Central America

The Middle East

Comparable Worth

The Kennedys

Isaac Leeser

Hillaire Belloc

Why the Democrats Lost

In 1984 the McGovernization of the Democratic party was completed. The movement was called the "new politics" by its original cheerleaders, and later was called "New-Left liberalism" or "counterculture liberalism" by its critics. But McGovernism is the term that has stuck.

Conservatism After Reagan

The press awarded Ronald Reagan a huge "personal" victory with no "mandate," and perhaps fairly so; the boldest policy statements coming out of the Reagan campaign seemed strongly to favor optimism, families, low inflation, and the Olympics. If the public delivered a clear message, it was probably a kind of negative mandate against the Democrats.

Delusions of Soviet Weakness

In recent years, entire books have appeared which argue that the Soviet armed forces are much weaker than they seem. Citing refugee accounts or personal experience, they depict the pervasive technical incompetence, drunkenness, corruption, and bleak apathy of officers and men. But no great military empire is likely to be undone by generals who procure villas through corrupt dealings, nor by sergeants who take the odd rubble off the conscript; Anglo-Saxon morality makes much of these things, history much less.

Vistas of Annihilation

The Jews brought with them to the arenas of destruction all their sundry internal divisions, their individual and collective defects, and, one must surely add, their various inner resources, whether recently acquired or developed over the centuries. An awareness of such continuities and such complicating backgrounds may make it possible to see that, however traumatic the Hitler years were, Jewish history neither ended nor began with them.

What Good Is Freedom of Speech?

Would we enact the First Amendment were it a proposal open to vote rather than a text to be applied? What is it in itself, and what is its use? Why, if at all, should one fight and die for it?

Reflections on a Memoir

H.'s english was hesitant, but he was fluent and expressive in Yiddish. There was more than a touch of delighted malice in his hoarse, deep voice as he recounted the foibles of townspeople in his shtetl. So I looked forward to a bright and lively account of an unusual life.

Treason Chic

Treason is in style. At least British treason.

Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, by Charles Murray

Charles Murray's closely argued book is a bold and timely indictment of the past twenty years of American social policy.

Ilya Ehrenburg, by Anatol Goldberg

The career of the writer Ilya Ehrenburg is an inextricable part of the odyssey and travails of Russian Jewry in the 20th century, under both czars and Soviets.

Not in Our Genes, by Richard C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin

For over a decade a group of scientists on the radical Left, Science for the People (SFP), has pursued a campaign against studies of human behavioral genetics.

Staying on Top: The Business Case for a National Industrial Strategy, by Kevin P. Phillips

Kevin P. Phillips's reputation as a political seer began with the publication, when he was still in his twenties, of "The Emerging Republican Majority," a book containing a vision of the future that appears to have included subsequent election returns.

In Love and War, by James and Sybil Stockdale

On the morning of Thursday, September 9, 1965, a squadron of 37 fighter-bombers took off from the USS Oriskany on station in the South China Sea.

The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, by Richard John Neuhaus

Most Americans were taken by suprise when the 1984 presidential election threatened for a time to degenerate into a war of religion.

Arms Control

Infanticide

The Court & the Crèche

The Soviet Threat (Cont'd.)

The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To compound the difficulty, Solzhenitsyn's very subject matter is guaranteed to induce a wandering mind. But of course by 1980 something had happened to Solzhenitsyn which placed between him and the Western reading public another and even greater obstacle than the length, the density, and the unpleasant subject matter of his books. He had become, to use the usual euphemism, "controversial." And thereby hangs a tale.

Politics, the Jews & the '84 Election

Politics has been an avocation of the Jews for a mere two hundred years, and as Mark Twain once noted, despite their splendid capacities in other fields, they have not excelled at it. Twain wrote, of course, before the development of political Zionism, but so far as the American Jewish community was concerned, the 1984 political season offered little that might have persuaded him to change his mind.

Can the Bishops Help the Poor?

On November 11, 1984, a committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, headed by Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, issued the first draft of a "Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy." Addressing all Americans, they explicitly mention and invite comment from non-Catholic Christians and Jews, with whom they share a common biblical heritage. The remarks that follow, then, are a response by a non-Catholic Christian to this invitation.

From Clapham to Bloomsbury: A Genealogy of Morals

"For the Englishman," Nietzsche wrote in 1889, "morality is not yet a problem." The English thought that religion was no longer needed as a "guarantee of morality," that morality could be known "intuitively." But that illusion was itself a reflection of the persistent strength and depth among them of the Christian "ascendancy." If Christianity should ever lose that ascendancy, Nietzsche implied, morality would be deprived of even that tenuous hold on reality and would then truly become a "problem."

A Few Home Truths About Latin America

An exchange with Luis Burstin, author of An Introduction to Latin American Political Mythology, on contemporary Latin American affairs.

Kosher Ecology

Apologists for religion often draw on science to reinforce their views, but their elaborate arguments cut no ice with scientists. Believe what you will, a scientist would say, you cannot prove the truth of religion with scientific tests. And in fact most religious people do not bother with science. Religious ordinances are observed by them not because they are scientifically valid, but as matters of faith. This is hardly to say that religious ordinances lack an appeal to reason.

Heller's Last Gag

Joseph Heller is a writer whose Books are awaited and even long-awaited, which is a polite way of saying that after his fantastically successful first novel, Catch-22 (1961), he proceeded to turn out work very slowly.

Deadly Gambits, by Strobe Talbott

Deadly Gambits has all the trappings of an important book.

The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941-1944, edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki

Three literary works, written in as many languages, have attempted to evoke the outward atmosphere of near-normalcy that was the species of horror peculiar to the ghetto of Lodz, Poland's second largest city, where over 200,000 Jews were hermetically sealed off in May 1940.

Turing's Man, by J. David Bolter; The Second Self, by Sherry Turkle

Despite the apocalyptic expectations aroused by the ever more awesome data-handling capabilities of electronic computers since the first ponderous models were constructed around the time of World War II, the effects of computers on our everyday life still remain far less visible than those produced by many earlier and more rapidly domesticated technologies of the past century.

The Liberal Crack-Up, by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

The Liberal Crack-up merrily surveys the transformation during the 60's and 70's of traditional liberals, mostly one-time New and Fair Dealers, into what R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. calls "New Age Liberals."

The Minimal Self, by Christopher Lasch

There is much to admire in the work of Christopher Lasch. He has constructed wonderfully exact criticisms of the presumptions and intrusions of those agencies of social control which are called, in the current jargon, the human services.

“Star Wars” & the Scientists

“The Bostonians”

Famine, Development & Foreign Aid

In recent years, American foreign-aid policies have been shaped increasingly by the argument that the many different problems facing the poor nations are inextricably interconnected, woven together into an all-encompassing "seamless fabric." However pleasing this notion may seem to theoreticians, its practical implications are dangerously wrong.

The Hidden Holocaust

Today the study of the destruction of the Jewish community in Europe has turned into a respectable academic pursuit. Yet despite the emergence of the Holocaust as a recognized field of historical study, despite the continuing publication of so many documents, articles, and books, what we know about it is still largely confined to those aspects which can be studied on the basis of German records. Further research is only likely to produce findings which are either marginal or repetitious.

How to Support the Democratic Revolution

Whether demanding that we sever all economic ties with the Union of South Africa, or that we pressure Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos to share power with his opponents, many Americans are clearly unhappy with the close embrace between their country and such regimes. The persistence of confusion about the basic purposes of American foreign policy suggests that we have yet to come to terms with the requirements for America's proper role in the world. What, then, are those requirements?

F. Scott Fitzgerald at the End

Fitzgerald was a victim of his third heart attack at age fourty-four. Closely considered, the shape of Fitzgerald's career, including its final Hollywood phase, does not correspond to the pattern of early success and later defeat and failure. Even as his body failed him, Fitzgerald was moving on to new themes and techniques, and he was not finally defeated as an artist.

Does Neoliberalism Have a Future?

Few political ideas have received as much praise lately as those usually labeled "neoliberal." Even some conservatives, like George Gilder, have hailed the advent of neoliberalism as marking a turning point in the political thinking that has dominated American life for most of the last half-century. Is neoliberalism nothing more than a publicist's slogan, aimed at breathing some life into an exhausted ideology? Or is it really a distinctive way of looking at public policy that, as its proponents maintain, seeks to achieve old-fashioned liberal goals through up-to-date means?

Out of the Ghetto

The evidence for Jewish participation in serious music is overwhelming. It is not that Jews make up a majority of participants, either as performers or listeners; they do not. It is rather that so often their presence is vital to the carrying on of the musical enterprise.

Eddie Murphy, American

If the world of entertainment is any guide, something rather large is happening on the American racial scene. In recent months three events have occurred, each in a distinct entertainment medium. The names of these events are: (1) Michael Jackson, (2) Bill Cosby, and (3) Eddie Murphy.

The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong, by Ben J. Wattenberg

There may be no cliche more beloved of contemporary journalists than the one about not blaming the messenger for bad news. It makes perfectly good sense, of course, on the assumption that the news is not the poor fellow's fault. But if it is his fault, whom better to blame? Now comes Ben J. Wattenberg with persuasive evidence that, inadvertently or not, the messengers have been consistently getting the message wrong.

Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, edited by Barry W. Holtz

This cogently conceived, handsomely produced volume is a piece of good news about the state of Jewish culture in America. The enlivening central virtue of Back to the Sources is that it provides a series of apt beginnings instead of neatly framed museum exhibits.

Son of the Morning Star, by Evan S. Connell

"I don't think I'll write any more than has been written on the Custer massacre," stated war correspondent John F. Finerty in 1890, explaining that "the Custer business has been written, so to speak, to satiety." But General George Armstrong Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn and the wiping out of some 215 men with him remains our most frequently rehashed fight.

America's Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power, by Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley

Mormonism was founded in the 19th century by Joseph Smith, a visionary who, beginning in the 1820's, elaborated a body of teachings that departed radically from sectarian Christianity. He taught that revelation is continuous; his followers compiled his visions as new scripture and published the Book of Mormon, a history of pre-Columbian Christians in America.

The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam, by Bruce Palmer, Jr.

There are two good reasons for reading this book. First, it is a thoughtful analysis of why we lost the war in Vietnam and how we might have won it. Second, it reveals what the military is thinking now and why it is thinking that way.

The Democratic Defeat

As You Like It

Economics

Words on Music

Life in the East

Vargas Llosa

Israel's Economic Crisis: What Israel Must Do

This year a new chapter will be written in the history of the unique relationship between America and Israel. Israel, by seeking $800 million in emergency assistance for U.S. Fiscal Year (USFY) 1985, on top of the $2.6 billion in military and economic aid already being supplied this year, and $4.05 billion for USFY 1986, has not only asked for more money than ever before, and at a time of budgetary restraint in this country, but has put the U.S. in a position to do something quite unprecedented: namely, to place economic conditions on its foreign aid. How have Israel and the United States come to this point--a point which seems to promise change in their evolving relationship?

Israel's Economic Crisis: What the U.S. Can Do

Israel is in serious financial trouble, and the American press is filled with analyses and solutions. The one element missing from the discussion happens to be the most crucial one--the dimension of strategy. To grasp the implications of this statement requires a look at the nature of Israel's economy and its relation to American strategic and defense needs.

Terrorizing Children

The American Orthopsychiatric Association offered several programs at its 1984 convention purporting to document the mental-health crisis being endured by children because of nuclear anxiety. Yet little of this is known generally. Social scientists with a strong interest in the matter have other fires to fight. Others are indifferent or discouraged. In the absence of opposing critical voices, we will soon come to accept as proved the idea of nuclear anxiety among the young. So it may be time to look carefully at the issues, and at the evidence.

The “Real” Marx

It used to be said that the three great giants of modern times-indeed the creators of modernity-were Marx, Darwin, and Freud. In the past few decades we have witnessed major reevaluations and revisions of all three. In the case of Marx, the process of revisionism has been much more radical.

Paul Celan: The Strain of Jewishness

When Paul Celan drowned in the Seine in 1970, a suicide at forty-nine, his loss hit hard the many Europeans, Israelis, and Americans who prized a voice that had suffered the Jewish catastrophe and resisted falling mute. The "strain" of Jewishness in Paul Celan can be heard with a sharp double entendre on that word. He knew well enough the burden of being Jewish, and avoided any religiosity, but a Jew he had to be and chose to be. A tenuous, an attenuated strain at times, and yet a tough one: sometimes it was all he felt he had.

When the Pipes Froze A Story

A story.

Four Cheers for Capitalism

It is four years now since the publication of George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, a book generally considered to be the most important and lucid explication of supply side economics. The book made an undeniably popular case for the fundamental importance of the private sector in improving people's material condition. But Gilder's stated intention in Wealth and Poverty was much broader than this: he had set out to do nothing less than establish the moral basis of capitalism, to prove that capitalism depends on, perpetuates, and serves as a force for good.

The Abandonment of the Jews, by David S. Wyman; The Jews Were Expendable, by Monty Noam Penkower; A Refuge From Darkness, by Naomi Shepherd

The first shots fired by the British after the outbreak of World War II killed two Jewish refugees attempting to gain entry into Palestine. In 1944, while various Allied government agencies were invoking the lack of available shipping as a reason why Jews could not be taken to safety, Liberty ships were returning empty from Europe, their captains complaining about the difficulty of finding proper ballast.

Poisoned Ivy, by Benjamin Hart

The rightward shift of the American political Center that can now be seen to have begun with the first election of Richard Nixon in 1968 was accompanied by a leftward shift among American university faculties and administrations.

The Tsar's Lieutenant, by Thomas G. Butson

When Soviet chief of staff Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov stepped in front of the TV cameras to deliver the official explanation for the 1983 downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, editors all over the world were sent scurrying to their files for material on this newest and most unexpected of Soviet public-relations men.

Eisenhower: The Presidency, by Stephen E. Ambrose

As early impressions have given way to historical judgments, the reputation of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President has risen sharply. The release of a great mass of private papers in the past decade has inspired a number of accounts of the Eisenhower Presidency which have undermined the widely held view of Ike as a lazy, bland, uninvolved chief executive, one who remained above politics and let the others run the government for him.

Helmut Schmidt, by Jonathan Carr

Jonathan Carr, a staff writer for the (London) Financial Times, has given us a biography of Helmut Schmidt that is fluent, factual, and instructive, addressed (almost) to those without a background in contemporary German politics.

The Election & the Jews

The Bishops & the Poor

“The Greenhorn Cousin”

Helping the Poor: A Few Modest Proposals

The nation is faced with some critical social pathologies that are not going to be solved or even much changed by a continuation of present policies. Policies can be devised that plausibly will have large positive effects. But each of them entails a major departure from business as usual, and each has a dark side that must be accepted as part of the price of the improvement that might occur.

The New War Against the Jews

The memory of the Nazi genocide against the Jews continues to cast its long shadow over the present, affecting the way people think about the major political events of our time. This preoccupation has its dangers, encouraging overheated rhetoric and demagoguery, as well as outright falsification of history. Far from being innocent, the use of Holocaust parallels is part of a major effort not only to shift attention away from the Nazi murder of the Jews but to redirect it entirely, and turn it into a means of morally discrediting the Jewish people and delegitimizing the state of Israel.

What the Fundamentalists Want

Jerry Falwell, Ed McAteer, Gary Jarmin, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Robison, Tim LaHaye--they are, so we hear, out to take over America and establish a theocracy in which all who disagree will be, at best, second-class citizens. Reports of the great terror that is upon us are raising millions of dollars in fund appeals by Planned Parenthood, American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, and others who claim to believe that the religious Right is the greatest peril to American democracy since Joe McCarthy. Those who are most vocally anxious about Christian America usually have a special kind of Christian in mind.

Onward Jerusalem

A story.

A Night With the FMLN

I was reluctantly beginning to acclimate myself again to life in the tropics and trying to understand what had happened during my absence: the new Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the new junta in El Salvador, big changes in Panama, Honduras, and Guatemala, the coup organized by Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the economic crisis here at home in Costa Rica.

Rabbis & Their Discontents

At its 1984 annual convention, the Rabbinical Assembly, the professional association of Conservative rabbis, listened to a paper by Leslie R. Freedman, a clinical psychologist who had recently completed a nationwide study of Conservative and Reform rabbis. Basing himself on interviews as well as on answers he had received from 1,342 rabbis to a questionnaire containing over 220 items, Dr. Freedman concluded that rabbis suffer from unusually high levels of stress.

Leinsdorf at the Philharmonic

For the erstwhile-and would-be -fans of the New York Philharmonic, the issue of Zubin Mehta, the orchestra's present music director, now seems closed. Summary rejection by the critical press, culminating in a blistering attack by Peter Davis in New York magazine at the beginning of January, has left little doubt that Mehta is now the lames of lame ducks.

Glitz, by Elmore Leonard; Briarpatch, by Ross Thomas

After eighteen novels written over the course of three decades, Elmore Leonard, who lives and writes in a suburb north of Detroit, has made it big with Glitz, a novel about a policeman, a psychopathic criminal, two beautiful women, and Atlantic City gangsters.

Begin, by Eric Silver

An irresistible polemical itch is not ordinarily a motive for biography. But it is hard to see what else spurred Eric Silver, a British journalist stationed in Israel from 1972 to 1983, to his labors on Menachem Begin.

Rise and Fall, by Milovan Djilas

There may be no man now alive who possesses more intimate knowledge of this century's Communist movement than Milovan Djilas. A core leader of the Yugoslav party during the 1930's, when it was little more than a tough band of Stalinist students, Djilas became a valued Titoist commander during the war, when Yugoslavia's fractioned armies fought both German occupiers and one another in battles noteworthy for their gratuitous cruelty.

Iacocca, by Lee Iacocca with William Novak

Since the escape of the Chrysler Corporation from what seemed almost certain bankruptcy, Lee Iacocca, who speaks unapologetically about such values as the importance of family ties, thrift, and patriotism, has emerged as a genuine folk hero and a potential political leader.

Breaking With Moscow, by Arkady N. Shevchenko

Breaking with Moscow has all the ingredients of an outstanding book on Soviet foreign policy. It is written by a highly-placed insider who went through an elite Soviet schooling to become a professional diplomat with twenty years of experience before defecting to the United States in 1978.

The Solzhenitsyn Question

Ecological Compassion

Lesser Evils

The Perversion of Foreign Aid

Surveys of public opinion consistently show a deep concern about the plight of the needy people in other countries. Paradoxically, while the public's commitment to aiding the wretched of the earth gives all the signs of an unwavering consensus, its attitude toward foreign aid programs appears to be thoroughly hostile. Interestingly enough, America's elites do not appear to share the deep misgivings of the public about U.S. foreign aid programs. The American people seem to recognize an important fact about world affairs that continues to elude their leaders--namely, that the American government's efforts to bring relief, prosperity, and security to impoverished peoples in other countries have gone seriously wrong.

Orthodox Jews-From Passivity to Activism

It took the perspicacity of Israel Salanter, founder of the Musar movement, to sense that the era of self-evident and unreflecting adherence to the traditional way of life was over, and that only a conscious act of self-education would enable modern Jews to internalize traditional values. This novel idea met with the predictable opposition of most traditionalist leaders. At the heart of Salanter's system was a recognition of the potential loss of Jewish youth to secular society. This is what links him to Samson Raphael Hirsch. Both men sought to bind the individual Jew to his faith by building up his sense of commitment.

Vietnam & the 60's Generation: A Memoir

The triumph of new men riding into power with new ideas has long been part of the script of American politics, responsible for many a reformist surge. In its most recent electoral manifestation, the generational theme fueled the Gary Hart campaign, the relatively youthful candidate whose advertising harked to the youthful idealism of the 1960's. One can surmise that the 60's sensibility posed a dilemma for the Hart campaign itself: was it really good politics to associate the candidate, even tangentially, with that decade's revolutionary posturing?

Crisis in the Pacific

For many Americans, a crisis in U.S. relations with New Zealand, centered on the question of whether American naval vessels will be allowed to continue visiting New Zealand ports, is bound to appear in unexciting terms: a case of "Minor Difficulties with Small Ally: Little at Stake." Indeed, one does detect some tendency to "kick the cat" in this instance--to vent on New Zealand some of the pent up frustration felt about the behavior of other allies. Unfortunately much too much is at stake for the confrontation between the U.S. and New Zealand either to be dismissed or used in this way.

Is Caravaggio Our Contemporary?

To A degree unparalleled in the artists of the Old Master tradition, Caravaggio would appear to have preserved through four centuries the power to awaken in us the kind of interest that we can ordinarily summon only in respect to our contemporaries. It is a fair guess that each visitor to the Metropolitan show experienced at some point during his inspection, and at whatever depths of his spirit, the faintest shrill of self-satisfaction, in the knowledge that he was ever so slightly more enlightened than those stuffed shirts whom Caravaggio once made sick to their stomachs. The Caravaggio who drew the crowds, and who left them feeling that they had gotten what they came for, was the Caravaggio of legend.

The Secret of Mary Gordon's Success

A review of Mary Gordon's third novel, Men and Angels. Miss Gordon's novels are at once the symptom and the artistic exemplification of the empty self-centeredness which happens to have become her subject.

The Pentagon and the Art of War, by Edward N. Luttwak

Edward Luttwak shows what can happen to a great nation's military when its leaders cease to behave as if war were a real possibility. Prominent among the consequences is a system of higher command that corrupts the officer corps, and may be impervious to reform save by a catastrophic experience of military defeat.

The Jews of Hope, by Martin Gilbert

Try as they might, Soviet authorities have been notably unsuccessful in their efforts to crush the movement for Jewish emigration and the associated struggle for Jewish religious and cultural rights. For the refuseniks, the rule of law is nonexistent. Despite having been consigned to the status of enemies of the state, the refuseniks continue to press their case.

Literary Criticism. French Writers. Other European Writers. The Prefaces to the New York Edition, by Henry James

At the close of his nation's Civil War, the twenty-two-year-old Henry James entered upon the "delicate task," as he would later describe it, of mediating between the French writer and the American reader, of interpreting a foreign culture to his own through literary criticism.

Grave New World, by Michael Ledeen

"The U.S. is short of breath. You can always wait them out." This comment was made by Syrian foreign minister Abdul-Halim Khaddam in 1984, and it proved painfully prophetic. The Lebanon crisis offered one more example of muddled American policy aims and the half-hearted use of military power.

The Blood of Abraham, by Jimmy Carter

Since leaving the Presidency, Jimmy Carter has devoted much of his time to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The source of Mr. Carter's continued interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict is not hard to find: to some extent his personal faith plays a part, but principally it is the fact that as President his only major achievement lay in helping Egypt and Israel make peace.

Israel's Economy

The Holocaust

Virginia Woolf

Solzhenitsyn, Cont'd.

Paul Celan

The Military

The Purges

Samuel Chotzinoff

Nicaraguan Harvest

Exactly six years ago Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza fled his country before the victorious onslaught of a popular revolution. Though some elements of the revolutionary leadership were troubling to the State Department and some members of Congress, the new regime in Nicaragua began its life with a generous legacy of optimism, hope, and good will, both at home and abroad. It was assumed on all sides that because the past had been so bad, the future had to be better. The "future" is now here, and by the reckoning of all but the most inflexible apologists for the Nicaraguan regime, it is perceptibly and measurably worse.

The Politics of Yiddish

With ignorance and distance the inclination to sentimentality increases, so that today the association of Yiddish with nostalgia is almost irresistible. Even practiced speakers and engaged students of Yiddish tend to approach the language and its culture protectively, with the instincts of tender curators. Beyond this kind of nostalgia, the mystique of Yiddish and of what is called Yiddishkeyt plays a significant role in Jewish culture at large, particularly among those uncomfortable with the religious definition of the Jew but nevertheless desirous of retaining their Jewish identity.

Out of the Drawer & Into the West

In the last few years, the recent works of such contemporary Soviet writers as Vassily Aksyonov, Vladimir Maximov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Vladimir Kornilov, and Yuri Trifonov have begun to appear in the West, often ably translated and handsomely produced by prestigious publishing houses. This diverse and ever growing body of literature, some of it by authors now part of the large emigre community, offers us a more comprehensive view of the state of culture and creative life in the Soviet Union than has been available to Westerners since the early 60's.

Operation Moses

"I rejoice: there are white Jews too!" This exclamation came from the mouth of one of the newly arrived Jews from Ethiopia in his first day at Israel's national absorption center for his people. However ironic the remark may have seemed, it had not a trace of intended irony in it. His exclamation of joy was followed by one of apprehension over the way he and the thousands of his brothers and sisters just rescued from Ethiopia's chaos and famine would be treated by their exotic white co-religionists: "I am fearful about how they will receive us."

Allen Ginsberg Then and Now

If it accomplishes nothing else, the appearance of Allen Ginsberg's Collected Poems, an enormous volume published under the terms of a six-figure contract, should once and for all puncture the widespread notion of Ginsberg as the pariah of the American literary establishment. Ginsberg has been around for a very long while now, as witness his Collected Poems, a book of such weight and durability that even sluttish Time will have trouble besmearing it.

Gifted and Talented A Story

A story.

Yesterday's America of Tomorrow

Beginning with the late 18th century, there have been many international expositions, and they have always been expressions of progress and enlightenment. But the New York World's Fair of 1939-40 was intellectually and artistically the most successful of them all, its only possible competitor the Great Exhibition of 1851, when the fabled Crystal Palace rose up in London's Hyde Park as an expression of Britain's empire and civilization.

The Rise and Fall of New York City, by Roger Starr

A decade after it began, New York City's fiscal crisis appears to have eased. While the price of the last decade is visible in the subways, streets, and elsewhere, this year's mayoral election is unlikely to have the life-or-death overtones of previous ones. Yet as Roger Starr writes in The Rise and Fall of New York City, the possibility that New York may soon face another financial emergency should not be underestimated.

The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, by Richard H. Pells

Arguments about the past are almost always arguments about the present as well. Disputes ostensibly rooted in disagreement as to the nature of historical evidence often turn out to be located instead in conflicting current sensibilities.

The Transformation of the Jews, by Calvin Goldscheider and Alan Zuckerman

The Bible characterizes the Jews as "a people that dwells apart," but Calvin Goldscheider and Alan Zuckerman will have none of that. As social scientists engaged in the study of Jewish life, they take it for granted that Jewish existence is shaped by the exact same forces that shape group life in general.

Counsels of War, by Gregg Herken

What should a reader look for in a popular history of U.S. nuclear strategy? First, a clear explanation of the contents and origins of alternative strategic theories, with accurate definitions of the jargon which professional strategists, like any professionals, use as a shorthand and which is now the common language of the national debate.

Habits of the Heart, by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton

Does the title Habits of the Heart seem more appropriate for a popular romantic novel (or a made-for-television movie) than for a serious sociological study? If so-if we associate "habits of the heart" with personal romance rather than with social science or public philosophy- that would simply be grist for Robert Bellah's mill, further evidence for his contention that "the language of individualism, the primary American language of self-understanding, limits the ways in which people think."

Aid & AID

Nuclear Education

Fundamentalism

Neoliberalism

Marx

Solzhenitsyn

Celan's “Death Fugue”

Bitburg: Who Forgot What

It hardly seems possible that in the year 1985, with a number of grave decisions and responsibilities facing him, the President of the United States would permit himself to get embroiled in a debate about so unquestionably settled an issue as the nature of Nazism. What seems even less likely is that of all Presidents, the author of this imbroglio should have been Ronald Reagan, a man who has paid a price in derision for his undeviating hatred of totalitarianism. Yet that is exactly what happened in the month of April past, and in a manner calculated to stir deep resentment and disaffection on all sides, not least his own.

Fighting Back

IN THE 1970's the Soviet Union em- barked upon an ambitious program of using proxy forces to expand its

On Jewish Forebodings

STUDENTS of American Jewry confront an interesting paradox: a sociological literature filled with forebodings

The Newest Political Pilgrims

MARXIsT-LENINIST Nicaragua has in the last few years emerged as the new destination of political tourists

Scripture and Culture

A GREAT deal has changed in this coun- try since that distant era of origins when the Pilgrim founders

Graffiti & Other Art Forms

SINCE 1932, the Whitney Museum in New York has regularly staged exhi- bitions of the work of those American

A Dissent on Grace Paley

GRACE PALEY believes that art has a practical function-to make "justice in the world." And for that reason,

Vietcong Memoir, by Truong Nhu Tang, with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai

OF THE many millions whose lives have been transformed by encounters with Communism, there is a special

Toward a More Natural Science, by Leon Kass Richard

Leon Kass of the University of Chicago knows that he is thinking against the mainstream. At the same time, his labors provide reason to hope that the stream can be turned. The stream is contemporary science, notably the biological sciences which Kass believes are on the edge of reshaping humanity in ways that may be very bad for human beings.

Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, by Jonathan Rieder

Canarsie sits along Brooklyn's southern edge, a narrow haven for the white middle classes, between the ghettos of Brownsville and East New York to the north and the marshes of Jamaica Bay. From these bare and brutal facts of urban geography, Jonathan Rieder, a Yale sociologist, has constructed an intriguing ethnography that empathically conveys the anguish of urban ethics over the "politics of place."

A Passion for Excellence, by Tom Peters and Nancy Austin; Innovation and Entrepreneurship, by Peter F. Drucker

In our society of large organizations there is a ready market for manuals of technique, advice, and consolation concerning the many problems afflicting the managerial class, and the outpouring of books and articles on the subject are consequently ceaseless. Most of these works attract only a specialist readership of mid- and upper-level business or government executives. But occasionally one of them finds a broader public.

Living With Koestler: Mamaine Koestler's Letters 1945-51, edited by Celia Goodman

In 1984, faced with an incurable and painful disease, and being a dogmatic supporter of voluntary euthanasia, Arthur Koestler took his own life. He also permitted his physically fit and much younger third wife, Cynthia Jefferies Koestler, to join him in committing suicide.

Germany Today, by Walter Laqueur

In 1979-80, with the explosion of the "peace" movement, the question of the political health and future role of the Federal Republic of Germany in the Atlantic alliance returned to the Western agenda with a vengeance. After spates of articles in periodicals, we are now seeing the first full-length assessments of what is going on in West Germany.

Reader Letters September 1985

The 60's Generation

Ethiopian Jews

Nuclear Education, Cont'd.

Rabbis

Bloomsbury

Carter & Iran

Kudos

The Race for South Africa

The campaign of economic attrition now being waged within the United States against the Republic of South Africa, which is summed up in the word disinvestment, is an outstanding example of the power of political propaganda. That the United States, the richest country in the world, should deliberately set about destroying the economy of what is in some respects still a developing nation is an absurdity in itself. The United States has absolutely nothing to gain, and a good deal to lose, if disinvestment inflicts radical damage.

Israel, the Hostages, and the Networks

The deterioration in U.S.-Israel relations in the year following the June 1982 invasion of Lebanon was among the steepest ever. But toward the end of 1983 the mood seemed to change. Not, however, in the media, and especially not among television reporters in the field.

Foreign Aid: Rewarding Impoverishment?

Relief of acute need and misery in poor countries has been the declared purpose of foreign aid. Yet foreign aid goes to governments, not to the poor. To support rulers on the basis of the poverty of their subjects effectively rewards the policies that cause impoverishment. We have not emphasized this critical consideration sufficiently in our previous writings on foreign aid.

How the West Lost the Peace in 1945

FORTIETH anniversaries are in vogue, none more so than those celebrating the end of World War II. That

One Cheer for E.M. Forster

How did E.M. Forster manage to elude the Nobel Prize in Literature? Not winning the Nobel Prize put him in a select little club, Tolstoy, Henry James, Chekhov, and Proust being among its most distinguished members-rather a more select club, when one thinks about it, than that comprised by the winners. Still, one wonders, did Forster think much about it?

The New Freedom Fighters

Up to now, insurgencies in Communist countries were always swiftly suppressed; the march to Communist totalitarianism appeared irreversible. Now for the first time, as a checklist of world guerrilla movements shows, anti-Communist insurgents are managing to sustain protracted wars against Soviet-backed governments with an astonishing degree of success.

Roy's Jewish Problem A Story

A story.

The American House of Saud, by Steven Emerson

When the British tidied up the map of the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman empire they probably thought they had done a good day's work in keeping a colony for themselves at Aden and entrusting nearly a million square miles of the Arabian desert to the Saudi dynasty, which had been disputing it with the Ottomans and others. Aden was a useful entrepot, but the only economic resource of the new Saudi state as the tourist trade into Mecca.

One Earth, Four or Five Worlds, by Octavio Paz

The Mexican poet and thinker Octavio Paz has distinguished himself for decades not only by his intelligence and eloquence but by the breadth of his interests. In addition to his poetic works, he has brought out two volumes of philosophical and sociological reflections on Mexico; he has written regularly on contemporary philosophical and literary themes; and he has been a frequent commentator on politics.

Encounter with Emancipation, by Naomi W. Cohen

After years of being scorned or ignored by historians, America's German Jews are finally being rehabilitated. The historical lens, focused for far too long on the experience of East European Jewish immigrants, is at last widening to include those who preceded them, and who forged the communal structure which they then inherited and built on.

The 2025 Report, by Norman Macrae

Regular readers of the London Economist have long been familiar with the independent thinking and biting wit of Norman Macrae, who as Deputy Editor for the past twenty years has put his inimitable stamp on the whole publication. Macrae has now produced a highly individualistic vision of what will happen to the world over the next forty years, written as if in hindsight from the vantage point of a future historian.

The Post-Modern Aura, by Charles Newman

In the past fifteen years or so, the world of academic literary criticism-heretofore dominated by humanists, with their view of literature as an aesthetic enterprise, a life study-has begun to fall into the hands of new-wave theorists with quite different perspectives.

Nicaragua

Yiddish

Allen Ginsburg

Esau and Jacob

Soviet-Jewish Emigration

Foreign Aid

Kirov, Cont'd.

Is There Now, or Has There Ever Been, Such a Thing as Totalitarianism?

NO IDEA in our time has provoked more impassioned debate than the idea of totalitarianism. Used indiscriminately

The Cult of Hiroshima

EVEN as the formal days of atonement in the Jewish and Christian calendar weaken, lose some of their

Reading Primo Levi

AFTER almost forty years of growing lit- erary renown in his native Italy and in Western Europe, Primo

What Nairobi Wrought

BETWEEN July 10 and July 26 of this year, several thousand delegates from 159 countries convened in Nairobi,

Who Killed the CIA?

ADMIRAL Stansfield Turner commanded a destroyer, a guided-missile cruiser, a carrier task force, a fleet,

Israel's Standing in American Public Opinion

IN JUNE of this year, Arab terror- ists hijacked a TWA jet on a flight from Athens and held its American

“Our Genius”: Norman Mailer & the Intellectuals

If there is one thing the case of Norman Mailer teaches us, it is that ideas matter, that they shape the common life both of the individual and of the culture. For the ideas propagated by Norman Mailer, along with those of such figures as Norman O. Brown and Paul Goodman, exercised a tangible influence in dragging America out of the Eisenhower years into the Aquarian age of the 60's and beyond. And in advancing those ideas, Mailer had the enthusiastic support of a perhaps surprising number of the major intellectuals of our time.

The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan, by Steven L. Spiegel

HOW is American policy toward the Arab-Israel dispute made, and who makes it? Steven Spiegel, a professor

The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, by Breyten Breytenbach

BREYTEN BREYTENBACH, consid- ered the best modern poet in the Afrikaans language, first re- ceived substantial

The Schools We Deserve: Reflections on the Educational Crises of Our Time, by Diane Ravitch

This collection of Diane Ravitch's recent essays on problems of contemporary education is an uncommonly attractive book. The essays are without exception instructive, well-reasoned, and smoothly written.

In Defense of Animals, edited by Peter Singer

To the numerous "liberation" movements of our times-including the black, chicano, women's, and gay-liberation movements -another must be added that is active not on behalf of any purportedly disadvantaged class or group of people but on behalf of animals. The major theorist of this "animal liberation" movement is Peter Singer, a professor of philosophy at Monash University in Australia and the author of the movement's seminal book, Animal Liberation, published in 1975.

A Matter of Principle, by Ronald Dworkin

Alexander Hamilton once defended the federal judiciary with the observation that "the possibility of particular mischiefs can never be viewed, by a well-informed mind, as a solid objection to a general principle which is calculated to avoid general mischiefs and to obtain general advantage." Two centuries later, those "particular mischiefs" have come to claim victims as unlikely as a policeman sued, in the words of Judge Richard Posner, "in federal court under a federal civil-rights statute for alienating a dog's affections.

Political Pilgrims

Russian Writers

Who is a Psychoanalyst?

How Has the United States Met Its Major Challenges Since 1945?

Exactly forty years ago, in the first issue of COMMENTARY (November 1945), its found- ing editor, the

A Certain People, by Charles E. Silberman

I am told that my grandfather, who during World War II was killed in the Bialystok ghetto at the age of eighty-two, was in the habit of taking his pulse three times a day. My father, too, before his heart gave out, would often stand, face taut, with his right hand held gingerly by two fingers of the left.

The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America, edited by Donald Hall

Donald Hall has done an exemplary job in assembling from the pages of long defunct children's magazines and antique anthologies this panorama of poems for American children from The Bay Psalm Book (1640) to Richard Wilbur, John Updike, and Shel Silverstein.

Sparks Fly, by Frank Chapple

In Britain, the costs of the yearlong coal-miners' strike are still being sorted out. Contrary to some sentimentalized American reports, the strike was not solely a matter of pit closures and the future of the coal industry.

New and Selected Poems 1923-1985, by Robert Penn Warren

Rumor Verified, the volume of Robert Penn Warren's poetry that preceded the present one, constituted a human document of no small interest. For it presented us with the phenomenon of a man who was older than most of us, considering with remarkable poise and dignity the extremity of undoing that might overtake him at any moment.

Chaim Weizmann, by Jehuda Reinharz

The promise implicit in the subtitle of this solid first volume on the life and times of Chaim Weizmann is largely though not entirely fulfilled. What we have here is a detailed and scholarly account of the process by which a gifted and ambitious young man from Pinsk became a successful British scientist and leader of the Zionist movement.

Bitburg

Ethiopian Jews

Jewish Forebodings

Addendum

The New Khmer Rouge

Rodolfo Salas is the ruthless and brilliant leader of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Yet only a tiny minority of Filipinos has heard of Salas. Most politically-minded Filipinos, if asked, will say that the leader of the Communists in the Philippines is Jose Maria Sison, who founded the CPP in 1968. While Salas shares Sison's original radical goal of transforming the Philippines into a Communist dictatorship, he seems to be far less concerned than the party's Maoist founder about what methods are used to achieve that goal.

Another Look at the Jewish Vote

The Democrats Jews call friends are an abstraction. Republicans gave a higher-than-average pro-Israel answer, but Jews do not regard them as friends. When it comes to political parties Jews have used reason to justify loyalty to old passions that have become anachronistic passions.

Scuttling an Empire

When Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten of Burma was murdered by Irish terrorists in the summer of 1979, he was an old man full of honors, who could look back with satisfaction on a long life filled with achievement. Philip Ziegler has indeed done him proud, with a long and copious life-well proportioned, lucid, and very readable. Do we rise from the almost 800 pages of this work convinced of Mountbatten's greatness-greatness as one thinks of it when, say, Churchill or Wellington comes to mind? Is this the impression of the man which the attentive reader carries away with him from a study of Ziegler's researches?

Religion and the Conservatives

When Hobbes in Part IV of the Leviathan wrote of the "Kingdom of Darknesse" he was referring, overtly at least, primarily to the Catholic Church, but the phrase soon came to signify the whole realm of religion. The Left, marching under the banner bearing the magic word "Enlightenment," promised to bring relief from that darkness, and in so doing can be said to have forced the Right into a defensive posture. The Right now hoisted a banner bearing on it the word "Tradition," thereby engendering certain difficulties in the relationship between conservatives and religion which have not been resolved to this day.

“Yours Sincerely, Sinclair Levy”

My best friend from high school is now a writer, famous enough to be the subject of a forthcoming study. What did you read, his biographer asks me, back then in the 50's, back there in the Bronx?

Confessions of an Ex-Translator

I mean "confessions" here in none of the word's more odious senses, criminal or spiritual. Translation is no guilty act to be forgiven at the confessional box. Nor do I labor under the compulsion to offer Apologia pro vita mea, a justification before God and man of my life as a translator. From childhood, in all my waking moments I have taken delight in an intense preoccupation: translating not mere words but worlds of experience-and the reality behind that experience-into my own language, world, experience.

Gaddis Recognized

To millions it may have seemed the Promised Land, but to certain of its native sons, post-World War II America had gained the whole world only to lose its soul. Such, at any rate, was the view that impelled the evolution of "metafiction" in the postwar years-a fiction whose form and content were meant to mirror, in an ironic way, the extravaganza of hype, fraud, and mounting materialism that the United States, its critics said, had finally been revealed to be.

Soviet Dissent, by Ludmilla Alexeyeva; Soviet Psychiatric Abuse, by Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway

In the opinion of many Western observers, the decline of the Soviet dissident movement coincided with (and was largely caused by) the collapse of detente, an event usually dated from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing sanctions imposed by the Carter administration. Yet as these two books make clear, this interpretation is seriously flawed.

Diaspora, by Howard M. Sachar

Howard Sachar's survey of the condition of what he calls the "third world" of contemporary Jewry-that is, the 4.5 million Jews who live outside of Israel and North America-belongs unmistakably to what Thomas De Quincey called the literature of knowledge as distinct from the literature of power.

Clamor at the Gates, edited by Nathan Glazer

Liberty on this planet being in shorter supply than oil, refugees and immigrants by the million still seek haven elsewhere than in the land of their birth-above all, and in increasing numbers, in the United States, which FDR aptly called "the land of immigrants."

Observations, by Henry Kissinger

One senses that Henry Kissinger's reputation, at least among the intellectuals, has grown since the publication of the two volumes of his memoirs, White House Years and Years of Upheaval. Both volumes were deservedly well received, even by some who had criticized him during his years in office and who still remained unpersuaded by his intelligent and passionate defense of the foreign policies of the Nixon administration.

The Price of the Ticket, by James Baldwin

"The failure of the protest novel," James Baldwin wrote in 1949, "lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended." It was around this time that American critics first began to speak of Baldwin as a writer with the sensibility and detachment of a potentially first-rate artist; with the 1953 publication of Go Tell it on the Mountain, a beautifully written first novel about Harlem life, he proved them correct.