The Cuban Missile Crisis

The Black Book

The Democrats

Lawyers

Liberals

The Republican Future

The Republicans had dreamed that 1982 might be a replay in reverse of 1934, the year in which, following Franklin Roosevelt's defeat of Herbert Hoover in 1932, the Democratic party consolidated its position as the nation's new majority party. But if the GOP averted disaster in last November's congressional elections, that is all it did. Yet while the Democrats won, they did not win decisively. If the political future is as open-ended as the analysis of the 1982 elections suggests, then the two years of political maneuvering we face before the 1984 elections should be of more than ordinary interest.

What the West Should Know About German Neutralism

What is happening now is that the hopes and beliefs of what used to be a lunatic fringe in Germany are beginning to gain a hearing within the established intellectual and political culture. To understand why these national-neutralist views have spread on both the Right and the Left simultaneously it is necessary to have a brief look at their roots in German history.

From Generation to Generation-A Memoir

A memoir.

Why Not Pragmatism?

My freshman English teacher told us that pragmatism was a businessman's philosophy, an assessment I have never seen any reason to dispute. Not that this is said in derogation. But pragmatism offered revolutionary answers to two perennial problems: the nature of thinking and the nature of truth.

How the PLO Terrorized Journalists in Beirut

Much was made during the Israeli campaign in Lebanon this past summer of attempts by Israel to muzzle the international press. The risks journalists incurred while working in Beirut did not come solely or even mostly from Israeli bombs. As an independent journalist who spent three weeks in a PLO jail this summer, I can testify that when it came to muzzling the press, the PLO had things worked out to a fine science.

Anti-Nuclear Fantasies

The anti-nuclear movement has typically expressed itself in broad, emotional gestures of public protest-marches and rallies, theatrical demonstrations of the horrible effects of nuclear bombs, popular referenda for some sort of "freeze" on the arms race. But along with this popular protest, a specialized literature has been forming.

John Updike: Promises, Promises

In her memoir, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton speaks of the advantages of not being considered promising. It was better, she thought, at least in her own case, "to fight my way to expression through a thick fog of indifference."

All Turkish, No Delight

The audience of critics at the recent New York Film Festival listened in awe to electronic crackle as the PA system amplified the voice of an unseen presence coming to them from a mysterious location abroad. It was the voice of a man who had been jailed by Turkey for being a Communist, released, jailed again for harboring terrorists, released again, and finally convicted of murdering a Turkish judge.

On Equal Terms: Jews in America 1881-1981, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

Lucy S. Dawidowicz first prepared this study for the American Jewish Year Book to mark the hundredth anniversary of the beginnings of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe in 1881. For this book, her text has been enlarged and embellished with statistics and a very useful chronology of important events in American Jewish history.

What Was Literature?, by Leslie Fiedler

As Leslie Fiedler himself acknowledges in his latest book, What Was Literature?, the only reason the editor Philip Rahv decided to publish Fiedler's "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" in the June 1948 issue of Partisan Review was that he was convinced that the essay was a jeu d'esprit.

Notes of a Revolutionary, by Andrei Amalrik

Andrei Amalrik is associated in the public memory with his influential treatise, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Written in 1969, this brief and provocative book predicted the dissolution of Soviet society as a result of internal separatist tendencies among the non-Russian nationalities, the absence of democratizing forces, and a likely Sino-Soviet war.

Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes, edited by Arthur A. Goren

The publication of this selection from the writings and addresses of Judah L. Magnes, a prominent American rabbi and Zionist leader who served for almost a quarter of a century as head of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and as a consistent opponent of Jewish state-hood, comes at an opportune moment.

Ethics (and Other Liabilities), by Harry Stein

When Harry Stein, who is now in his mid-thirties, was invited to write a column on ethics for Esquire three years ago, he felt unworthy of the task. In college he had opted for a course in Social Problems over Ethics; he was, moreover, "a congenital exaggerator" and had even been known to tell an occasional lie. Who was he to discourse on right and wrong?

The Paideia Proposal, by Mortimer J. Adler

In the course of a writing career going back more than fifty years, Mortimer Adler has told us How to Read a Book (1940), How to Think About War and Peace (1944), and How to Think About God (1980). Now he has turned his attention to the reform if not the complete restructuring of American elementary and secondary education.

Socialism

Afghanistan

Latin America

Burdens, Shoulders, and President Carter

Fractured French

What We Know About the Soviet Union

The present transition period in Moscow, the third in three decades, has left Western-observers more uncertain than its two predecessors. Secretary of State George Shultz recently said that the experts on the Soviet Union apparently did not know any more than he did about what was going to happen in Moscow. It seemed an obvious conclusion, and it was quite wrong.

Bialik's Hint

I once had a theory about Jewish language. I began by renaming English: I called it "New Yiddish." I posited a variety of literary forms for New Yiddish, and imagined for it a liturgical spirit that would nevertheless not contravene what it is nowadays fashionable to call Post-Modern Modes.

Teacher Politics

The political activism of America's two major teachers' unions is well known. The National Education Association (NEA), with 1.6 million members, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), now numbering 600,000, are among the largest, best organized, and most energetic interest groups in the United States. All that this long-slumbering giant needed was to be awakened, a process that commenced within the AFT during the 1960's and within the NEA in the early 70's.

Brother Camus

Mea culpa. In my morning mail I find a magazine with yet one more review of a book that I predicted vas born to blush unseen, Patrick McCarthy's Camus. Aside from a handful of archeo-Tolstoyans, neo-Gandhians, and hapless college students, who reads Camus nowadays?

Economic Futures

Today we have many who perceive the future in their charts, tables, and social theories. They are often, though not always, professors, and they engage in a discipline that is in one respect safe and in another risky. It is safe because unlike business forecasters, the contemporary prophet looks twenty years or more ahead and embraces all of society. The risky part has to do with the credibility of the portraits drawn of the future.

Down Memory Lane with Joe McCarthy

In obedience to iron laws of human behavior, it is time for Americans to wax nostalgic about things that died in the 1950's. And so there has been something of a revival of interest in the execrable music and the mediocre movies of the time, as well as in the life and works of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, and his eponymous "ism."

A Jewish Romance

A story.

The Hollywood & Other Quartets

Until now chamber music has been booming, or exploding, to choose only two of the military metaphors so often invoked. The proof is in the numbers.

The War Against the Atom, by Samuel McCracken; Nuclear Power: Both Sides, edited by Michio Kaku and Jennifer Trainer; Nukespeak, by Stephen Hilgartner, Richard C. Bell, Rory O'Connor

Anyone old enough to remember Hiroshima will also remember that in the welter of conflicting emotions stimulated by the destruction of that city through atomic power came one particular ray of hope-the hope that this immense power could be put to work for peaceful purposes. For many Americans today that hope has faded.

An Orphan in History, by Paul Cowan

A number of American Jews who once seemed thoroughly indifferent to their Jewishness have begun to move back into the Jewish sphere and to make their "return" a matter of public record.

The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence, by Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson

The tension between history and myth-even the difference between them-is not generally understood. The Greeks are said to have invented history by separating the two; history, wrote Thucydides, was that which could be proved to have happened.

Anatomie d'un spectre: L'\'economie du socialisme r\'eel, by Alain Besan\ccon

Two earlier books by Alain Besanqon, the French historian and scholar of Soviet affairs, The Soviet Syndrome (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) and The Rise of the Gulag (Continuum, 1981), dealt with Leninist ideology-its role in Soviet foreign policy and its "intellectual origins" in Russian history.

Koestler: A Biography, by Iain Hamilton

Arthur Koestler is seventy-seven Years old now, almost as old as the century in which he has participated so ardently that he is certain to be remembered as one of its representative men. The things he has done and suffered illustrate our time almost too vividly.

Christianity and the Holocaust

China

Job 5:7

Martin

“The Rebbetzin&rdquo

Garp's World

Why Strategic Superiority Matters

I happened to come across a New Yorker article on nuclear weapons and SALT by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In reading Senator Moynihan's article, I became aware for the first time that the policies of the United States for protecting its citizens from destruction are based on a flawed premise.

Israel's New Majority

A new "discovery" has been made about Israel: the emergence of the Sephardim, Jews from non-European background, as a political majority.

Babel the Jew

The leaves of '36, '37, and '38 had already fallen: those who had to be were shot; those who had to be were banished forever to the wilderness, the tundra, the mines-places which, from time immemorial, have always been plentiful in Russia.

Orwell in Perspective

The ordeal of reading a new book about George Orwell drove me to riffle through my copy of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. I was looking for the word "symbol." Webster says it is derived from the Greek term for a token of identity, verified by comparing a thing's two halves. This is peculiarly apposite to the case of Orwell, since there are two distinct halves of his public identity, and one has tended to inflate the other out of all proportion.

Ann Beattie and the Hippoisie

A few years ago I spent three days as a visiting writer on the campus of a liberal-arts college. The campus may have been small, the college in the hills of Ohio, but the English department, whose paid guest I was, ran an absolutely up-to-date operation.

The Gandhi Nobody Knows

I had the singular honor of attending an early private screening of Gandhi with an audience of invited guests from the National Council of Churches. At the end of the three-hour movie there was hardly, as they say, a dry eye in the house.

The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon, by Jacobo Timerman

The Longest War is Jacobo Timerman's response, in the form' of a journal, to the Israeli incursion into Lebanon between June and August of 1982. A highly impressionistic document, Timerman's journal, which loosely follows the chronology of the war, includes some account of his own activities during the summer, sporadic quotations from Israel's English-language press, selective anecdotes and references to events in the country, all held together by a series of attacks on the current government of Israel that mount in intensity as the book proceeds.

Keeping Faith, by Jimmy Carter; Crisis, by Hamilton Jordan

Rarely has a President passed so quickly and so thoroughly from public memory as has Jimmy Carter; his memoirs, Keeping Faith, are unlikely to change the situation.

The Springs of Jewish Life, by Chaim Raphael

"Oh, FOR A slim, elegant little book about the Jews," cried Chaim Raphael in a 1980 review in Commentary. The book he was longing for has now appeared, and it turns out to be his very own.

A Better World, by William L. O'Neill

This is a welcome book-a careful, systematic study of the struggle between those American intellectuals who supported or apologized for Stalinism and their adversaries, from the period of the New Deal on.

Mailer: A Biography, by Hilary Mills

For forty years the reviewing of new American writing has been dominated by critics who have sought to extend the argument enunciated by Alfred Kazin in On Native Grounds (1942): American writers are the victims of their society.

German Neutralism

The Holocaust

Politics and Ideology

On Irving Howe, Cont.

“A Jewish Romance&rdquo

How Important Is the PLO?

I doubt that I was alone in being perplexed by the news from Lebanon last summer. Even knowing the record of the Palestine Liberation Organization toward Israel had not prepared me to think that it terrorized Palestinians, too. To understand why Arab leaders support the PLO, and what that support means, we must begin with pan-Arabism, the ideology that explains so much about political life in the Middle East.

The “Neutralism” of E. P. Thompson

Over the past years E.P. Thompson, the British social historian, has become the most influential intellectual figure of the European campaign against nuclear weapons. One British writer has been moved to suggest that in Thompson, the peace movement has found its Luther. It is precisely Thompson's pretense of political neutrality which merits serious examination.

Living without Health

It started one morning in the spring of 1976. I was twenty-four, and with college and my ROTC active duty out of the way, I had landed my first job, doing economics research in Washington, D.C. I awoke that morning just as the numbers clicked to 6:00 on the digital clock. The room was dark. The windows had no blinds, and only half a sheer curtain hung from the far one.

Milosz: Poetry and Politics

As a rule of thumb, displacement is probably hardest on poets, because of their intimate linguistic attachment to their native sphere, the ultimate untranslatability of what they do, and their consequent dependence on an audience in their own language. A good many modern poets have been forced to leave their homelands with little or no choice in the matter; a few others have, paradoxically, made the decision to leave in order to be faithful to their own calling as poets. Such is the case of Czeslaw Milosz.

Still Life with Scar

A story.

Greatness & Decline of Richard Wagner

Exactly one-half century ago Thomas Mann stepped to a podium at the University of Munich, and there delivered an address on the fiftieth anniversary, of the death of Richard Wagner. The next morning Mann left Germany for exile.

Anti-Americanism & Other Cliches

If statistics are correct-and after all they don't always lie -the arts appear to be flourishing in America at present. Museum attendance has been up, concert halls are filled, over the past decade or so ballet has come into its own, and there seems to be a revival of interest in the movies.

The Destruction of a Continent, by Karl Borgin and Kathleen Corbett; Development without Aid, by Melvyn B. Krauss

Some years ago Sir Keith Joseph, the British Tory politician, was addressing a local constituency meeting when a man rose and asked what his views were on foreign aid. Sir Keith gave a characteristically anguished reply.

Jews and Money: The Myths and the Reality, by Gerald Krefetz

In October 1974, a year after the Arabs had launched the Yom Kippur War, General George S. Brown, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, addressed a Duke University law forum.

The Muslim Discovery of Europe, by Bernard Lewis

Bernard Lewis has probably done more to foster Western understanding of the Islamic world in our day than any other contemporary scholar. His Arabs in History is a minor classic, his Emergence of Modern Turkey is the standard authority on the subject, while his contributions to the historiography of medieval and modern Islam, not least in his capacity as co-editor of the monumental second edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam, stand as a testimony to the formidable range and depth of his learning.

Slavery and Social Death, by Orlando Patterson

Slavery, this book demonstrates, far from being a "peculiar institution," comes very close to being, along with kinship and religion, a universal one.

The Arab-Israeli Wars, by Chaim Herzog

The son of a distinguished British rabbi (later Chief Rabbi of Palestine), Chaim Herzog served with the British army during World War II and then with the new Israel Defense Forces, twice holding the position of director of Military Intelligence.

The State Against Blacks, by Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a prolific writer on issues of economics and culture. This, his first book, marks a new stage in the American discussion of race.

The German Interest

McCarthy and Populism

Jewish Writing

“An Immodest Agenda&rdquo

Peace and the USSR

Pragmatism

Shostakovich

Our Obsolete Middle East Policy

Conventional wisdom has it that American interests in the Middle East would be served above all by peace. Since the Arab-Israeli conflict is seen as the principal threat to peace in the region, a settlement of this conflict is considered to form the great objective of policy. So strong is the persuasion that it has made a resolution of the Palestinian issue the Golden Grail of American policy in the Middle East.

The Euromissile Crisis

The outcome of the great European missile debate, which will be concluded one ay or another during 1983, will determine much more than NATO's European nuclear posture for the 80's. At stake is whether nuclear pacifism will finally make a breakthrough from minority status to official-though undeclared-doctrine throughout much of Western Europe.

Totalitarianism & the Lie

The validity of totalitarianism as a concept is occasionally questioned on the ground that a perfect model of a totalitarian society is nowhere to be found and that in no country among those which used to be cited as its best examples has the ideal of absolute unity of leadership and of unlimited power ever been achieved. This is not a serious obstacle to understanding.

Jewish History and the Sephardim

A new political situation has surfaced in Israel in recent years with the rise of the Sephardim-a term referring to Jews from the lands along the Mediterranean littoral and the Middle East, including the Muslim countries-to a majority position in Israeli life. This development has been the subject of a fair amount of newspaper coverage, but much of that coverage has been tendentious.

Interrogating Eichmann

I saw Adolf Eichmann for the first time at about 4:45 P.M. on May 29, 1960. Colonel Hofstaetter (my immediate superior) and I had sent for him to be brought to the room where the hearings were to take place.

The Secret Life of Sarah Lawrence

Nobody at Sarah Lawrence thought it was peculiar for the president and his fiftieth-anniversary committee to choose a fiction writer to produce a history of the college. Just the opposite: the plan seemed like a typical stroke of Sarah Lawrence genius. Everyone agreed that a book was needed to sharpen the image of the college, which had undergone a certain blurring since the 60's.

French Culture in Decline

I had not paid too much attention to an article by Raymond Sokolov that appeared in the Wall Street Journal concerning an event that anyway had not seemed so important to me. But then in the March 1 issue of Le Monde I was confronted with the "Ideas" page and I understood more clearly. Mr. Sokolov had written that the Paris conference, whose title was "Creation and Development," was notable chiefly for the vagueness of its substance and for the blatant anti-Americanism of its tone.

How Good Is Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

How good is Gabriel Garcia Marquez? "Define your terms," I can hear some wise undergraduate reply. "What do you mean by is?" Yet I ask the question in earnest.

Salvador, by Joan Didion

Sometime in late 1982 the novelist Joan Didion spent two weeks in El Salvador with her husband John Gregory Dunne. The result is this pamphlet-sized book, which has also appeared in the form of two extended articles in the New York Review of Books

The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943, by Yisrael Gutman; Courier from Warsaw, by Jan Nowak

January 1983 marked half-a-century since Hitler's advent to power. Forty years ago in April, Hitler's tanks and artillery were called out to level the remnants of what had only recently been Europe's largest Jewish community.

Pluto's Republic, by Peter Medawar

Sir Peter Medawar is an ornament of British science. A zoologist who shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work in tissue transplantation, Medawar has made a distinctive imprint on intellectual life in general by his urbane and witty reflections on the place of science in culture.

The World of the Yeshiva, by William B. Helmreich

Until recent years, Orthodox Judaism has been considered a negligible factor in the American Jewish experience-and for good reason. While Orthodoxy is still in the minority position in terms of numbers, it has made striking gains on the American Jewish scene.

In Defense of the Family, by Rita Kramer

Anyone who remembers the White House Conference on Families that took place during the Carter era, or the publication in 1977 of All Our Children by Kenneth Keniston and the Carnegie Council, will recall them as major events in the evolution of a pair of peculiarly contemporary doctrines.

Doctors and Disease

Christianity and the Holocaust Cont.

Journey's End?

Bishops, Statesmen, and Other Strategists on the Bombing of Innocents

Must the West threaten to bomb innocent bystanders in order to deter nuclear war? Does the West itself need to be threatened with annihilation of its civil society in order to be deterred?

Indicting American Jews

The rabbis of the Talmud blamed the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. on "groundless hatred" among the Jews. In the nearly two thousand years since then, the penchant for self-castigation has remained as constant among Jews as the divisions the rabbis alluded to.

The Bulgarian Connection and the Media

The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in the spring of 1981 should have produced a frenzy of activity from our leading "investigative reporters." Yet for nearly a year, only one American journalist took the time and effort to dig out the details that pointed an accusing finger at the Kremlin, and that journalist has lived in Italy since the 1940's.

Israel as a Strategic Asset

The idea that the American commitment to Israel has damaged our interests in the Middle East has surfaced once again as a result of the war in Lebanon and its diplomatic aftermath. This, in spite of the fact that in the Middle East, a region located on the doorstep of the USSR and where resentment of the West is well-ingrained, the supposedly damaged U.S. is today the dominant political power.

What Do the Poles Want?

A diary of what occurred at a roundtable conference on Poland.

Le Carr'e's Fantasies

Many years ago Jacques Barzun noted that the representative figure of our age was not the statesman, the soldier, or the divine, but the spy. The most successful and most interesting practitioner of the contemporary spy story is John le Carre.

The Politicized Oscar

I have a friend, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who maintains that attending the annual Academy Awards ceremony is a humiliation. I had attended it exactly once, and think he has a point.

Power and Principle, by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski's book is an honest and well-written account which will be valuable to historians and attractive to many readers.

Bollingen, by William McGuire

In the summer of 1938, as Hitler was mobilizing Germany, a wealthy American couple attended a small seminar in the village of Ascona, Switzerland, held in honor of another charismatic figure, C.G. Jung, the psychologist of the collective unconscious.

Cecil Roth: Historian without Tears, by Irene Roth

As England is the land of eccentrics, it is wholly in character that the outstanding historian Cecil Roth, who adored being English, brought a special kind of eccentricity to his lifelong devotion to Jewish history.

Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, by Judith Martin

A little more than a hundred years ago, Clara Sophia Bloomfield-Moore, alias "Mrs. H.O. Ward," wrote in Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society: "It is the duty of American women to do all in their power toward the formation of so high a standard of morals and manners that the tendency of society will be upward instead of downward....Manners and morals are indissolubly allied, and no society can be good where they are bad."

Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics, by Adam B. Ulam

Adam B. Ulam is one of the few living scholars of Soviet affairs who may fairly be credited with a masterful command of world politics. By wedding the local, the daily, and the tactical to the international, the historic, and the strategic, he has steadily extended the realm of the understandable in world affairs.

Strategic Superiority

Gandhi

Appeasement By Any Other Name

Of the leading political figures of the age, Ronald Reagan was perhaps the most sharply defined. He stood without ambiguity for the view that the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was the central issue of our time; that it could be defined as a struggle between good and evil; that in this struggle the United States had been falling behind while an expansionist Soviet Union was forging ahead. It is very important to recognize that Reagan did not create this new consensus. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that it created him.

Misreadings of Anti-Semitism

Modern historians have tended simply to rule out the Jews altogether as a possible cause of anti-Jewish animosity. Rather, these scholars have felt compelled to explain the ongoing hatred and persecution of Jews exclusively in terms of developments within the anti-Semitic camp or in the larger non-Jewish environment. Generally speaking such explanations have tended to fall into three categories: the socio-political; the psychological; and the ideological.

How the Schools Were Ruined

During the last quarter-century, American sentiments concerning education have fallen and risen and fallen. The present mood is despondent, and I suspect more so than ever before in our history, certainly more so than in the memory of most of us.

Whatever Happened to Willy Brandt?

In the summer of 1944, a thirty-year-old German exile named Herbert Frahm approached the American embassy in Stockholm with an interesting proposal. As a democratic socialist, he felt it important that Germans who believed in democracy should have a say in drawing the geographical postwar boundaries. Frahm was indeed destined for momentous deeds, albeit under another name: Willy Brandt. There is a clear rupture between the pro-Western Brandt of the 50's and the neutralist Brandt of the present. What accounts for this amazing change?

Impersonations

Over the past fifty years, an unusual genre of political journalism has developed. The intellectuals who practice it believe that the best way to understand the people they study-the urban and rural poor, soldiers, minorities-is to become one of them.

Mailer Hits Bottom

On page 421 of Norman Mailer's new novel, Ancient Evenings, my eyeballs glazed like a franchise doughnut, I came across the following line, spoken by the Pharaoh Ptah-nem-hotep to Menenhetet II, the character who for the most part narrates this more-than-700-page book: "To tell too little is becoming your sin."

The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer, 1874-1914, by George H. Nash

Herbert Hoover's early life was a romance, but no one, then or after, ever mistook Hoover for a romantic. In this first installment of a projected multivolume biography, George H. Nash leads us, by way of prodigious research and careful analysis, through the first forty years of Hoover's life, but in the end his subject eludes him and us.

Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

The Jews, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi shows in this splendid little volume, are the "fathers of meaning in history." Through the medium of the Bible, they were the first to assign a "decisive significance to history," thus forging a "new world view whose essential premises were eventually appropriated by Christianity and Islam as well."

The Confidence Gap, by Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider

The Confidence Gap is an attempt to describe and explain the trend of American attitudes toward prevailing social and economic institutions from the late 1950's to almost the present day.

Inside the Soviet Army, by Viktor Suvorov; The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine, by Andrew Cockburn

S.L.A. Marshall, the great combat historian of the United States Army, once wrote that "The basic study in all warfare is the mind and nature of the probable enemy, compared to which a technical competence in the handling of weapons and engines of destruction is of minor importance."

Sarah Lawrence's Secret

The Sephardim

Anti-Americanism

Wagner

The Rich, the Poor & the Reagan Administration

According to a recent Gallup poll, 82 percent of the American people hold that President Reagan's domestic programs "help the rich" and 75 percent hold that they "hurt the poor." The fact that the "fairness" issue has been made the single determining focus in assessing the domestic record of the administration does not mean that it has itself been considered fairly, on its merits.

Are Things Getting Better in Eastern Europe?

One of the effects of the Polish crisis has been to puncture the notion of Eastern Europe as an island of political stability in an otherwise disorderly world. The belief that the people of Eastern Europe had reached a grudging acceptance both of Communism and of Soviet imperial domination was integral to the intellectual case for the detente policies of the 1970's. This illusion has been shattered.

How to Lose the War of Ideas

At the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United States subsidizes the erosion of intellectual freedom, the degradation of democratic values, the redefinition of human rights, and the manipulation of education into an instrument of political indoctrination by those who wish us ill. Since returning from Paris a few months ago with these sobering insights, I find that they surprise even worldly people who are accustomed to hearing unpleasant things about the United Nations itself.

The Education of an Anti-Capitalist

I just do not despise capitalism the way I once did-I do not say that I love it, but, no argument about it, the old hatred is no longer there. Yet how has this unshakable faith in the nastiness of capitalism come into being?

The Prince of Progressive Humanity

A story.

Rubinstein the Great Entertainer

When Arthur Rubinstein died last December at the age of ninety-five, there was remarkably little feeling of loss in the musical community. As had been the case with his life, Rubinstein's death too seemed natural, another fulfillment of the kind which appeared always to have been his lot.

Aharon Appelfeld, Survivor

In the twenty-five years of near silence following the destruction of European Jewry in World War II, those who managed to survive must often have wondered whether anyone but they would remember their trial. Ghetto commemorations in those years, even when they were held in large halls, seemed to be taking place in basements or bunkers.

The Wizards of Armageddon: Strategists of the Nuclear Age, by Fred Kaplan

This account of the evolution of American strategic thought in the nuclear age begins in a promising fashion, with the first attempts to understand how the atomic bomb could be used, or rather kept unused, to keep the peace.

The Europeans, by Luigi Barzini

Is the Atlantic Alliance breaking up? The signs are certainly ominous. A common defense policy remains elusive.

An Ambassador Speaks Out, by Shlomo Argov

When Shlomo Argov became Israel's ambassador in London in September 1979 he brought with him, as part of his "credentials," a personal background that in its color and variety was a perfect expression of what he himself called, in another context, the "tapestry" of Jewish experience.

Red Carpet, by Joseph Finder

The current fascination with the machinations of the KGB-which focuses on Soviet espionage, subversion, disinformation, and assassination-tends to distract from the incredible, and far more decisive, success of Soviet trade policy in the past sixty years.

American Jews and the Holocaust

Orwell

E.P. Thompson

Democracy for Everyone?

On June 8, 1982, in a speech to the British Parliament, President Reagan called for a "global campaign for democracy." At the same time, the United States Information Agency has been directed by the administration to intensify its presentation of democratic ideas and realities. The issue of democracy has thus acquired a new timeliness.

The Greatness of Gershom Scholem

Gershom Scholem, who died two years ago, produced such a far-reaching revolution in our understanding of Judaism that his work cannot yet be assessed in its entirety. A brilliantly panoptic mind, a true "master thinker," Scholem represented a force in the intellectual life of our century, and not only in Jewish intellectual life, whose influence will be felt for a long time to come.

Thatcherization (Cont'd.)

From the moment that Britain's election date of June 9 was announced, Margaret Thatcher was the firm favorite of both opinion polls and bookmakers. Still, it was at least theoretically possible to imagine a sequence of events in the ensuing campaign that might produce a "hung parliament," in which no single party would enjoy a majority. The political journalists who made such a prediction pointed to three factors. All three were proved false by the course of the campaign.

Electricity

A story.

Bergman Discovers Love

Ingmar Bergman has described himself in the years before World War II-during the Hitler period-as a "pro-German fanatic," a political orientation which, by his own admission, lasted until 1945 when he was twenty-seven.

Cozzens Repossessed

"In what century did he live?" asked the graduate student in literature to whom I mentioned that I had been reading the novels of James Gould Cozzens. "In what century do you?" I was tempted to reply, but I didn't.

The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, by Seymour M. Hersh

This very long book is the latest sally in the war of a certain segment of the journalistic elite against the Nixon administration. Not content with having won a large battle that ended in the liquidation of that administration, some among the Washington press corps are still searching out survivors upon whom to concentrate their personal attack.

Jewish Identities in France, by Dominique Schnapper

The French Jewish community is now the largest in free Europe, the fourth largest in the world. Decimated by persecution during World War II, it was still in a convalescent state when the arrival of the North African communities swelled its ranks in the early 1960's.

The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry, by Brock Yates

When an economic institution so pervasive in our national life as the automobile industry suffers its worst slump in twenty-five years; and when foreign cars, mostly Japanese, come to comprise 30 percent of new-car sales, as they did in 1982, something is afoot that merits the attention of serious analysts. Unfortunately, serious analysts have been little attracted to the automobile industry.

Memoirs, by Petro G. Grigorenko

The memoirs of former Red Army General Petro Grigorenko are a remarkable byproduct of this century's most influential political invention-totalitarianism. They are based on Grigorenko's lifelong relationship with the closed society.

Confession of a Catholic, by Michael Novak

For most of this century, the Roman Catholic Church was regarded as among the most reactionary of American institutions, blindly anti-Communist and a hidebound defender of traditional mores. In the more than two decades since then, much has changed.

Mailer

Appeasement

Spies and Le Carre

“The Confidence Gap&rdquo

The Pope and the USSR

Acadamy Awards

The Sephardi Heritage

Salvador

Poles and Jews

The Rise & Decline of Industrial Japan

Industrial supremacy does not usually last very long. "All industrial curves seem to take off vertically and to decline equally dramatically," writes the French historian Fernand Braudel. He was commenting on the shift of the center of textile production from Italy to northern Europe some four hundred years ago, but he could have been talking about Japan today.

George Will and American Conservatism

Once upon a time American conservatism was something of an intellectual embarrassment. Yet over the past fifteen years, the pattern of better than half a century has begun to erode.

Who Was the “Mysterious Messenger”?

On July 28, 1942, a prominent and well-connected German industrialist met with a Swiss citizen in Zurich. The industrialist revealed that Hitler's headquarters was considering a plan to concentrate all Jews from Germany and German-occupied territories in the East in the fall of that year, and to exterminate them through the use of prussic acid. After many months of searching through the labyrinth of documents at the National Archives, we were confident that we had unearthed the industrialists identity and with it, one of the great untold espionage episodes of World War II.

On Nuclear Morality

The contemporary anti-nuclear case takes two forms. In examining the different strands of the anti-nuclear argument, it is useful to start with the more fundamental challenge to deterrence itself.

The War of the Liberal Economists

"Liberal" has become a loose word that conveys a multitude of views. The recent writings of liberal economists reveal a common pattern. In fact, the more acceptable to the public did the Reagan program appear in action during the past two years, the more resolutely did the entire spectrum of liberals move to the Left.

From Coalinga to the Negev

The first news report of the day in English spills forth from Kol Yisrael at 7 A.M. with a brassy fanfare of Artza Alinu. Too often that musical measure sounds the brightest riff of the ensuing quarter-hour.

Yellow Rain: The Conspiracy of Closed Mouths

When one investigates the use of Soviet chemical weapons in Laos and Cambodia (and, for that matter, in Afghanistan as well), the difficulty lies not in gathering evidence, which by now is within the grasp of anyone who searches for it, but rather in understanding by what sophisticated mechanisms this evidence has been obscured, discredited, and minimized by the very persons who should bring it forward.

Musical New York in Crisis

New York is the musical capital of the United States. New York is at the same time one of the most important centers of music in the world.

The Rosenberg File, by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton

Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, in this superlative book, describe how their conviction that the Rosenbergs were innocent changed on the basis of a lengthy study of the case, and in particular of the enormous mass of documents that were released through the efforts of the Rosenbergs' sons under the Freedom of Information Act.

Why the Jews? The Reason for Anti-Semitism, by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin

Much that is important about this audaciously subtitled book (the one and only reason for anti-Semitism?) is foreshadowed in the dedication: "To Raoul Wallenberg," the Swedish diplomat who rescued Hungarian Jews during World War II and was subsequently bundled off to the Gulag by Soviet authorities, never to be seen again.

Modern Times, by Paul Johnson

It must surely be one of the great paradoxes of our times that as "the power of the state to do evil expanded with awesome speed" (in Paul Johnson's words), its ability to fulfill its traditional obligations declined precipitously.

Promethean Fire, by Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson

A new generation of physical and biological scientists has been looking to nature rather than culture for authoritative answers to the troubling question of who we are, what we can become, and how we are to live.

The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union, by Edward N. Luttwak

Some years ago, before the events giving birth to Solidarity in 1980, I had occasion to chat with a Pole visiting this country. Though himself a member of Poland's ruling party, he not atypically launched into a violent denunciation of the Communists, the Soviet Union, and all associated phenomena. Whatever one makes of my visitor's opinion, the episode is quite pertinent to the message of Edward Luttwak's book.

Willy Brandt

Anti-Capitalism

The Schools

Nuclear Strategists

The New Soviet Apologists

Among the many consequences of the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 has been the temporary suspension of a growing disposition on the American Left to propagate a more sympathetic attitude toward the Soviet system and the Soviet Union's global role. I stress the word temporary.

The Famine the “Times” Couldn't Find

My editor was dubious. I had been explaining that fifty years ago, in the spring and summer of 1933, Ukraine, the country of my forebears, had suffered a horrendous catastrophe. In a fertile, populous country famed as the granary of Europe, a great famine had mowed down a sixth, a fifth, and in some regions even a fourth of inhabitants.

The Last Great Yiddish Poet?

"A country or a state should endure longer than an individual." Whomever Czeslaw Milosz may have had in mind in making this observation, it certainly holds true for his compatriot and friend, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever.

Writer at Work

A story.

Cohen at the Bat

Andy Cohen and his brother Syd together spent a total of seventy years in professional baseball, but were major leaguers for only seven years. In a sport which revels statistics, neither man counts significantly.

It's Only Culture

For all that so many people extol the period in American life known with chronological inexactitude as the 60's, looking back upon it fondly as a time of unrivaled freedom and creative disorder I have never heard anyone of any seriousness extol its cultural achievements.

Woody Allen on the American Character

Woody Allen had dreamed of higher things. Having been encouraged by more adulation from the country's cultural elite than any comic artist since Charlie Chaplin, he aspired to outgrow comedy-in his chosen medium to become Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.

Overdrive, by William F. Buckley Jr.

The first thing to say about Overdrive is that it is a dazzling book. The second thing to say is that it has generally been greeted with extreme hostility.

Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat, by Mohamed Heikal

Mohamed Heikal, the renowned Egyptian journalist, writes on the first page of Autumn of Fury that he was "very fond of Sadat as a man." The reader might wish to savor these pleasant words, for they are the last he will encounter.

The War Over the Family, by Brigitte Berger and Peter L. Berger

Respecters and defenders of the much-maligned traditional family should take pleasure in this book. For it is the aim of the sociologists Brigitte and Peter L. Berger to define here a position for reasonable people who feel comfortable with the extremes of neither Right nor Left in the current battle over the role of the family in American society.

The Sacred Executioner, by Hyam Maccoby

This is a venturesome, provocative book that seeks first to uncover the archaic origins of certain central expressions of biblical religion and then to explain the anti-Jewish bias of Christianity, both early and late, as a swerve back into the archaic.

Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics, by Lester C. Thurow

Lester C. Thurow first became visible in 1972 as chief economic adviser to George McGovern. Since the publication of his book The Zero Sum Society several years ago, he has made a strong bid to succeed John Kenneth Galbraith as the Left's favorite economist.

Morality and Deterrence

Reagan and the Poor

Anti-Semitism

Totalitarianism

Willy Brandt & the Jews

Dartmouth and Wellesley

The State of World Jewry

Whether they bewail as dangerous their evident inability to unite for the purposes of concerted action, or whether they glory in it as a measure of diversity and pluralism, Jews understand that it remains a fact-one of the stubbornest facts of Jewish life. And yet, and yet, in recent years there has seemed to be an exception.

European “Sophistication” vs. American “Naiveté&rdquo

The great transatlantic debate over deploying the Pershing-2 and cruise missiles in Western Europe has once again raised the question of how America's European allies see themselves, the United States, and international politics generally.

The Greatest Living American Philosopher

Charles Sanders Peirce, the only American one can confidently place among the world's great philosophers, had a view of logic as a form of heroism. As he saw it, logical thinking is virtually useless in life, where the most important matters must be settled by faith and instinct.

Train to the West

“Listen, old man,” said Andy Perlov, entering my room, “would you like to get married?”

Thinking About Crime Again

James Q. Wilson has been regarded as a leader of American criminology—we have more criminologists (and more crime) than most countries—at least since he collected his work in Thinking About Crime eight years ago.

“Colonia” According to Naipaul

Since leaving his native Trinidad thirty-three years ago, V. S. Naipaul has written eight novels and seven books of social and political commentary, most of them dealing with Third World politics in a decidedly unaccommodating way.

The Troubled Crusade, by Diane Ravitch

The ferment over education reform of the 1960's and the emergence of neo-Marxism in the universities have, over the past decade or so, inspired a spate of revisionist histories of American educational institutions and policies. Against this tide, Diane Ravitch has stood almost alone as a voice of reason and moderation.

Andropov: New Challenge to the West, by Arnold Beichman and Mikhail S. Bernstam

Yuri Andropov's accession to power in the wake of Leonid Brezhnev's death on November 10, 1982, has understandably resulted in the appearance of several English-language books sketching out the career of the new Soviet leader.

Exiled in Paradise, by Anthony Heilbut

Of all the waves of immigration to the United States, one of the smallest-that made up of the approximately 132,000 escapees from Nazi Germany who reached this country in the 1930's and early 40's-probably had the strongest impact on American culture.

A Journey for Our Times, by Harrison E. Salisbury

As long ago as the time of Lincoln Steffens it was obvious that journalists could themselves make good "copy"; all the more so today, when the death of a network anchorman can get more coverage than that of a major public official.

The Economics and Politics of Race, by Thomas Sowell

Over the past years Thomas Sowell, an economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, has become one of America's most trenchant and perceptive commentators on the subject of race relations and ethnicity.