largely beyond the author's control.

Origins of the Novel, by Marthe Robert

What is the source of the human impulse to tell stories and to delight in them? Is there indeed one only? And if we knew what it was, would we be any nearer to rescuing literature from the "post-humanist" tide?

The Bureaucracy of Truth, by Paul Lendvai

Paul Lendvai's study of the mass communications policies in the Soviet bloc is important not only for its much needed perspective on a widely misunderstood subject, but also because it represents the kind of intelligent anti-Communist journalism which is invaluable for a serious evaluation of the totalitarian phenomenon.

The Killing Ground

Looking Ahead

Women's Blessings

The Palestine Question

Corporate Ethics

Testing

007 and the Cold War

In Pursuit of Papa

Speaking to the Third World

"Third World." The very phrase by now evokes a multitude of images, positive as well as negative.

On the Ninth of Ab

The liturgy for the Ninth of Ab, the day of fasting which marks the destruction of the First and Second Temples as well as other tragedies in Jewish history, laments the fate of Jerusalem, "The mournful, wasted, degraded, and desolate city."

The Surrealists in New York

I visited Meyer Schapiro one summer night in 1942 and found him engaged in conversation with a slender, well set-up, quite handsome young man, with blond hair falling in pale, flat lines across a high forehead. This was Robert Motherwell, then only up to the prolegomenon of what has been a brilliant career.

Bribing Delinquents to be Good

In strange contrast to the volume and heat generated by the problem of delinquent juveniles is the silence that surrounds what is actually being attempted and done to treat them.

Beyond Nuremberg

On January 21, 1981, the Supreme Court, in one of its most extraordinary opinions, decided the case of United States of America v. Feodor Federenko. At issue was whether the defendant, a seventy-four-year-old Ukrainian-American who during World War II had served as an armed guard at the infamous Treblinka extermination camp, should have his American citizenship revoked on the basis of this newly discovered fact about his past.

Arms & the Movies

The most hackneyed profundity bandied about in recent years by people who confine their reading of classic authors to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is George Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Sequels

When John Updike published Rabbit, Run in 1960-though he was only twenty-eight, it was his fourth book and second novel-no one could have expected that it would be the first of a continuing, if intermittent, chronicle of working-class life in a small industrial town of southern Pennsylvania.

Ethnic America, by Thomas Sowell

If one came to this book fresh, having read nothing else on the subject, one might find it a deceptively simple work.

New Rules, by Daniel Yankelovich

If sociologists have their way, it is going to be difficult to remember the 1970's with anything but displeasure. The latest attack on that much-maligned decade comes from the pollster Daniel Yankelovich in his book, New Rules.

Jacksonian Jew, by Jonathan D. Sarna

Mordecai Noah (1785-1851) was a remarkable character. The best-known American Jew of his day, he was at once a bold visionary and a self-centered conniver, a champion of democratic values and an apologist for slavery, a staunch American patriot and a fiercely loyal Jew.

Riding on a Blue Note, by Gary Giddens

For much of its history, jazz has been considered a form of entertainment, music to be dined, danced, and drunk to. In the last two decades, however, the belief has spread that jazz is as serious as the music of the European tradition.

Within the Whirlwind, by Eugenia Ginzburg

The author, a university lecturer in Kazan, was thirty-one in 1937 when she was arrested on a trumped-up charge of "counter-revolution." She died in Moscow, after rehabilitation, in 1977.

World Hunger

Dissonance in Music

Leon Festinger

The Law of the Sea

The Jewish Vote

Ethnic Groups

Letters on Letters

Human Rights and American Foreign Policy A Symposium

What role, if any, should a concern for human rights play in American foreign policy? Is there a conflict between this concern and the American national interest? Eighteen intellectuals respond.

Murder and the Intellectuals

Not a few of us in New York have been witness to killings-and killings, mind you, of the innocent; many of us live with the expectation of seeing such things. But one thing few of us expect to see, and that is someone found guilty of murder being taken to the gas chamber or to the chair.

A Scandalous Journalistic Career

Wilfred Burchett is no ordinary journalist. An Australian, he has been actively involved in reporting the major confrontations between East and West for over forty years. He has also been a highly controversial figure.

The French Lieutenant's Person

Karel Reisz, an anglicized Czechoslovak, is one of the world's most accomplished film directors. His Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Morgan are considered central works in the 60's renaissance of British cinema.

Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion, by P.T. Bauer

In an attempt to account for the rather disappointing economic performance of so many poor countries, some scholars have suggested that there must be forces at work within the "world system" which perpetuate poverty. The great obstacles to material progress today are neither physical nor financial: they are intellectual.

Auschwitz and the Allies, by Martin Gilbert; American Jewry and the Holocaust, by Yehuda Bauer

Here are two books on related, but separate subjects. Martin Gilbert, the official Churchill biographer, has produced a study of when and how news about the Holocaust-or, more specifically, news about Auschwitz-reached Great Britain and America.

The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, by Virginius Dabney

In 1974 the late Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History revived the unprovable charge that Jefferson kept a slave mistress at Monticello and fathered her five children. In The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, Virginius Dabney has gathered the evidence surrounding the charge against Jefferson.

On a Field of Red, by Anthony Cave Brown and Charles B. MacDonald

Among international Communist organizations, the most notable by far is the Communist International, or Comintern, which was dissolved on Stalin's orders in 1943 to soothe his Western allies. Yet for all its activities and importance, the Comintern has been little studied.

The Litigious Society, by Jethro K. Lieberman

The term "imperial judiciary," originally coined for the purpose of calling attention to activist excesses, has passed into usage as a simple description of the power of the courts in contemporary American government.

The Wars of America, by Robert Leckie; The History of American Wars from 1745 to 1918, by T. Harry Williams

There are many reasons for the unpopularity of military history among the otherwise well-educated, but one of them has to do with the quality of the literature itself.

“CBS vs. Defense&rdquo

“The Timerman Case&rdquo

On Reading

Appeasement & the AWACS

Seldom in recent years has the Congress, particularly the Senate, given the sustained consideration to an issue of foreign policy that it gave to the Saudi arms sale. Yet what is striking about the debate engendered by the sale was the inconsequence of much of it when measured against this nation's compelling interests in the Persian Gulf.

Can El Salvador Be Saved?

In countries where the mass of people have been exploited and oppressed for generations, and have no possibility of peacefully securing their freedom or decent treatment, violent revolution often seems to be the only way to produce necessary change. In September 1979, the case for violent revolution in El Salvador seemed strong.

A New Direction for American Jews

As outsiders in so many of the countries in which they have lived, Jews have always had to create machinery for dealing with the broader society. Since early in the 20th century this activity has taken the form of Jewish "defense," or what has come in the United States to be called community relations-relations between the Jewish and other communities in the land.

Patenting Life

Every once in a while, we come upon an event of seemingly minor import which, on reflection, turns out to betoken deep and problematic truths about our culture. The "Patenting of Life" decision is such a significant event.

My Friend Walter Benjamin

Before I made Walter Benjamin's personal acquaintance, I saw him in the autumn of 1913 at a meeting that took place in a hall above the Cafe Tiergarten in Berlin. At that meeting, about eighty young people had gathered to discuss their relationship to their Jewish and German heritages.

Children of Chopin

Recent history would suggest an inverse relation between a country's economic performance and the amount of official attention paid to its national culture. Yet the tiger of cultural pride is not an easy mount for governments to ride.

Why “Nicholas Nickleby”?

How different is the Royal Shakespeare Company's eight-and-a-half-hour version of Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby from the last "theatrical event of the decade," the Living Theater's Paradise Now of a dozen years ago.

Our Lady of Corruption

"He shook hands with the Pope. How many pimps can say that?" This single line of dialogue, plucked almost at random from the middle of True Confessions, tells you a good deal about this remarkable film.

Political Pilgrims, by Paul Hollander

There is nothing new about travelers in countries other than their own returning with exaggerated, and often ludicrous, accounts of the merits of the way others live.

Javits: The Autobiography of a Public Man, by Jacob K. Javits

Jacob K. Javits served longer in the United States Senate than any other Senator from New York State. For someone born on the Lower East Side, and whose father was a janitor, it is a record to be proud of.

Tocayo, by Antonio Navarro

The exile memoir is not normally the most valuable guide to the history of a revolution. Tocayo is not, however an idealized reconstruction of a vanished past or a lament for lost privilege, still less one more tiresome disquisition on how Castro "betrayed" his own revolution.

The Holocaust and the Historians, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

Lucy S. Dawidowicz's new book shows me how wrong it is to remain silent.

The Struggle for Afghanistan, by Nancy Peabody Newell and Richard S. Newell

In the immediate wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in December 1979, it was widely predicted that the USSR's international reputation would suffer a serious decline because of this naked act of aggression against a defenseless Third World country. It is now clear that the Afghanistan war has cost the Soviets little in international prestige.