The Mysterious Messenger

The Tory Victory

Frank Rosenwig

Fiction

Evidence

UNESCO (cont'd)

Reagan vs. the Scientists: Why the President Is Right about Missile Defense

When President Reagan announced his proposal last spring for defending the United States against Soviet missiles, the reaction from scientists, politicians, and journalists was almost uniformly hostile. A watertight defense against missiles would upset the nuclear balance between the two superpowers. In this way, it became official policy of the United States to keep its people undefended against nuclear attack.

The Voice from the Whirlwind

The power of Job's unflinching argument, in the biblical book that bears his name, has rarely failed to move readers, but the structure of the book has been a perennial puzzle.

Liberalism, Stanford-Style

The details soon get complicated, but in broad outline the recent dispute between the Hoover Institution and Stanford University is fairly straightforward: a somewhat conservative institution, set in the midst of an increasingly liberal university, and largely independent of it, has been growing in influence and since 1980 has had friends in the White House, including the President. A segment of the Stanford faculty has not been enthusiastic about these developments, and some of the faculty have sought to limit Hoover's influence, or to bring it under Stanford's control. Others, recognizing that Hoover's prestige in part derives from its association with Stanford would like to terminate the association altogether. In the end, these attempts may have backfired.

In Memoriam: Henry M. Jackson

When Senator Henry M. Jackson died last September at the age of seventy-one, much else died with him.

A Conductor in History

Of all the mountains in a man's life, those of his youth are forever the tallest. In my own musical growing up, one figure stands supreme. Pierre Monteux, the French conductor who led the riot-ridden 1913 premiere in Paris of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, remains the most extraordinary musician I have ever known, and his greatness haunts me still.

The Hard Left and the Soft

"Five Films With Political Statements Due In Fall." There it was, in a headline right on the front page of the New York Times, so it must have been true. The point had already been amply covered, in any event, in the pages of Variety, the trade journal of the entertainment business, which, for those who can translate its eccentric linguistic constructions into English, is an excellent historical source.

What Does Philip Roth Want?

There is, as the folks in the head trades might say, a lot of rage in Philip Roth. What, one wonders, is he so angry about?

The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths, by E. Fuller Torrey

Edwin Fuller Torrey, M.D., is a member of the psychiatric staff at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. Although by all accounts he is an efficient administrator, his achievements as a scientist are dim to the point of invisibility.

The Rise of the French Rothschilds, by Anka Muhlstein; Contre Bonne Fortune, by Guy de Rothschild

Early in 1982, a short essay appeared on the front page of Le Monde. The essay recounted in broad strokes a very full life in our century. It told of services rendered to the French nation in peacetime and war, and it told also, with more sorrow than bitterness, of insults suffered at the hands of bigots and opportunists.

Escape to Freedom: The Story of the International Rescue Committee, by Aaron Levenstein

If Communists took over the Sahara, the joke goes, there would soon be a shortage of sand. There would probably not, however, be a shortage of refugees. "In every country taken over by the Communists," Aaron Levenstein writes in this moving history of the International Rescue Committee, "an exodus got under way."

Grand Delusions: The Cosmic Career of John DeLorean, by Hillel Levin; Dream Maker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. DeLorean, by Ivan Fallon and James Srodes; DeLorean: Stainless Steel Illusion, by John Lamm

In April 1973, John Z. DeLorean, a man who had become a media legend in his own time, shocked the automotive and business world by resigning a position that had put him only a step or two away from the presidency of General Motors. Having resigned, he declared his intention to build an "ethical" sports car-one that would be distinguished by its ageless style, its provisions for safety, and its durability.

Margaret Mead and Samoa, by Derek Freeman

Derek Freeman's refutation of one of the heroes of American academia has incited responses from many angry social scientists. The ensuing controversy has raised questions not just about the Stature of Margaret Mead but about the mission of anthropology and the present-day implications of the debate over "nature versus nurture," or biology versus culture, that dominated anthropology during the first half of this century.

Yellow Rain

Deterrence

Government

The Sacred Executioner

Ingmar Bergman

Musical New York

Why an American Arms Build-up Is Morally Necessary

That the Reagan administration has so far won most of the policy battles in the nuclear debate seems remarkable in light of the fact that it has lost virtually all the moral ones. Even as its defense programs have gradually gained approval in Congress, an enormous array of moral forces has mobilized against it. At its roots, the contention of these people is not that the administration has a bad defense policy, but that in the end the United States, or at least the United States government, is hardly worth defending.

Blaming Israel

Israel may have proved itself a reliable ally to the United States government; the collapse of the PLO may facilitate peace with Jordan and Lebanon. But as the anti-Israel rhetoric that was unleashed in the summer of 1982 showed, the image of Jews as a malign force has unfortunately recovered some of its old mythic potency, with consequences not likely to soon disappear.

Siberian Holiday

As with so much else in the Soviet Union, you wondered why they were willing to show you this gangrenous hulk of a land mass: bog in summer, permafrost in permawinter, a waste that seems to have been formed solely for the discomfort of convicts, nomad herdsmen, and anchorites. But railways are one thing that Communism hasn't savaged, and short of hitching them up in the courtyard of some Palace of Economic Achievement, the trains have got to go somewhere, and somewhere means Siberia.

Breaking with the Communists—A Memoir

A memoir.

German Culture and the Jews

"Jews have not assimilated into 'the German people,' but into a certain layer of it, the newly emerged middle class." I have since come to believe, after further inquiry into the historical process known as assimilation, that notwithstanding the experience of certain individuals, the entry of Jewry as a collective into the body of German society, a process which began in the later 18th and early 19th century, did not mean real integration into any stratum or section of it. Rather, it meant the creation of a separate subgroup, which happened to conform to the German middle class in certain of its characteristics.

Is Peronism Finished?

On December 10, 1983, Rail Alfonsin of the Radical Civic Union (UCR) began a six-year term as President of the Argentine Republic. His accession consummates one of the most dramatic political reversals of the 20th century, for it represents the first time since 1946 when Argentines-freely permitted to express their preferences-have turned their backs on Peronism.

The Democrats and Their Rules

The actual selection of delegates to the Democratic Party's presidential nominating convention is about to start: we are coming to the end of the beginning. Once again, the party has been ruffled by debates about the reformed delegate-selection rules launched by the McGovern commission in 1969. But one thing has changed: the liberal press has shown signs of peevishness toward what one New York Times op-editorialist described as "layer upon layer of rules having little to do with the original goal of a fair and open system."

The Death Penalty: A Debate, by Ernest van den Haag and John P. Conrad

If we must have another book on the rights and wrongs of the death penalty, we are unlikely to get one much better than this debate between Ernest van den Haag and John P. Conrad.

The Intemperate Zone, by Richard E. Feinberg

Richard Feinberg is an economist. He is also a policy intellectual who served in a mid-level capacity on the policy-planning staff of the State Department during the Carter administration.

The Brothers Singer, by Clive Sinclair

The publication of The Brothers Singer by Clive Sinclair, an English novelist and critic, brings some welcome attention to the work of Israel Joshua Singer, one of the greatest of Yiddish novelists and the man whom Isaac Bashevis Singer called "my older brother and master."

The Railroaders, by Stuart Leuthner

This is a book about thirty-two people who made railroads run, including two women-one a brakeman (brakeperson?), the other a crew caller-and two blacks, one a chef on the 20th Century Limited, the other a porter in Grand Central Station. Each tells a brief life story in his own words, illustrated with photographs saved in attics or albums.

Channels of Power: The Impact of Television on American Politics, by Austin Ranney

Since the major expansion of network news in the early 1960's, television has become a significant factor in American political life. And because this same period has seen far-reaching changes in our political arrangements, many people have been led to wonder whether television itself may not be, at least in part, at their root.

The State of World Jewry

Famine in the Ukraine

Culture Critics

Economists

The Mysterious Messenger

The Education Establishment

The Democrats & the Kissinger Report

If you measure by votes, congressional seats, and other old-fashioned standards of political success, one "lesson of Vietnam" is that the Democratic party's identification with the cause of U.S. retreat was not a helpful thing. This suggests that Democrats, and liberals generally, might do well to take a second and closer look at the report and recommendations of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (the "Kissinger commission").

Liberating Women: Who Benefits?

It is a matter of no small wonder that amid all the urgent public and private conversation about the condition of women carried on throughout this nation for nearly two decades now there has been so little said on the subject of men. The women's movement has devoted a considerable amount of thought and energy to analyzing and characterizing the male principle, but only as a principle. Of the actual condition of the actual living men under its collective nose the movement has, to put it mildly, been singularly unmindful.

No Hitler, No Holocaust

For some years after the Bolshevik Revolution, young people in the Soviet Union could leave school thinking that Peter the Great was the name given to economic modernization and political centralization in late feudal Russia. Their teachers' insistence on impersonal historical forces has turned a person into a personification, an abstraction, a metaphor.

What We Now Know About China

In 1978, frightened by how little they had inherited from their Maoist legators and worried by an increasingly menacing international situation, the group that rose to power with Deng Xiaoping sought to bring events more fully under its command through a campaign of "truth from facts." Like previous Communist Chinese campaigns, this one involved a massive settling of old scores. What set it apart from the two decades of campaigns before it was its nominal goal: learning about the condition of the Chinese people.

The Decline and Fall of Literary Criticism

The decline of literary criticism, an intellectual activity not so long ago thought of as culturally significant in America and England, has often been noted. What deserves more attention is the rise of theory and the fall of criticism.

Memories of the Moscow Trials

More than any other series of events abroad, the Moscow Trials of 1936-37 were a turning point in the history of American liberalism. They were a turning point in my own political and intellectual development as well. The Moscow Trials taught me that any conception of socialism that rejected the centrality of moral values was only an ideological disguise for totalitarianism.

Cynthia Ozick, Jewish Writer

On more than one occasion Edith Wharton was called "a Henry James in skirts," a remark that chagrined, irritated, and finally infuriated her. If only someone had said the same thing of Cynthia Ozick, the comparison would have made her day.

The Idea of Poverty, by Gertrude Himmelfarb

In the early 18th century, philosophers wrote about wealth-Adam Smith on The Wealth of Nations, for example, or Rousseau on Riches or Voltaire on Luxury. Writers of the 19th century produced books about poverty. How are we to explain such a depressing change of focus?

Israel in the Mind of America, by Peter Grose

In Israel in the Mind of America, Peter Grose, director of Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, has written an entertaining and engaging account of America's fascination with the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land.

KGB Today, by John Barron

John Barron's KGB Today, which draws on a wealth of new data and is written with a conceptual clarity rarely found in books about espionage, is indispensable to an understanding of the recent activities of Soviet intelligence.

The Politics at God's Funeral, by Michael Harrington

In this book, Michael Harrington "cries wolf," as he puts it, in order to warn us all of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the death of God, the "societal God of the Judeo-Christian West."

The Coercive Utopians, by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac

Who are the coercive utopians? According to Rael Jean and Erich Isaac in this valuable book, they are the people in present-day America who hold the view that man is by nature both innocent and perfectible.

Preventing Crime

American “Europeans”

Charles Sanders Pierce

Buckley and Gratitude

Stanford

Henry M. Jackson

Pierre Monteux

Phillip Roth

Publishing

Ezra Pound

To Our Readers

Jesse Jackson; the Blacks & American Foreign Policy

Today the Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s lieutenants and currently a candidate for the Democratic party's presidential nomination, has developed a perspective on foreign policy sharply at variance with both the Reagan administration and the declared views of many leading figures of his own party. Yet while Jackson's positions on international affairs have been duly recorded by the press, they have not been subjected to anything approaching the intense scrutiny which the views of such other Democratic candidates as Walter Mondale or even George McGovern have evoked. This is unfortunate, for Jackson is altogether serious about foreign policy.

Marxism vs. the Jews

Why is anti-Semitism, at least in its new "respectable" form of anti-Zionism, now found predominantly on the Left of the political spectrum? Why in particular is this new form increasingly common among intellectuals?

Vietnam: The Revised Standard Version

When a few years ago I undertook to write a book called Why We Were in Vietnam, I was a little startled to discover that there was hardly anyone around who still wanted to talk about Vietnam. Indeed, upon learning that I was working on Vietnam, most people would either change the subject after getting through the obligatory courtesies of a perfunctory question or two, or else they would shake their heads in commiseration: how could I bear to immerse myself in that sorry story again?

In Defense of Public Diplomacy

The global proliferation of modern means of communication has given masses of ordinary people an unprecedented access to information and ideas, while the spread of literacy and of education at all levels has profoundly altered social and political relationships both in advanced and in underdeveloped countries. Partly as a result, ideologies incorporating a more or less elaborate system of opinions continue to have a major role in forming the political understanding and allegiances of much of contemporary humanity.

The Phenomenal Life of Sir Moses Montefiore

Anyone famous who lives to be a hundred acquires an extra bonus of esteem; and this was the experience of the most famous Jew of the 19th century, the English philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, whose double centenary is being celebrated this year.

Sex and Euphemism

In the beginning was the Word. There followed, at an undetermined but (one assumes) decent interval, private, harsh, and dirty words. Invention here being the mother of necessity, the need for euphemism arose.

The World's Favorite Movie Star

It starts with a vulgar case of armed robbery. Three thugs break into a lunch counter, where, to their misfortune, Dirty Harry Callahan is in the habit of taking his absent-minded snacks.

In the Land of Israel, by Amos Oz

The history of the state of Israel is (unfortunately) so dramatic that the great issues always threaten to obscure the subtleties of daily and individual life. Contemporary Israeli writers tend to resent this encroachment of the collective drama on private experience, and, in what may be deliberate defiance of their national fate, to concentrate on the ordinariness of ordinary men and women, on the personal scene.

The Alliance, by Richard J. Barnet

Richard J. Barnet is a founder and co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.; a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the New Yorker; and the author of nine books. His new book, The Alliance, is a history of America's relations with Western Europe and Japan since 1945.

Tracking the Marvelous, by John Bernard Myers

It is only now, after almost forty years, that we are beginning to look with fresh eyes at that period in American cultural life when the Parisian Surrealists, practically en masse-Matta, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Andre Breton-were in New York.

America's Hidden Success, by John E. Schwarz

On a day-to-day basis, bad news is what makes the headlines. I have no idea whether gloom and doom actually sell newspapers or magazines, but there it is. Do we get a bumper harvest? Farmers threatened with ruin. Inexpensive electronic gadgets available?

The Plot to Kill the Pope, by Paul Henze; The Time of the Assassins, by Claire Sterling

These two very interesting books on the attempted assassination of John Paul II in May 1981 both reach the same conclusion: Mehmet Ali Agca, the youthful Turk who missed killing the Polish Pope by a finger, was piloted by the Bulgarian secret service.

Arms and Anxiety

The Book of Job

Jewish Writers

The Democrats

Israel and the Arabs

Capital Punishment

World Jewry

Plaudits

The Lesson of Lebanon

Less than two years ago the PLO's military base in Lebanon was smashed by the Israeli armed forces, and dozens of terrorist organizations that had used the country as their training and operational center were dispersed around the globe. Today the situation is almost totally reversed.

Best-Case Thinking

Although the phrase "worst-case thinking" is now an established term of art among international-affairs analysts and commentators, it is generally in bad odor. It is interesting that the counterpart term-that is, "best-case thinking," as exemplified by a systematic determination to interpret events and trends, particularly those involving the enemies of democracy and free societies, in a way that denies that they constitute a serious threat-has not gained currency.

Cravat Jews and Caftan Jews

Half a century after the founding of the Third Reich, the role of the Jewish community in the history of Germany is receiving more scholarly attention than ever before. For only now that it has become part of a dead past can its dimensions be fully explored.

Homage to Raymond Aron

Raymond Aron, who died in Paris last October at the age of seventy-eight, was one of the great intellectuals of Europe's liberal tradition, and France's most lucid political writer in this century.

East Europeanists Need Not Apply

For some time now, we have been hearing about a crisis in the field of Soviet and East European studies in the U.S. A number of statements have appeared, in a variety of formats, lamenting the shortage of specialists in the field. A concern of those who write about the "national need" for East European specialists is, quite naturally, that there should be a sufficiency of experts in order, among other things, to supply people for government agencies. Yet a question the authors of such articles do not discuss is the degree to which government agencies themselves, and their personnel offices, share this concern.

Politicizing Science

In an age in which intellectual fashions seem to shift more frequently than the seasons, it is remarkable for a mass-circulation magazine to flourish continually, with virtually no change, in its format or style, for over thirty-five years.

Bartok at the Piano

Composers of serious music in the 20th century have often complained about the mixture of incompetence and self-regard with which performers have allegedly played their works. The champion at this kind of complaint was Igor Stravinsky, who disliked the performances of such of his works as The Rite of Spring even when they elicited enthusiastic responses from the audience.

Mayor, by Edward I. Koch

Edward I. Koch is certainly one of the most popular mayors New York City has ever had. Although he won his first term in 1977 by a very narrow margin, he was reelected to a second by a 75 percent majority.

Horace's Compromise, by Theodore Sizer

Besieged and benumbed as we already are by proliferating studies of American education, we might fairly wonder what could possibly justify another one. Yet even after nearly two years of commission reports, task forces, presidential hoopla, gubernatorial activism, and a thousand solemn conferences, Theodore Sizer's book is, initially, a refreshing addition to the literature.

Civil Religion in Israel, by Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehia

There is something to be said for George Eliot's dictum that "the happiest nations have no history." One way or another, the Jews are a people encumbered by their past: the past as history, the past as tradition.

In the Shadow of FDR, by William Leuchtenburg

Buried in the preface of this book is the author's version of a modern American success story. The year was 1939. A sixteen-year-old boy from Queens entertained dreams of attending Cornell University, only to learn that the $400 tuition was beyond his family's means.

Religion in the Secular City, by Harvey Cox

It is nearly twenty years since Harvey Cox, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, became a sensation among liberal theologians with the publication of The Secular City. In that book, he celebrated the advent of secular urban civilization and the retreat of traditional Christianity.

“Star Wars”

German Jewry

Can the Democracies Survive?

Democracy probably could endure if it were the only type of political organization in the world. But it is not basically structured to defend itself against outside enemies seeking its annihilation, especially since the latest and most dangerous of these external enemies-Communism-parades as a democracy perfected when it is in fact the absolute negation of democracy, the current and complete model of totalitarianism.

The Media and the Middle East

American press coverage of the 1982 war in Lebanon rightly provoked a storm of criticism. As a variety of analysts have shown, many errors were made in the reporting of facts, and anti-Israel bias was rampant. But falsehood and prejudice, if they were the outstanding media problems in 1982, are not usually the main source of inaccuracy regarding the Middle East. That arises out of the subject matter chosen for coverage.

“Julia” & Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman

In February 1980, Lillian Hellman brought a libel action against Mary McCarthy. Miss McCarthy, appearing on the Dick Cavett Show, had called Miss Hellman a bad and dishonest writer. Apart from the libel action, which may anyway never come to trial, the incident raises a more general question, the question of the credibility of a very well-known and highly esteemed author.

The Decline and Fall of Islamic Jewry

Western travelers, almost unanimously, confirm the impression that the period from the end of the 18th into the second half of the 19th century was the lowest point in the existence of the Jews in the Muslim lands. At a time when Jews in Western Europe were beginning to enjoy the fruits of emancipation, several of the Christian travelers marked the contrast between the Jews they met in Muslim lands and those whom they knew at home.

In Coventry—A Memoir

A memoir.

Deficit Thinking

What is the significance of the currently bulging federal deficit, and what should be done about it?

The Sunshine Girls

I do not have the attention span to sustain a lengthy depression, but I have of late been reading two novelists who do: Renata Adler and Joan Didion. I think of them as the Sunshine Girls, largely because in their work the sun is never shining.

The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, by Peter Gay

We are promised that this is the First installment of "a project of enormous scope," a "multivolume study of the European and American middle classes from the 1820's to the outbreak of World War I." Actually, it is an extensive but not particularly systematic survey of sexuality in the 19th century.

The March of Folly, by Barbara W. Tuchman

At first glance, a remarkable idea: to examine cases in world history in which rulers, to preserve their power or principles as they saw them, persisted in policies which damaged or destroyed that power.

The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars, by Ezra Mendelsohn; From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, edited and translated by Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin

Ezra Mendelsohn's new study is a solid, intelligent analysis of a Jewish community which, on the eve of World War II, was the largest and most heterogeneous of any in the world.

Why Are They Lying to Our Children?, by Herbert I. London

The dogmas of the 1960's counterculture have not stood up well either to logic or to experience. Yet for certain intellectuals and educators, nothing better demonstrates the value of an idea than its discrediting.

The Heyday of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr

This outstanding study of the American Communist movement during the Depression era fills an important gap. All in all, Klehr's book and his research represent an archival gold mine for future scholars.

The Holocaust

Men and Women

Literature & Theory

Blaming Israel

Strategy for Survival

Clint Eastwood

The Art World

Capital Punishment, Cont'd

Education in Defense of a Free Society

As we approach the bicentenary of the American Constitution, it seems to me fitting and fruitful to explore two related themes in the intellectual legacy of Thomas Jefferson, the first philosopher-statesman of the fledgling American republic to call himself a democrat. Since Jefferson's own time, discussion of the relation between democracy and education has not been absent from political discourse but as a rule, it has been subordinated to narrow curricular issues. Periodically, however, the question becomes focal whenever we seek, as we are doing today, to rethink, revise, and reform the educational establishment of the nation.

The Political Dilemma of American Jews

Erik Erikson, in his biography of Luther, defines three critical stages in the life cycle of an individual. The first is a crisis in identity, the second a crisis of conscience, and the third a crisis of integrity. The American Jewish community is in the process of experiencing all these life-cycle crises simultaneously. Let us look at three changes in the American political landscape that were not anticipated, and that are now contributing to these crises.

Alma Redeemed A Story

A story.

The Networks vs. the Recovery

In the summer of 1981, some six months after Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. economy stopped growing and began to contract. Over the ensuing year-and-a-half the country experienced a recession of about average intensity and duration for the postwar period. But in December 1982, the economy started growing again, and during the twelve months that followed, the country experienced an economic recovery and expansion whose size once again made it about average for postwar expansions. As the economy itself began growing again, the networks' economic coverage became curiously schizophrenic.

Underdevelopment Revisited

The poverty in which large numbers of human beings live has been a stubborn and morally troubling reality for a long time. The terminology describing this reality has often changed, however. Changes in terminology sometimes reflect advances in knowledge: sometimes they are covers for ignorance. Which is the case here? How much have we really learned about the world's poverty and the remedies for it?

European Diary

Political and social observations in: Liverpool, London, Points South, Essen, Brussels, and Zurich of Walter Laqueur.

Call of the Wild

The late Henry Arthur FitzRoy Somerset, tenth Duke of Beaufort, must have given little comfort to English animal lovers. When his death at eighty-three was announced early this year it was revealed that the Duke had by his own estimation spent four thousand days in the saddle pursuing foxes, few of which, one must assume, evaded the pursuit.

Caveat, by Alexander M. Haig, Jr.

Reading Alexander M. Haig, Jr.'s Caveat is a painful experience. This is not because it is a bad book. On the contrary, it is a surprisingly good one: surprising because no one listening to Mr. Haig speak without a prepared text would have thought him capable of handling the English language as smoothly and even elegantly as it is handled in Caveat.

From Time Immemorial, by Joan Peters

Joan Peters began this book planning to write about the Arabs who fled Palestine in 1948-49, when armies of the Arab states attempted to destroy the fledgling state of Israel. In the course of research on this subject, she came across a "seemingly casual" discrepancy between the standard definition of a refugee and the definition used for the Palestinian Arabs.

How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, by Serge Guilbaut

Looking back at the art scene in New York City as shaped during the war years and early 50's, a critic might well find much to criticize in past descriptions of the Abstract Expressionist movement, both by those who championed and by those who opposed it; he might also raise questions about the motives of the artists involved, as of their champions and their detractors.

Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939-1941, by Martin Gilbert

On November 30, 1934, Winston Churchill celebrated his sixtieth birthday. Cut off from power, his warnings about the Nazi danger ignored, his judgment doubted, and his motives impugned, Churchill had reason to be pessimistic about his political future, his career appeared to be largely behind him, and he assumed he was entering the last decade of his life.

An American Procession, by Alfred Kazin

The major key to his native city, said Henry James, was the monstrous labyrinth stretching from Canal Street to the Battery, the "down-town" world of business and finance, but as he acknowledged in the preface to the New York edition of Daisy Miller, Pandora, The Patagonia, and Other Tales, the task of exploiting lower Manhattan literarily was one for which he was in the last degree unprepared and uneducated.

Jesse Jackson

Vietnam

Euphemism

Islamic Jewry

The Moscow Trials

East Europeanists

Monteux

How to Cope With the Soviet Threat A Long-Term Strategy for the West

The comments which follow will deal with the preferred Western response to Soviet leadership in the military, political, and economic fields.

Westmoreland vs. CBS

The months of charges, counter-charges, investigations, and denials following the airing by CBS-TV of The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception on January 23, 1982, took a step toward resolution when retired General William C. Westmoreland filed a $120-million libel suit against CBS. Westmoreland contends that CBS committed the libel by portraying him as the principal villain in a conspiracy to falsify and suppress critical intelligence data describing Vietnamese strength before the Tet attack. Like Tet, the road to the courts has already had a tangled history, but unlike Tet, the last shot has yet to be fired.

Christianity's Break With Judaism

Which is the true continuation of the ancient Israelite religion-the Christian church, or the Jewish synagogue? To simple believers on each side, the answer has always seemed obvious, and the opposite answer absurd.

Neoconservatism & Irving Kristol

Neoconservatism is a movement that, as far as most of its adherents are concerned, would rather not speak its name. If, by now, most neoconservatives have become resigned to the term, that is more in the nature of acceptance of the inevitable than of any positive choice. Not so with Irving Kristol, who has mockingly referred to himself as perhaps "the only living and self-confessed neoconservative, at large or in captivity."

The Jewish Way of Crime

The seamier side of modern Jewish life has in recent years become the subject of considerable scholarly interest. We now know more than we ever did before about the Jewish underworld in Germany dating back to the 17th century; the role played by Jewish convicts in the genesis of Australian Jewry; the Jewish criminal element in 18th- and 19th-century England; the activities of Jewish gangsters in America; and Jewish involvement in prostitution ranging over five continents.

What Really Happened on the “Bounty”

They stand within a few feet of each other on the quarterdeck of HMS Bounty. Fletcher Christian, the second in command, on the verge of hysteria, has in a wild, impulsive action "taken the ship," mutinied, a crime for which the Royal Articles of War allow only one punishment: hanging.

The Other Side of the Story, by Jody Powell

Jody Powell's four years as White House press secretary left him "upset," even "angry" at the press corps, and he has written a book to explain why.

In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power, by Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes's book is divided into three parts. He begins by delineating the premodern legacy of Islam, he goes on to describe the encounter of Islam and the West with all the problems which this encounter entailed for Muslims, and he examines the characteristics of the Islamic revival which in recent years has taken the world by surprise.

The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, by Kenneth Silverman

Any biographer of Cotton Mather is faced with a lot of wrongs to redress. Lampooned and scourged in his lifetime by a rising political class of populist merchants who had displaced his family's religious authority, Cotton Mather went down in the books as an authoritarian bigot, a witch-burner, who sought to keep America in its theocratic swaddling clothes well into the 18th century.

The New Diplomacy, by Abba Eban

Any work on diplomacy by a man who was his country's UN representative and Foreign Minister for successive decades deserves serious consideration. Abba Eban's new work has, in addition, enough solid virtues of its own to recommend it.

Sex and Destiny, by Germaine Greer

Anyone reading this book might find it hard to believe that its author also wrote one of contemporary feminism's pioneering texts. The Female Eunuch (1970) was a racy, radical, best-selling manifesto that posited sexual freedom as the key to women's liberation.

Lebanon

Best-Case Thinking

Lillian Hellman

Cravat and Caftan

Marx and Anti-Semitism

“Scientific American”

Comparable Worth: The Feminist Road to Socialism

In December 1983, Federal Judge Jack Tanner accorded the fullest legal recognition it has so far received to the novel economic doctrine of "comparable worth." This doctrine holds that women in the work force are paid less than they are really "worth" in terms of the "value" of what they do. Washington now owes 15,500 female state employees over four years' back pay and raises. Whatever the eventual tally, Washington will have to come up with it soon as Judge Tanner has denied various motions by the state for time to accommodate its new burden.

Beirut & the Great Media Cover-Up

On April 23, 1981, hundreds of Syria's elite special forces gathered in designated meeting places near the northern city of Hama. They were led by Syrian President Hafez Assad's brother and they had come for a simple purpose-to teach the citizens of Hama a lesson. They systematically dragged hundreds of civilians from their bed, lined them up, and machine-gunned them to death. The reporters stationed in Beirut must have heard the story circulating there and had chosen to ignore it.

How to Understand Central America

It is now more than three years since Central America became the United States' most dramatic and divisive foreign-policy issue since the Vietnam War. It has dominated the front pages of newspapers for many months; fueled acrimonious exchanges in Congress; and ignited a national protest movement. What is the argument about? And who is doing the arguing?

Philosophy & the Disappearing Self

The 19th is still a century we are struggling to extricate ourselves from. It has thus something of the ambiguity of a parental image for us, and our grasp of it, in consequence, is still somewhat uncertain and confused.

Weekends in New York—A Memoir

A memoir.

A Primer for Polemicists

Irving Kristol has written that in an ideological age such as ours, the key political question is: who owns the future? Owns, that is, in the sense of determining the spirit of the age, the prevailing notions concerning what is possible, inevitable, desirable, permissible, and unspeakable. An ideological age is also a polemical age. Hence, if one rules out the notion of a free-floating or impersonally determined Zeitgeist, the answer to Kristol's question will to a significant degree turn on the polemical presentations of the main competing ideological cases.

From Eton to Havana

Has Great Britain sent us a film of social and political significance? So it would seem from the reaction of a large portion of the American press to Another Country.

Reality and Rhetoric, by P.T. Bauer

Throughout the 1930's the intellectual sky was gray with books predicting the doom of capitalism; then, after World War II, came the wholly unexpected "economic miracles" of Western Europe and Japan. What were deflated socialists to do?

The Transfer Agreement, by Edwin Black

Edwin Black here retells the story of the agreement worked out between Zionists and the Nazi government in 1933 by which German Jews were allowed to emigrate to Palestine and retrieve a small portion of their assets in various forms, including an indirect interest in imported German goods.

First Lady from Plains, by Rosalynn Carter

The Carter White House seems to have spawned more memoirs more quickly than any other, a phenomenon that may owe something to the advent of the word processor. Jimmy Carter, Hamilton Jordan, and Jody Powell have offered their stories to the public, and now, with First Lady from Plains, we have the tale told from the perspective of the former President's better half and "political partner."

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony, by Lewis Thomas

As a rule, scientists who share the dominant predilections of the literary establishment are lionized regardless of their competence to comment intelligently upon social and political problems. In recent years, one who has benefited particularly from this dispensation has been the biologist-physician Lewis Thomas, whose latest best-selling book, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony, has been universally praised by reviewers and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov, by John Carswell

Ivy Low Litvinov (1889-1977) has long deserved to be the subject of a book, as much for her life as for her writing.

The Democratic Muse, by Edward C. Banfield; Culture and Politics, by Ronald Berman; Excellence & Equity: The National Endowment for the Humanities, by Stephen Miller

The evening before starting this review, I was part of the audience for the Nashville Symphony's annual opera production, this year a satisfactory rendition of La Traviata. As usual, the printed program named and thanked hundreds of individuals and corporations whose contributions helped underwrite the large costs of staging a full-fledged grand opera. Listed alongside the private donors, one also came upon a grateful acknowledgement of the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and its Tennessee state affiliate.

Jewish Voters & the “Politics of Compassion”

Democracy's Future

The Deficit

Adlai vs. Ike

Jews in Muslim Lands

Bartók

Has the Burger Court Gone Too Far?

Only yesterday, it seems, federal judges were being admired for refusing to confine themselves to the modest but appropriate role of interpreters of statutory or constitutional texts. Better than any other of its members, Douglas characterized the Warren Court, and among liberals that Court was held to be the best or among the best in our history. This view of the Supreme Court as preceptor and pontiff survived the advent of the Burger Court-for a time, at least.

An Open Letter to Milan Kundera

A letter.

Why the Schools May Not Improve

The report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk, has become so familiar since it was issued in 1983 that it is hard to remember how surprised we were when it appeared. Most of us interested in education were entirely unprepared for its tone and emphasis. It had been assumed that we would get a characteristic product of the committee process-a report temperate and evenhanded, which might well mean, in practice, an exercise in the vacuous, the sententious, and the banal.

How to Rescue International Law

Recent events in Grenada and Nicaragua have reinforced a growing belief that the United States is losing faith in the system of collective security, international organizations, and treaties established after World War II; that it has abandoned the concept that international relations can and should be governed by a regime of international law. Faith in international law has been characteristic of the United States and this faith does now seem to be fading.

Of Arms, Men & Monuments

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. was controversial from the moment it was put forward as an idea; the controversy increased when the sponsors unveiled the design, and abated slightly only when the completed memorial was dedicated on Veterans Day 1982.

Naming Day in Berkeley

Doreen was back in Berkeley now, remarried, another family. It had been ten years since I had seen her, fifteen since we had both lived in that renowned town. I called to say hello, and she invited me and Molly to come to some kind of ceremony for her newborn son.

“The Bostonians” Inside Out

Basil Ransom is one of three major protagonists-and certainly the conqueror-of Henry James's The Bostonians, which has just reached the screen in one of the most singularly perverse adaptations of a classic I have ever encountered.

The Kennedys, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

The United States, a republic, covers itself in shame when it is false to its republicanism. That is the moral of the audacious attempt by Joseph P. Kennedy to turn his progeny into a surrogate royal family, an attempt ignobly assisted by the liberal media of the East Coast and by a crowd of court historians and other pliant academics.

Ethnic Dilemmas 1964-1982, by Nathan Glazer

It is hard to imagine that a book of three hundred pages on affirmative action and associated subjects, pages written over eighteen years of fierce and emotional debate on the issue, could be a model of clarity, measured reasoning, and, to use a word of unnatural political appeals nowadays, fairness.

Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard Nixon, by Robert Sam Anson

Exile is an account of Richard Nixon's life from his resignation of the Presidency on August 9, 1974 through his seventieth birthday on January 9, 1983. It is a narrative of events intertwined with a vast accumulation of gossip.

Jewish Life in Philadelphia 1840-1940, edited by Murray Friedman

American Jewish communities of all sizes and in every region of the country now sport handsomely illustrated and often bulky tomes brimming with names and events from the past, all woven together into a rich narrative tapestry.

Powerplay: What Really Happened at Bendix, by Mary Cunningham

In June 1979, Mary Cunningham, then twenty-seven years old, was graduated with high grades and first-rate recommendations from the Harvard Business School where she had been the beneficiary of the case-study approach to management-by-objectives, strategic planning, and human behavior in organizations.

Required Writing, by Philip Larkin

Since 1945, the English poet Philip Larkin has published a single volume of poetry nearly every ten years. Now, in 1984, amid rumors that he has ceased writing poetry entirely the sixty-two-year-old Larkin has issued this collection of articles, reviews, introductions, talks, and interviews done between 1955 and 1982 for British periodicals.

Christianity & Judaism

Education and Democracy

Network News

Capitalism

Democracy

Frederick Law Olmsted

The Case Against Arms Control

In one sense the case against arms control is not difficult to make. One might simply ask just what evidence exists that recent nuclear-arms-limitations agreements with the USSR have actually contributed to U.S. security.

“Peace for Galilee”: Success or Failure?

A complete and satisfying history of Israel's war in Lebanon, "Operation Peace for Galilee," will not come into our hands for many years. The time is still ripe for some reflection on the events of June 1982 and their aftermath, and three recent books are valuable in that regard.

Infanticide & Its Apologists

The killing of unwanted babies, commonly known as infanticide, is back in fashion. Few commentators have admitted as much, and few reporters have encouraged them to do so.

A Taste for Dostoevsky

I am rather sure that I was not the only member of my generation (which came of age during the early 30's) to have felt especially rewarded in coming, suddenly, on the novels of Dostoevsky. But for what were we being rewarded? What direction of thought had we already taken which made our discovery of his novels the confirmation of some judgment already forming in us?

Economics in Decline

Though no Gallup polls or other surveys exist on the subject, there is considerable evidence that the last fifty years have witnessed a remarkable reversal in the professional prestige of economics.

What Hubert Humphrey Wrought

In my New York Times this morning there is a review of a televised documentary on the House Judiciary Committee impeachment proceedings of ten years ago. Members of the committee are characterized in the document by narrator Charles McDowell as "obscure members of Congress, partisan politicians, suspected second-raters." This description, says the Times reviewer, "is not uncharitable; it is realistic." The moral we are asked to draw is: the best defense against being a suspected second-rater is to become a household name.

The Stranger A Story

A story.

The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie, by Edith Efron

Among the many remarkable qualities of this book about cancer science is the back of the dust jacket. It is not unusual to find in this space highly favorable comments by distinguished readers who have seen a book before its publication, and Miss Efron's book is no exception.

The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka, by Ernst Pawel

Franz Kafka is the Byron of our century: a writer who fixes for his audience its image of the writer, as well as of the age that both created and consumed him.

The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience, by William Shawcross

In 1979 William Shawcross attracted widespread praise for his book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. Some reviewers, it is true, pointed out the author's careless use of facts, or argued against the book's conclusion that the disasters which befell Cambodia in the 1970's were caused in the main by the policies of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

The PLO, by Jillian Becker

On one level, Jillian Becker successfully achieves her aim in The PLO. The book provides a straightforward, factual survey of the PLO's remarkably extensive activities from its founding in January 1964 to late 1983.

Hilaire Belloc, by A.N. Wilson

In his day, Hilaire Belloc was treated as a peer by Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, with whom he conducted a furious public controversy. A Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1910, he was a novelist, historian, creditable minor poet, Roman Catholic polemicist-and incandescent anti-Semite.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations, by Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, the well-known author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, migrated from New York in the late 60's when her quest for a humane scale of life took her to Toronto, Canada. From this exile, her romantic view of the livable city has continued to strike echoes across the political spectrum.

The Soviet Threat

Neoconservatism

Journalists in Beirut

Cotton Mather

“Science”

The War Against “Star Wars”

President Reagan offered a new strategic vision to the American people in his "Star Wars" speech of March 23, 1983. He called on our scientists to find a way of defending the United States against a Soviet nuclear attack by intercepting the Soviet missiles before they reached our soil. One group of distinguished experts said no fundamental obstacles stood in the way of success; the other group, equally distinguished, said it would not work. Who was right?

Islam vs. Israel

The series of bombings and other acts of violence directed at American installations in Lebanon over the last months has focused public attention on the fanatic groups, acting in the name of Islam. One of the most fertile grounds for ideological and political fundamentalism in recent years has been, paradoxically, that quintessentially "moderate" Arab country, Egypt. In order to understand the nature of the present influence wielded by the fundamentalists within Egypt, it is necessary to survey, however briefly, the recent history of their views toward Israel and the Jews.

Totalitarianism Today

There is an understandable tendency for many in the democratic world to identify the totalitarian phenomenon exclusively with its most dramatic and brutal manifestations: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Stalin, China during the Cultural Revolution, and martial law in Poland. The distinctive feature of totalitarianism, and Communism most notably of all, is the elaborately constructed apparatus of control which is inevitably set in place after the seizure of power.

Shakespeare in the Original

This year two radically new British editions of Shakespeare have begun to appear in print, one from Oxford University Press and the second from Cambridge University Press. Either can reasonably expect to become the standard classroom text for an entire generation to come.

From Maoism to the Talmud (With Sartre Along the Way): An Interview with Benny Levy

An interview.

Artist in a Cause

The just-published autobiography of the sometime Soviet soprano Galina Vishnevskaya is in many important ways a prime example of the tale of a prima donna's triumphs.

Dutch Treats

If you are a neurotic, alcoholic, Mariolatrous, Catholic homosexual on the verge of going over the edge, have I got the film for you! It is Dutch, yes, Dutch, The 4th Man.

Beyond Magic Realism

The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa is known both for his interest in politics and for his realistic narratives, as contrasted with the experimental forms favored by a number of his Latin American contemporaries.

Margaret Mead, by Jane Howard

The Episcopal Church certainly knew what it was doing when it invited Margaret Mead to help revise the Book of Common Prayer in 1967. Here was a bishop who carried her staff of office as if she meant it, as a true symbol of authority, and it is pleasing to learn that she gave the Episcopal bishops more than they bargained for.

Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota's DFL Party, by John Haynes

Thirty-six years ago, the Democratic Party and then the American electorate decisively rejected a candidate for President, Henry Wallace, who blamed the United States for the cold war, apologized for Communist dictatorships abroad, and accepted domestic Communists as legitimate partners in his political coalition.

Musical Variations on Jewish Thought, by Olivier Revault d'Allonnes

Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, a professor of aesthetics at the Sorbonne, was quite serious when he called this unusual little book Musique: Variations sur la pensee juive.

Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy, by Richard H. Shultz and Roy Godson

Last spring a rumor spread in the Islamic world that on his moon walk, astronaut Neil Armstrong had heard strange voices; returning to earth, he had discovered these to be a call to Islamic prayer.

Secrets of the Tax Revolt, by James Ring Adams

Despite its title, this book is not about the tax revolt, since there are no real secrets about the mobilization of tax-weary citizens to cut back the spending of state and local governments. It is, rather, about the still undiscovered secret of how to develop public prudence.