U.S. Foreign Policy

Juvenile Delinquents

Jesus and the Jews

Jazz

Reagan & the Russians

Not even President Reagan's arms-reduction proposals of late November can redeem the impression that in foreign policy, 1981 was unfortunately not an annus mirabilis. Evidence for this conclusion lies all around but perhaps nowhere so saliently as in the main area of international affairs, U.S.-Soviet relations.

Notes from the American Underground

One day in 1969 a twenty-two-year-old Swarthmore graduate named Jane Alpert-dressed, as she recounts in her recently published memoirs, in her white kid gloves and adorned with a ladylike touch of make-up-traveled on a New York City bus downtown to the Federal Building in Foley Square and there planted a time-bomb on the 40th floor.

Israel and the Messiah

The prayer for the well-being of the state of Israel which is recited on Sabbaths and festivals in most synagogues in Israel and the Diaspora calls the state "reshit geulatenu," the commencement of our redemption. The question that a historian may address is not whether the state of Israel is worthy of association with the traditional messianic concept but whether a connection can in fact be drawn between the messianic hope entertained by Jews through the ages and the modern national movement that led to the founding of Israel.

The Painters' Club

The artists themselves spoke of it simply as "the Club." "Painters' Club" was my own expression when I had to identify it for some of my literary friends as the place where I might have picked up this or that odd bit of information.

Ulster: In the Empty House of the Stare

The present media tableau of Ulster has become as fixed and conventional as one of those temperance woodcuts of the last century. Its dramatis personae wring tears from audiences in many countries; but in the United States this flow is a veritable torrent.

Criticism Without Constraint

Is literary criticism really needed? Does it constitute a legitimate discipline or only a pastime? And can there be any justification for the old faith-now professed only with apology or irony-in the historical study of authors and periods, when the only student enthusiasm we can rely on is borrowed from such topical domains as feminism, science fiction, and popular culture?

Collaboration Par Excellence

The conventional image of France during World War II is similar to that of Belgium in World War I: a nation trampled upon by the Hun, but in its soul unvanquished. In this picture, a small clique of unrepresentative reactionaries took over the country under the protection of the German army and proceeded, in the abject setting of Vichy, to help the Nazis do their work while the heroic Resistance did what it could to salvage French honor, and rescue victims of fascist persecution.

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, by V.S. Naipaul

The celebrated novelist V. S. Naipaul began his "Islamic journey" in Teheran in the late summer of 1979, eight months after the fall of the Shah and the concomitant enthronement of the Ayatollah Khomeini as de facto ruler of Iran.

Darkness Over the Valley, by Wendelgard von Staden

The most interesting thing about Wendelgard von Staden's slim account of her recollections of growing up in Hitler's Reich is its great success in Germany. Since it first appeared in 1979, the book has gone through seven printings, and its author lectures throughout the country to packed audiences of all ages.

The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., by David J. Garrow

For some time it has been Common knowledge that the FBI engaged in a relentless investigation of Martin Luther King, Jr. during most of his brief public career. In this book, David Garrow sets out to review the Bureau's campaign against King.

Essays on Moral Development, by Lawrence Kohlberg

Lawrence Kohlberg is a Harvard psychologist who has been insisting for two decades that the study of children's moral reasoning can guide society in distinguishing right from wrong. The present collection of essays is concerned with the moral and pedagogical consequences Kohlberg draws from his empirical findings about children.

The Road From Here: Liberalism and Realities in the 1980's, by Paul Tsongas

The problem that liberals continue to face, more than a year after the sweeping conservative election victory, is deciding whether to repackage their old ideas in different rhetorical wrappings or to come up with some genuinely fresh ideas.

“Human Rights and American Foreign Policy&rdquo

Wilfred Burchett

The Third World

The Ninth of Ab

M*A*S*H*

“Hollanditis&rdquo

Why We Need More

In its revised budget the Reagan administration requested $214.1 billion for defense in the current (1982) fiscal year. Among those who object, some columnists and many TV personalities, full-time defense critics, disarmers, isolationists, and "concerned" churchmen and academics remain blessedly ignorant of the full dimensions of the Soviet military upsurge and of our own weakness.

Reform Judaism and the Bible

Jewish culture, it has often been remarked with considerable justice, is a peculiarly exegetical one. Though some notable efforts have been made over the centuries to systematize the ideas and values implicit in Judaism, it has been far more typical for Jews to articulate such ideas and values through textual commentary and often, indeed, through commentary on commentary.

The Authentic Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling was a graceful man. I was reminded of the fact recently by happening upon an old publicity photograph that shows him bowling.

God & Man at Yale-Again

In a speech to the freshmen this past September, President A. Bartlett Giamatti of Yale warned of a new and powerful evil in America, a "storm that blows across the landscape." With all the eloquence at his command, Giamatti exhorted the freshmen to fight for the values that are threatened with "spiritual violence" by this new evil, which goes under the name of the Moral Majority. Why the attack? Why shake a fist at a lobbying group whose supposed power has not affected in the least those who dwell in Ivy League cloisters?

The Scandal of Cambodia

The occupation of Cambodia (Kampuchea) by the Vietnamese, who invaded it in 1978 and installed a puppet government that remains in power today, is fully comparable to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Why then has it received so much less public attention?

Poland on Film

Poland's Andrzej Wajda is by far the best known film-maker from the Communist world, and the one most honored in the West. In Western Europe, Wajda is ranked along with Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa as one of the "greats."

The Miseducation of Musicians

Every time is crisis time for those who live in a world of annually revised budgets. This is, in a special way, the lot of the large group of people who teach music in our schools and universities and who make up the faculties of instruction in our professional colleges of music.

The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould

Since mental tests of all varieties have been under attack for more than a decade, it is scarcely surprising that Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man has been received in some quarters as a devastating critique of testing.

Breakthrough, by Moshe Dayan; The Battle for Peace, by Ezer Weizman; Destination Peace, by Gideon Rafael

Despite the great differences of personality between them, the late Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman had much in common. Both were Palestinian-born, came of age toward the end of the period of the British Mandate, and received their first military training under the British.

The Arab States and the Palestine Conflict, by Barry Rubin

Rarely does anyone stop to ask just how the Palestine problem became so important. At base, it concerns two small people fighting for control over a sliver of territory. There is nothing in this struggle to capture the world's attention; how, then, did it grow from a minor clash into the most persistent international problem of our time?

The Physicists, by C.P. Snow

This book, lavishly illustrated, is actually a first draft, dictated in haste from memory, of a longer work the late C.P. Snow planned to write, and this is reflected in the brevity of the text.

The Ultimate Resource, by Julian L. Simon

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse weren't the sort of fellows you'd want your sister to marry. It is perhaps because of this fact that apocalyptic literature is generally assumed to deal with revelations about how bad things are or about how bad they can be seen to be now that the veil has been torn off.

The AWACS

American Jews

Pianists

The Deconstructionists

War Criminals

Goldwyn

The Surrealists

The Middle East: A Consensus of Error

A consensus has been developing lately on what the main problem is in the Middle East, and what needs to be done about it. This consensus is shared by a large and growing majority of the international community, including most Western diplomats, our European allies, and many intellectuals. The main tenets of the consensus are that the Camp David accords are an insufficient basis for seeking peace in the Middle East; that the PLO is prepared to accept peace with Israel in return for land; and that the major impediment to a policy based on the foregoing propositions is the Jews of the United States.

What Poland Means

The first reaction to the military coup in Poland was shock and confusion, followed by a wave of indignation, anger, and protest. Protests are important, but they will lead nowhere unless an analysis is made of what went wrong and why. A defeat always contains lessons for the future. What are the lessons of the defeat in Poland?

Voting Rights and Wrongs

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is surely the most successful civil-rights measure ever enacted by the national government. Everybody-or, at least, everybody who has publicly offered an opinion on the subject-agrees with this judgment, and there is good reason why they should.

Arms & the Church

A new and startling development has taken place in the thinking of the American Catholic hierarchy on questions of war and peace. In the name of Catholic morality, and on the alleged authority of Vatican Council II, influential bishops have publicly denounced the American strategy of nuclear deterrence and have in its stead recommended a policy whose ultimate logic will demand unilateral nuclear disarmament. How has this extraordinary development come about?

American Nightmares

"There must in art, as in medicine and fashion," wrote Proust, "be new names." Robert Stone, the novelist, is such a new name. Not that Stone is quite so new as all that: he published A Hall of Mirrors, the first of his three novels, in the middle 1960's.

Jewish Dreams

Modern Jewish literature, one of the major by-products of Jewish secularization during the past two centuries, has long been obsessed with the rebellion against tradition that brought it into being.

Within a Budding Grove's

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians-the latest manifestation of the renowned English reference work-is here, surpassing in size all its predecessors. Like the battleships built in the twilight of sea power, its mere statistics of displacement and armament seem validation enough in themselves.

Bolshevism for the 80's

I first met Warren Beatty in the transit lounge at the Copenhagen airport in 1969. He was on his way to Russia, already embarked on a project to make a film called Ten Days That Shook the World, based on the celebrated work of a boyhood hero of his, John Reed.

Yellow Rain, by Sterling Seagrave

To most Americans, the initials NBC stand for a television network or a biscuit company. To the military analyst, however, they denote three nonconventional forms of warfare-nuclear, biological, and chemical-whose assimilation into strategic thinking presents a variety of serious, and indeed frightening, practical and moral problems.

Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917, by Jonathan Frankel

The modern history of European Jews begins with their emancipation in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789. By 1838, in the West, the movement toward equality had already undergone a reversal.

Mrs. Harris, by Diana Trilling

We have here an account of a much publicized murder trial, the trial of an aging woman cruelly rejected by a vain and callous lover. The case gained its notoriety largely because the victim had achieved a momentary position on the margins of celebrity as the author of a best-selling diet book.

How Courts Govern America, by Richard Neely

This is a confused, tendentious, and exasperating book. Yet, coming as it does from a sitting judge-Richard Neely, Chief Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals-it is an important document.

Waldo Emerson: A Biography, by Gay Wilson Allen

Commentators on Emerson's life have always been "notably skittish" about dealing with the circumstances and implications of Emerson's first marriage to Ellen Tucker, particularly on its financial side, Joel Porte observed a few years ago in a biographical study called Representative Man.

Ulster

Painters

Political Pilgrims

“Affirmative Action” Under Reagan

In a press conference on the anniversary of his inauguration, Ronald Reagan stated that "I have been on the side of opposition to bigotry and discrimination and prejudice, and long before it ever became a kind of national issue under the title of civil rights. And my life has been spent on that side." The policies, unfortunately, are not as clear as they should be after more than a year in office.

AWACS and the Jewish Community

When the sale of AWACS jets to Saudi Arabia was narrowly upheld in the Senate on October 28, 1981, the President's victory was widely seen as a major setback for the supposedly powerful "Jewish lobby." Yet the first thing that needs to be observed is that the very definition of the AWACS fight as a test of "Jewish power" reflected-and reflects-a falsified conception.

Why We Need a Draft

What should we make of the All-Volunteer Force? Government officials, be they Republicans or Democrats, and even some officers, assure us that it is working well. On the other hand, everyone senses that something is wrong.

The Problem of Christian Anti-Semitism

A theological revolution has been taking place within Christendom in the last generation which has largely remained unknown to Christian believers specifically and to the educated public generally. The chief issue may be oversimplified in this way: does the murder of millions of Jews by ex-Christian Nazis and the passive acquiescence of millions of Christians and ex-Christians have any source in the Christian theological teaching about the Jewish people during the last two millennia?

Matthew Arnold and the Resistance

In November 1883, when Matthew Arnold was lecturing in America, Henry James wrote from England to his boyhood friend Thomas Sergeant Perry: "I am very sorry you didn't like poor old Mat. I like him as I do my old portfolio: with an affection that is proof against anything he may say or do today, and proof against taking him too seriously." Not take Matthew Arnold seriously.

The Curious Career of Costa-Gavras

Costa-Gavras is the world's premier agitprop film-maker. He casts well. He has a good sense of drama and timing. He has a decided talent for political melodrama, for the mood, for the visual creation of atmosphere.

Saul Bellow's Winter of Discontent

To judge from the photographs on their book jackets, most serious American writers of fiction have followed the trek to the suburbs and beyond, and now ply their craft in semi-rural or college settings. In their work the garden shows its season.

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, by Marshall Berman

The role played by modernist culture in the radical movement of the 1960's, though often assumed to have been a significant one, has never really been clarified. Has it, indeed, ever really been studied?

The Making of Modern Zionism, by Shlomo Avineri

One of the central difficulties about Zionism is that there is no agreement about its content or nature or ultimate purposes. One man's Zionism need not be-indeed, rarely is-another's.

Practicing History, by Barbara W. Tuchman

The publication of this book testifies, in its own curious way, to the strength of Barbara Tuchman's extraordinary popularity and reputation.

The King of Fifth Avenue, by David Black

August Belmont, twenty-three years old, arrived in New York City on May 14, 1837. As David Black explains in his massive and riveting new biography, the handsome youth had already been an employee of the House of Rothschild for almost nine years.

Le Spectateur Engag\'e, by Raymond Aron; Devant la Guerre, by Cornelius Castoriadis

The considerable impact that these two quite different books have made in France is a testament to substantial changes that have occurred in the French intellectual climate over the past several years.

Defense

The Underground

Messianism

Lionel Trilling

American Jews

Nazi Germany

“True Confessions&rdquo

The Peace Movement & the Soviet Union

The "struggle for peace" has always been a cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy. We must at the same time bear in mind that according to Communist dogma, wars are the "inevitable consequence of the clash of imperialist interests under capitalism," and therefore they will continue to be inevitable as long as capitalism exists.

With the American Press in Vietnam

My time in Vietnam was brief: less than two years. This was not unusual, the normal thing was to move people in and out of that country before they got the hang of it, or even a proper handle on their jobs. Aside from some scabrous stories that LBJ told about his salad days in Texas, we talked about nothing but Vietnam and the "bloody-minded press."

Vanishing Acts

My father, a prosperous lawyer in Nuernberg, returned from a month long professional trip abroad to our home in Fuerth to be present at my Bar Mitzvah in early October 1938. His return was imprudent; he would have been better off staying in Brussels.

The Atlantic Alliance and Its Critics

The signs of mounting dissatisfaction in this country with the Atlantic Alliance are today everywhere at hand. How are we to assess this current disaffection with an alliance that has formed the principal instrument of America's post-World War II foreign policy?

Ethnicity-North, South, West

Twelve years ago, Daniel P. Moynihan and I, reviewing the condition of politics in New York City for the second edition of Beyond the Melting Pot, described two models of group relations which we dubbed "Northern" and "Southern." Both models, we wrote, rejected the idea that the fate of ethnic groups and races in the United States was to acculturate to a common American mean, and both affirmed the reality of group distinctiveness. But otherwise the differences between the two models were striking.

Shakespeare as Remedial Reading

Sometimes in my English classes I give out reading lists of about fifty titles from Homer to Joyce. The student appreciates the thought, but wishes to know why it should be necessary to face another and unadvertised requirement.

Santayana and the Genteel Tradition

The Harvard faculty of the 1890's thought of itself as made up of men of superbly independent mind. George Santayana, a prodigy of detachment, knew otherwise.

Rediscovering Judaism

A couple of years ago I attended Friday night services at a Reform temple in Connecticut. One aspect of the service surprised me. Though there was much less Hebrew in the prayers than English, the Hebrew passages were read aloud by the congregation with what appeared to be exceptional emphasis and warmth.

The Kingdom, by Robert Lacey

Omens all seem to point grimly to the possibility that the Great American novel, that homely and enduring landmark on the literary scene, may soon be shouldered aside by an exotic intruder, the Great Arabian saga.

The Turbulent Decades: Jewish Communal Services in America, 1958-78, edited by Graenum Berger

A number of developments in the decades since the end of World War II have eroded the numerous ideological commitments that once divided and fragmented the organized Jewish community of the United States.

The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume I, by Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre's monumental study of Gustave Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille, originally published in 1971-72 is hardly the delightful "novel of suspense" that Simone de Beauvoir once amazingly called it.

The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection, by Bruce Allen Murphy

The story line of this book was somewhat obscured by its prepublication publicity. Essentially, it is an account of some inside Washington politics.

Prime Time Preachers, by Jeffrey K. Hadden and Charles K. Swann; Fundamentalism and American Culture, by George Marsden

Although the current wave of religious fundamentalism has been building for some years now, we still lack a balanced, reasoned interpretation of this most recent manifestation of a persistent theme in American culture.

Voting Rights

The Draft

Reform Judaism

Solidarity

“The Refusers&rdquo

“Reds&rdquo

Intelligence

Kissinger Reconsidered

Reading Years of Upheaval, the second volume of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, was for me a less overwhelming experience than reading its immediate predecessor, White House Years. But that was only because my astonishment at what Kissinger was capable of as a writer had already worn off by the time I had finished White House Years itself.

The Latest French Revolution

Public opinion greeted the election of François Mitterrand to the Presidency of the French Republic on May 10, 1981, and of a Socialist majority to the National Assembly on June 21, with a degree of skepticism that was, to say the least, curious.

My Life as a Christian

On a spring afternoon in 1955, having finished classes for the day, I was waiting for a friend outside the main entrance of Brooklyn College. As I looked up Bedford Avenue, a man approached and offered me a copy of the New Testament. That night I read the little volume in its entirety. The book's historical and theological implications were beyond my comprehension, but I came away fascinated by the person of Jesus.

Feminism & Thought Control

When parents object to profanity in schoolbooks, they are invariably met with answering cries of "censorship" or "thought control," and warned of the dangers of tampering with the First Amendment. Yet while national attention has been focused on the activities of such concerned individuals, one of the most extensive thought-control campaigns in American educational history has gone completely ignored.

Blaming the (Jewish) Victim

Almost exactly on the 44th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Austria, I happened to be having lunch in New York with one of my oldest and dearest friends. He had been an undergraduate with me in the years just before World War II broke out.

Rich Met, Poor Met

Our premier opera company will be 100 years old on October 22, 1983. Its history began in the old Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway just below Manhattan's Times Square. The anniversary celebration will take place just twenty-five or so blocks to the north, in the palatial monument bearing the company's name at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Black Comedy

Are we witnessing one of Thomas Sowell's examples of "ethnic succession" in American comedy today? It is hard to believe, given the personalities of the individual performers and the traits of ethnic groups in question.

Why John Irving Is So Popular

"Ambushing a Best-Seller" is the title Edmund Wilson gave to a 1945 review of a novel by Anya Seton, but clearly it is too late to ambush the novelist John Irving, who has already ridden into town, cleared out the banks, and ridden out again unharmed.

Hannah Arendt, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

This book is a labor of love. It is also an interesting and valuable study, essential to an understanding of a formidable and complex intellect.

Blaming Technology, by Samuel C. Florman; The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder

Ever since the industrial revolution, the role of technology in reshaping our physical and social environment has been inescapable.

Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov; Graphite, by Varlam Shalamov

To all appearances, the man who died last January in the obscurity of a Moscow old-age home was a minor Russian poet. The truth is that Shalamov's original and translated verse is incidental, as are his other writings brought out by Soviet publishers.

The Imperial Rockefeller, by Joseph E. Persico

While immense family wealth may be an increasingly rare phenomenon in American society, it is still deeply intriguing to study and observe-especially when it is combined with great political ambition.

The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions, by George F. Will

This is the second collection of columns George Will has published; the first, brought out in 1978, bore the title, The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts.

“Arms & the Church&rdquo

The Middle East

Music and Education

Disinformation: Or, Why the CIA Cannot Verify an Arms-Control Agreement

Even though its missile testing was being relentlessly monitored by America's electronic sentinels in space and on land, the Soviet Union, without alerting U.S. intelligence, managed to develop-and deploy-missiles with multiple warheads accurate enough to attack the most hardened missile silos in the United States. How could such a massive development not have been detected?

The Delegitimation of Israel

What was it about European Jewry that made possible its extermination? Historians, psychologists, theologians, thoughtful people everywhere will continue to ask this question and to grope for partial answers. How did it come about that the Jews, who were neither bellicose nor numerous, and who had contributed not a little to European well-being, were transformed into the very essence of satanic evil-the image which the Nazis projected onto them and which so much of Europe seemed to accept as true?

My Running Debate With Einstein

Had Albert Einstein been an ordinary mortal or even an ordinary scientist, his views on life, politics, and human destiny would have had no great significance. And yet reflection shows that carrying over some of the attitudes and values of scientific inquiry to the consideration of political affairs may result in disaster.

What Economists Know

Vigorous disputes are common among experts in the natural sciences but normally erupt at the unexplored frontiers, when critical facts or experiments are lacking. Not so in economics. At stake are political commitments as well as academic reputations, emotions as well as fame, against which the reputed dispassionate harmony of scholarly academe is as ineffectual as a parasol in a hurricane. It is as though the economics profession were torn asunder by profound divisions of faith, impervious to the appeals of reason.

Mordecai M. Kaplan in Retrospect

"America is a golden land-but a curse on Columbus." These observations point up some of the ambiguities generated by the mass immigration of Jews to America. Among Jewish religious thinkers, perhaps no one has attempted to resolve them with greater comprehensiveness than Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan.

Our “Most Important” Living Poet

In 1976, the poet John Ashbery received the three most prestigious awards an American writer can have bestowed on him: the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Similar validation has been expressed over the years by other authoritative voices.

After Diaghilev

"Etonne-moil" Diaghilev demanded. "Astonish met" Jean Cocteau obliged-and so did Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso, Leon Bakst, Georges Braque, and a host of others.

The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, by Michael Novak

Intellectuals sometimes take considerable time to catch up with the facts. In 1543 Copernicus published his major work on the heliocentric theory; during the next century this theory received confirmations from Galileo and Newton. Yet throughout most of the 18th century, the Cassini family, directors of the observatory at Paris, remained piously geocentric.

Acts of Faith, by Dan Ross

Everyone knows the story of the pigtailed Chinese Jew who greets his Litvak visitor in total disbelief: "You Jewish? You don't look Jewish." But though this is funny when first heard, it might seem foolhardy to write a book consisting largely, as Acts of Faith does, of variations on this one theme.

The New Class War, by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward

Early in 1981, it seems, the Reagan administration began a war. It was not an old-fashioned shooting war, but rather one of economics, and the adversary was not a foreign power but the American poor.

Hunger of Memory, by Richard Rodriguez

The story is familiar in its outlines. Clever and watchful, the son of a poor immigrant family (in this case Mexican) is propelled by his easy successes in school into a world that is far removed from that of his parents.

On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, by Harry G. Summers Jr.

Colonel Harry Summers begins this concise and fascinating study of American strategy in Vietnam by disposing of two myths. Summers explains that we never lost a battle but that we did indeed lose the war.

The Arab Predicament, by Fouad Ajami

That the Arabs share a predicament seems at once implausible. Some grow impoverished, others wax rich. Some are caught up in world politics and markets, others cannot imagine what lies beyond clan or village.

Yale and the Pangle Case

Cambodia

The AWACS

The Peace Movement

Christian Anti-Semitism

Santayana

The Courts

How to Think About Nuclear War

Now that the United States is belatedly acting to restore a tolerable balance in forces nuclear as well as conventional, a vast chorus of protest has been heard from those who hold that deterrence is a policy not merely dangerous but irrational, and who therefore demand an immediate "freeze." And then there has been the broadest of claims, in which pastors and priests, rabbis and bishops, have been most prominent: that nuclear deterrence, and indeed nuclear weapons as such, are in themselves immoral. The churchmen who hold that nuclear weapons are ipso facto immoral are guilty of a crude ethical illiteracy.

Afghanistan-Another Cambodia?

Afghanistan, the former hermit kingdom of Central Asia whose name hardly ever appeared in the news, has become one of the world's human disaster areas. In some ways the country's fate even rivals that of Cambodia.

The Theory and Practice of Anti-Semitism

In a book published in 1950, a distinguished veteran of the fight against European anti-Semitism argued that the Nazi Holocaust had little to do with the tradition of anti-Semitism in Germany. The real cause of the catastrophe, wrote Eva Reichmann, had to be traced to the confluence of various crises in Germany after World War I, producing a profound social breakdown which the Nazis alone appeared capable of repairing.

The Life You Gave Me

So my father is going to be all right. That's what my mother said as soon as we met at the airport. That's what the doctor said when he came out of surgery. That's what my father said himself, just before he went in, making it snappy over long distance: "This is costing you money." That's what I thought all along. He's always been right before.

Of Time and the River Jordan

In Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the middle-aged Kath, eager to suggest an innocence she doesn't possess, assures Sloane, the homicidal young hustler, that in her youth she was more familiar with Africa than with her own body. Even in these cynical times, that still gets a laugh.

Read Marguerite Yourcenar!

In an attempt to arouse interest in the novels of Marguerite Yourcenar, a writer I much admire, perhaps I could do worse than to begin by announcing that the critic George Steiner thinks very little of them. Since so many people who do intellectual work keep a cold spot in their hearts for George Steiner, the fact that he has written with a lofty contempt for Mme. Yourcenar may help them to set aside a warm spot in their hearts for her.

Summertime Visions

With all the attitudes and institutions that the great Western nations have in common, there are still sharp differences among them in matters of daily living. The French, for example, almost close down their film business in summer.

The Underclass, by Ken Auletta

"I absolutely believe it is outrageous and totally immoral not to require work in exchange for every dollar of welfare given out," stated Adam Walinsky, one-time top legislative aide to Senator Robert Kennedy, to Ken Auletta, author of The Underclass. That these sentiments are now held by someone who was once a well-credentialed "60's liberal" is one of the eye-opening revelations of Auletta's study.

The Great Code, by Northrop Frye

Serious reading of the Bible is not an occasional pastime but a steady absorption, involving reading and rereading, deriving from the sustained experience a web of comprehensive meaning. There are too few serious readers of the Bible today.

Beyond the Ivory Tower, by Derek Bok

According to Derek Bok, president of Harvard, the ivory tower no longer serves as an image for the modern American university, which neither can nor should live in proud isolation from what he calls "the outside world."

Psychiatrist of America: The Life of Harry Stack Sullivan

Harry Stack Sullivan is one of the most important and least known social scientists of this century. Some of his basic ideas are now so much a part of the way we think that any summary makes them sound banal.

Countdown: The Polish Upheavals of 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, 1980, by Jakub Karpinski; The Polish August, by Neal Ascherson; Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, by Michael Checinski

There are many differences between the Solidarity revolution in Poland and previous East European upheavals, not the least of which is the indifference of the' Poles to the possibility of Communist party reform.

Kissenger and Sholom Aleichem

Victims and Victimizers

Feminism and Education

Evangelism

The Press and Vietnam

“Missing&rdquo

J'Accuse

The war in Lebanon triggered an explosion of invective against Israel that in its fury and its reach was unprecedented in the public discourse of this country. Even when, as began happening with greater and greater frequency after the Six Day War of 1967, Israel was attacked in more respectable quarters, care was often taken to mute the language or modulate the tone. Israel's "true friends," then, were liberated by Lebanon to say much more straightforwardly and in more intemperate terms than before what they had all along felt: that Israeli intransigence and/or expansionism are the main source of the Arab-Israeli conflict and therefore the main obstacle to a peaceful resolution of that conflict.

Liberalism & Theodore H. White

When Theodore H. White first developed the ideas that eventuated in his Making of the President series in the late 1950's, both he and the nation whose politics he intended to chronicle were filled with energy, confidence, and enthusiasm. None of the books that followed The Making of the President-1960 worked as well as the original did. This is not difficult to understand; White with that book made himself a very hard act to follow.

Vietnam Under Communism

Few political parties have so successfully enshrouded themselves in political mythology as have the Vietnamese Communists. For thirty years, the party's leaders managed to persuade many Western intellectuals and journalists that the movement they led was a nationalist movement, that it expressed the will of the Vietnamese people, and that for them, Communism was merely a means to a nationalist ends, not the ultimate end itself.

Boredom

Among the forces that have shaped human behavior boredom is one of the most insistent and universal. Although scarcely as measurable a factor in history as war, disease, economic depression, famine, and revolution, it is far from invisible in either the present or the past.

Our Egalitarian Economists

Over the last half-century, the dominant politico-economic movement of the industrialized democratic world has been a drive toward the equalization of incomes. It accounts for the fact that on the Left, Ronald Reagan is the most widely hated man since Senator Joseph McCarthy. For Reagan is without doubt the first President in history to confront the drive toward leveling, openly and explicitly, and to attempt to reverse it.

Thinking About the Self

It is hardly news that in recent years Americans have indulged in a perhaps unprecedented preoccupation with the care and feeding of the self, from courses in assertiveness training to articles like the one in a leading women's magazine, "Nineteen Ways to be Uniquely Yourself." Tom Wolfe's term for the 70's, the "Me decade," has even entered the language as a catch-all tag for this era of self-consciousness.

The Black Book

Since the close of World War II, a multitude of firsthand material about the destruction of European Jewry has been published, including diaries, memoirs, and the reports of Nazi officers to their superiors in Berlin. But until recently, the slaughter of Jews on Soviet territory has not been as well documented.

Garp: Violence for the Educated

One of the most conspicuous features of our present culture is that we are subject to the most severe inhibitions regarding the use of force. For the intellectual class, with its various dependents and hangers-on, the use of violence for the preservation of the social order is for all practical purposes never legitimate and if it should be attempted, it will not work.

The Story of the Stories, by Dan Jacobson

Some years ago the South African-English-Jewish author Dan Jacob- son wrote a novel called The Rape of Tamar. It was not, in my opinion, a successful book.

Stalin's Secret War, by Nikolai Tolstoy

This book is woven around three main themes. None of these themes is new, but their interweaving makes an instructive, if depressing, tale.

This Was Harlem, by Jervis Anderson

Within memory, the section of upper Manhattan known for the past twenty years as a depressing, forbidding slum was a vibrant and self-confident community.

The Day Is Short: An Autobiography, by Morris B. Abram

Morris Abram is a former president of Brandeis University, of the American Jewish Committee, and of the Field Foundation; a former candidate for the Senate from New York; and a man who has held many official appointments, from the United Nations to committees investigating nursing homes in New York.

Verification and Arms Control

Delegitimatizing Israel

Pluralism

Kissenger

Economists

Richard Pryor

Lebanon: The Case for the War

Each of the Arab-Israeli wars has been distinctive. Each has developed in ways that confounded the expectations of observers and each has given rise to consequences that were unforeseen at the time. The war in Lebanon followed this pattern.

A New Direction for the Democrats?

For the past two years, it has sometimes been hard to comprehend-beyond the label-just who and what the Democrats are, let alone where they are going. The collapse of the Carter Presidency and the loss of the Senate left the Democrats stunned, divided, and adrift, their stores of thought and inspiration largely exhausted or gone bad.

The Missiles of October: Twenty Years Later

Like all great events, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 left a mark in the lessons its contemporaries drew from it. These interpretations of the Cuban missile crisis played a role in shaping subsequent decisions both of the Kennedy administration and of administrations to come. Indeed, in the intellectual aftermath of Cuba can be found the seeds of much of the history of the next twenty years.

The Stalinist Follies

In June 1949, Paul Robeson arrived in the Soviet Union on one of his periodic pilgrimages. According to a new account by his son, Paul, Jr., Robeson was immediately alarmed by the political atmosphere, sensing the virulently anti-Semitic character of the state-orchestrated campaign against "Zionism."

Malamud in Decline

When do we give up on a novelist? Sometimes, if it be foul enough, a single sentence will do the job. I was able, for example, to fling across the room in good conscience the novel in which the following sentence appeared on page 12: "And anyway, what can be more romantic than self-denial-your basic Dante and Beatrice trip?"

Fassbinder & the Bloomingdale's Factor

Mike Frankovich, the veteran Hollywood producer, used to say, "Everybody's got two businesses: his own, and the movie business." By this he meant that, wherever he went in Beverly Hills, people with no connection with the film industry whatever were always telling him that he should have known that film A was going to be a blockbuster at the box office and film B a turkey.

The Real Anti-Semitism in America, by Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter

About two years ago, the level of anti-Semitic violence throughout the United States seemed suddenly on the rise. According to statistics compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 377 reported incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism and violence in 1980, triple the number for 1979.

John Foster Dulles, by Ronald W. Pruessen

This is the first of a projected two-volume intellectual biography of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959. It brings Dulles to the point when, at the age of sixty-four, he is to win the coveted appointment and his brother, Allen, is to become director of the CIA.

Spain, the Jews, and Franco, by Haim Avni

In 1492, after centuries of coexistence with their Christian (and Muslim) neighbors, the Jews of Spain were ordered to embrace Catholicism or quit the country altogether. Some did accept this fiat and abandon their distinctively Jewish identity.

The Best Defense, by Alan M. Dershowitz

For years I vaguely disapproved of Alan Dershowitz, although I was hardly acquainted with him. He seemed to be always in the newspapers and on radio and TV, defending objectionable radicals. The Best Defense has changed my mind.

The Rebbetzin

A story.

Thinking About Nuclear War

Einstein

Reconstructionism

Afghanistan

Is the Jewish Community Split?

According to Time magazine in September, "Most American Jews are apprehensive, if not heartsick about the anguished debate that has broken out inside their community on the actions of Israeli PM Menachem Begin's government." Yet while this conventional wisdom is right about the apprehension and the anguish, it is wrong on the nature and substance of the debate.

The Mandarin and the Commissar

I went to China. What I was most interested in seeing and probing was the difference between Chinese Communism and the one I knew firsthand from Eastern Europe.

Evolution and Its Discontents

It is now a full century since Charles Darwin died, but the theory of evolution associated with his name remains a subject of heated controversy. The continuing existence of such wide-ranging disputes provides perhaps the clearest demonstration of the central role played by Darwin's thought in modern biology, a role which serves to unify the far-flung specialties of that broad science by reference to the presumed common descent of all life on earth.

Culture Among the Nations

The Second UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies convened in Mexico City from July 26 to August 6. The following notes are excerpted from a record of events kept by the author, who attended as a member of the press.

The Worm in the Big Apple

In Europe my wife and I were always aware that we were moving about in a violent world where kidnappings, purse snatchings, knee-cappings, bombings, and assassinations were as common as soccer matches, but it was always a media-based awareness; none of it touched us personally. Thus it was without apprehension that we began to plan for a trip to New York. As we began to do our homework it quickly became clear that 45th street was out.

Appropriating the Holocaust

The Holocaust must have been a great shock to Christian consciousness. Why else would Pope John XXIII have cried out-as he is said to have done-"Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh"?

Shostakovich in Four Parts

When Dmitri Shostakovich died in Moscow seven years ago, he was mourned in his homeland as a great Soviet composer. Behind all the obligatory declarations of faith in the present and future of socialist art lay the unspoken acknowledgment that with Shostakovich's death there had passed away the last great Russian musician worthy of standing with such immortals as Mussorgsky, Tchaikowsky, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev.

The Past Has Another Pattern, by George W. Ball

Although he has not held an important government position since briefly serving as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 1968, George W. Ball remains a figure of controversy and influence.

The Politics of Welfare, by Blanche Bernstein

Blanche Bernstein is a public official who has become anathema to her former colleagues in the social-welfare community. In their view, her basic principle-that welfare programs should be administered in accordance with law-verges on an outrageous insult to the human spirit.

The Killing of Bonnie Garland, by illard Gaylin

In the early morning hours of July 7, 1977, Richard Herrin, a recent Yale graduate, sat in his estranged girlfriend's bedroom at her parents' home in Scarsdale, New York. He was watching the Tonight Show and leafing through Sports Illustrated while she slept, when the notion came to him to kill her.

Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980, by David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot

Books whose nominal subject is the history of schooling in America have often been thinly disguised didactics, with less to say about past circumstances than about present-day controversies. This was true eighty years ago when Ellwood Cubberley, newly arrived at Stanford University from the superintendency of San Diego's schools, was told that he had three years to make the study of education respectable.

When the Going Was Good!, by Jeffrey Hart

One of the problems for the conservative imagination in this country is that it has had no recent experience in power. Liberals have been able to look back on a culture they first changed and then dominated.

The Response to “J'Accuse&rdquo

Banks, Tanks, and Freedom

If the most recent suppression of the Polish nation has taught us little we did not know about totalitarianism, it has exposed much that we may have wanted to ignore about the dynamics of the dollar democracies. In the continuing example of Poland, the West is suffering one more rout of its moral, strategic, and political interests.

Socialism & Its Irresponsibilities: The Case of Irving Howe

Anyone who wished to trace the tides and fortunes of American socialism since the 1930's could do worse than examine the intellectual and political development of Irving Howe: critic, writer, editor, and socialist par excellence. To be sure, Mr. Howe's career-not unlike American socialism itself-has kept him in an only glancing and sometime connection to the Socialist party as such. But one can find a fair summary of the movement of American socialist thought over half a century in his response to those issues.

Theologian of the Holocaust

Of all the painful reconsiderations of the meaning of Jewish experience to which the Holocaust has given birth in our time, that undertaken over the last decades by the theologian Emil Fackenheim is perhaps the most rigorous and, at the same time, the most moving.

Scenes from the Cedar Bar

I came back from Paris in the fall of 1951, and found that New York had changed in the three years I had been away. People in Europe were speaking then about the imminent death of the old continent's culture, but in New York something very different was being proposed about American culture, American politics, and especially about American painting.

The Record in Latin America

Major opportunities have been missed in Latin America and important mistakes made since January 20, 1981, when the Reagan administration became responsible for foreign policy. To appreciate the increased dangers resulting from the administration's failures in Latin America it is necessary to examine some of the main arenas individually.

My Friend Martin

You can never know for certain what the next person thinks of you, but my guess is that Martin thought I was smart enough to get my work done and make a small name for myself in a large world, yet not as smart as he, who understood how hopelessly complicated the world was, an understanding which only rendered him impotent to make any sort of dent in it at all.

How to Read the Bible

In encountering a new translation of the Bible, one often thinks first of the changes one can expect to find from the most beloved of earlier renderings, the King James Version of 1611. But there are broader issues which we are led on to explore in any version.

Why Herzog Differs

One of the oddities of the age is the artist or intellectual who, deferring to the pervasive sanctities of the times, succeeds in misunderstanding his own temperament. There are quite a few of these about in America, but a most spectacular example is the German film-maker Werner Herzog.