Totalitarianism

South Africa

Losing the Peace

Nairobi

The Networks & the Hostages

Colonialism

Behind the Black-Jewish Split

Relations between American blacks and Jews have become strained in recent years. Some of the problems between the groups go back many decades.

Do We Still Need Europe?

For an American to suggest that we should investigate our strategic interest in Europe can sound positively subversive--tantamount to repudiating our commitment to Europe altogether, or denying Europe's value to American security. And yet such a reappraisal is due, and overdue. For the world has changed in many ways since the statesmen and generals of World War II, in a departure from American tradition, advanced arguments for the commitment of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to the peacetime defense of Europe.

New York Down, Washington Up

Such, such is the power of New York in the imagination that many people--I count myself among them--declare upon arriving that they will never leave. It is the city that all Americans know. Speaking of New York in terms of geographical boundaries is an offense because it does violence to the essence of the phenomenon, which is a matter of Geist, of spirit.

A Misdiagnosis of American Medicine

Within the last fifty years, in Western societies, medicine itself has emerged as a force to be reckoned with, encompassing a powerful profession and a great network of facilities and organizations, and it constitutes as well a social "problem." Where yesterday medicine was ignored by social scientists, today it is the primary concern of a large and active branch of the sociological profession. But "medical sociology" reflects its relative youth, and particularly its lack of an intellectual pre-history.

Professor Vendler's Garden of Verses

By its title, one might think that the new Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by the well-known critic Helen Vendler, would concentrate precisely on upstarts of the newest generation, and that any controversy aroused by this anthology would touch upon her choice of younger poets. Yet these selections turn out to be quite unremarkable. Much more surprising in a book billed as a compilation of "contemporary" verse is the great preponderance of older poets

Dinner With Butler and Eisenhower

Nicholas Murray Butler, who was president of Columbia University from 1901 to 1945, was by far the most dignified person I ever had contact with, the most solid of images of a university president.

Settlers

A story.

Common Ground, by J. Anthony Lukas

By now, everyone must know that J. Anthony Lukas has written a fascinating book about three families and various public figures who are caught up in the turmoil surrounding the effort to integrate the Boston public schools.

The German Jew, by H.I. Bach

The German-Jewish experience, no longer a living reality, ought to be studied with as much scholarly detachment as is applied to that other great epoch of Jewish history in the Diaspora, the Golden Age in Spain.

Liberalism and Its Challengers, by Alonzo L. Hamby

Twice in a row, American voters have elected by large majorities the most conservative presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover.

Alien Powers, by Kenneth Minogue

One does not lightly pick up a book whose subtitle is "The Pure Theory of Ideology," even if the title proper suggests something by Arthur C. Clark.

The Victim's Song, by Alice R. Kaminsky

Years ago, long before I became a mother, a friend of mine was raped and murdered. She was twenty-four.

Italian Jews

Hiroshima

Resistance in Vietnam

1945 & After

Psychoanalysis

Russian Writers

How the Constitution Disappeared

To state that judges should interpret the Constitution as intended by those who wrote and ratified it ("the Framers") is only to state the basic premise of our political-legal system that the function of judges is to apply, not to make, the law.

Liberalism and Zionism

During the past century, few things have surprised and offended the liberal imagination more than the weird persistence of the Jewish nation.

The Lost Honor of Geraldine Ferraro

The movie The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck came to my mind when I read Ferraro: My Story, the campaign memoirs of the first woman on a major-party national ticket. For the most interesting question raised by Geraldine Ferraro has to do with the press treatment of her vice-presidential candidacy.

Execution Day in Riyadh

Soon after I arrived in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, in 1980 to teach at the university, a new colleague pointed out the parking lot called Dira Square, in which executions took place.

Kafka's Father, Agnon's Mother, Bellow's Cousins

What happens in the fictional representation of the family? A social institution appearing in a fictional text may be neither a laboratory specimen of a general condition nor an individual case study, though it may often oscillate over some ambiguous middle ground between the two.

Who's Afraid of Women's Studies?

Kenyon College, a tiny liberal-arts school in rural Ohio, earned a reputation for its traditional curriculum. When I began hearing rumors of student unrest, I investigated. What was going on at Kenyon, I learned, was a reversal of the usual scenario: it was the school's administration that was engaged in a thoroughgoing reform effort, while students and faculty members were urging maintenance of the status quo. The issue was women's studies.

In the House of Glass

IT WAS, after all, a remarkable piece of apparatus. Hagen grabbed the brass ring; tricklingly the flush

Citizens and Soldiers, by Eliot A. Cohen

Thirteen years ago, the United States became the only great power in history to attempt to meet its global military commitments entirely through the use of citizen volunteers.

Selected Letters of Cyrus Adler, edited by Ira Robinson

When Cyrus Adler graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, his classmates, who considered him a trifle arrogant, pictured him as a question mark.

Peace and Survival, by David Gress

In this period of relative calm after the storm over the installing of cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe, "continuity" is the key word for many observers of West German politics.

The Faraway Music, by Svetlana Allilueva

In the flurry of publicity surrounding the return of Stalin's daughter Svetlana Allilueva to the Soviet Union in October 1984, few commentators noted that months before her departure she had published a third volume of memoirs, a sequel to Twenty Letters to a Friend and Only One Year.

Oral Roberts, by David Edwin Harrell, Jr.

I was trying to play golf with Oral Roberts the other day," Bob Hope once cracked, "but the holes kept healing up."

Cutting Edges, by Charles Krauthammer

Cutting Edges is an anthology of Charles Krauthammer's recent columns written, by and large, for the New Republic in which he appears regularly.

Symposium

The Jewish Vote

Religion

Espionage & the CIA

Animal Rights

Blacks and Jews

In Occupied Poland

My family comes from Warsaw. My parents were born and lived there until the outbreak of World War II. They are Polish Jews, for whom the adjective is no less important than the noun.

Naked Racial Preference

The Board of Education in Jackson, Michigan, between 1972 and 1981, repeatedly laid off high-seniority white teachers to protect the jobs of others, with less seniority, who were "Black, American Indian, Oriental, or of Spanish descendancy." Those white teachers contend that they were discriminated against unjustly on the basis of their race, denied their constitutional right to the equal protection of the laws. Are they correct?

Son, Father, Judge

A story.

Vietnam: How We Deceived Ourselves

On May 11, 1978, I took a bus to the airport for the weekly 5 P.M. Air France refugee flight from Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to Paris. This last reminder of the giant prison camp Vietnam had become faded quickly as we boarded the plane.

Back to Criminal Psychology

Seeing on my desk a copy of Crime and Human Nature by James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, a colleague asked if that was the book arguing that "crime is biological." It does not, but it is easy to see how and why he came to think so.

Truffaut & Other Auteurs

Who is the author of a movie? What is an "auteur," anyway? What was in the mind of the late Francois Truffaut and his friends when they thrust this idea upon the world some thirty years ago?

E.L. Doctorow's

By self-proclamation, E.L. Doctorow is not an Ernest Hemingway or a Norman Mailer. "I tend not to get in fights in bars," he announced reassuringly in a recent interview, "I don't go hunting for big game in Africa. I don't box."

Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, by Richard Fox

The dust jacket declares, and at least some reviewers agree, that Richard Fox's Reinhold Niebuhr is the definitive biography. It is in many respects an outstanding biography, but if definitive means that it is the last word, there is much reason to hope that it is not the definitive biography.

Star Warriors, by William J. Broad

In March 1983, when President Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), he took the U.S. defense establishment by surprise.

My Father, His Daughter, by Yael Dayan

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, the Israeli government press office circulated a photograph of Moshe and Yael Dayan that appeared in hundreds of newspapers in Europe and North America.

Petain: Hero or Traitor?, by Herbert R. Lottman

Philippe Petain died in 1951, a prisoner on the Isle D'Yeu below the Brittany peninsula where he was held for the final six years of his life, lurching and wheezing between lucid intervals to an end at the cruel age of ninety-five.

Politics, by Edward I. Koch with William Rauch

Politics is a rambling, highly personal, and exceedingly funny account of the battles of Edward I. Koch, written by Koch together with his press secretary, William Rauch (who also co-authored their earlier and best-selling Mayor).

The Black-Jewish Split

N.Y. vs. D.C.

Butler at Columbia

Totalitarianism

German Jews

East-West Art

Violent Death

How Not to Occupy the West Bank

Since the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, various plans and ideas concerning their future have been extensively discussed. Remarkably, however, the principles which have guided the Israeli Military Government (IMG) in administering the day-to-day life of the Arab population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, a population currently estimated at 1.3 million, have been very little discussed or studied.

Therefore Choose Death?

Contemporary law is now thoroughly intertwined with the practice of medicine. The effects of this entanglement are apparent in each camp, as judges decide when life-sustaining treatment should be terminated, and physicians struggle to define "patients' rights." One of the most unsettling developments is the abandonment by the medical profession of an unambivalent commitment to the treatment of the ill.

Ethiopia: The Communist Uses of Famine

At the height of a famine which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, the Ethiopian government launched a far-reaching social experiment, to relocate between 1.5 and 2 million peasants. Government spokesmen justified the resettlement project on both humanitarian and economic grounds. But a compelling body of evidence suggests that Ethiopian government policies played a much more substantial role in exacerbating the effects of famine than was previously recognized.

A Russian Writer's Jewish Fate

With the U.S. publication of Life and Fate, his masterwork, the name of the Russian writer Vasily Grossman (1905-64) will, one hopes, become more familiar to the American reader than has hitherto been the case.

E.B. White, Dark & Lite

When E.B. White died, at the age of eighty-six, on October 1, 1985, his obituarist in the New York Times referred to him as "one of the nation's most precious literary resources," and the newspaper backed up the statement by running a six-column-across obituary of the kind it generally grants only to indisputably major statesmen and artists.

Indian Art-and Ours

Nowadays, everybody seems to love India-its food, its costumes, and its exotic art. This interest is reflected in the recently published The Sculpture of India, 3000 B.C.-1300 A.D. by Pramod Chandra, which served as the catalogue for a show at the National Gallery in Washington, and it was reflected even more emphatically in the exhibition, "India! Art and Culture 1300-1900," which ran at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Why Computers Can't Be Poets

There is no royal road to learning, the ancients said; but in our culture, now, all roads seem, in one way or another, to lead to the computer. The transition from mathematical logic to the computer is an easy and natural one. But the overwhelming question then becomes: how far can the machine go in taking over human thought?

The Heavens and the Earth, by Walter McDougall

The Reagan administration has announced that during the next five years it will conduct research into the technology of anti-missile weapons.

Beyond Belief, by Deborah E. Lipstadt

When Generals Eisenhower and Patton arrived at Ohrdorf, one of the first concentration camps to be liberated by American forces at the end of World War II, they insisted that their troops view the entire camp.

Dickens and the Social Order, by Myron Magnet

The novels of Charles Dickens often create an initial impression of great simplicity, compensated for by extraordinary intensity--in contrast, say, to the novels of George Eliot, which are long on complexity and short on intensity.

Military Incompetence, by Richard A. Gabriel

"If a military force cannot perform well on the battlefield, then anything else it might do doesn't really matter." So writes Richard Gabriel in Military Incompetence, an analysis of five of this country's most recent military actions: the Mayaguez rescue mission, the Iran rescue mission, Beirut, Grenada, and a failed rescue mission in Vietnam.

Without God, Without Creed, by James Turner

If the argument of James Turner is accepted, a major rewriting of cultural history is in order. Turner, who teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, contends that "Until little more than a century ago, virtually everyone within the orbit of European culture agreed that a superhuman power was somehow responsible for the universe and that this fact determined the purpose of life."

American Medicine

Women's Studies at Kenyon

Saudi Arabia

Oral Roberts

How SDI Is Being Undone From Within

While the turn toward a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the 1980s was caused by recognition of the nation's strategic predicament, the White House and the Defense Department quickly defined SDI as research into technology that might or might not be useful after the year 2000--but surely not by any time on which we could immediately plan. This effectively detoured discussion from the essential question: how shall we meet our urgent need for protection now?

The Arab World Discovers Anti-Semitism

Since 1945, certain Arab countries have been the only places in the world where hard-core, Nazi-style anti-Semitism is publicly and officially endorsed and propagated.

Montezuma's Literary Revenge

Of those native Mexican artists born after the Revolution, few have addressed themselves more consistently to subjects of national character, or anatomized the Mexican character more enthusiastically, than the world-famous novelist Carlos Fuentes, whose latest work of fiction, The Old Gringo, was published in the United States last year.

Religion in Post-Protestant America

The men who drafted the First Amendment not only did not have in mind what later exegetes have imputed to them, but different ones among them had quite different things in mind. In view of the historical evidence, it is hard to sustain the later interpretation that the two clauses of the First Amendment, the "establishment" clause and the "free-exercise" clause, implied a balanced theory of church-state relations.

Gorbachev and the Jews

On the eve of Mikhail Gorbachev's accession to power, rumors began circulating of a possible resumption of large-scale Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. Western observers have long maintained that Soviet emigration policy depends on the climate of U.S.-Soviet relations, and as Gorbachev clearly wished to improve superpower relations, what better way to do so than by releasing Soviet Jews? Yet Gorbachev did not act in accordance with this line of analysis, and the signs are few indeed that he will do so in the near future.

Close Calls

A story.

The Later, and Greater, Strauss

All the material necessary for an evaluation of Richard Strauss (1864-1949) as a composer sub specie aeternitatis is now available.

With the Contras, by Christopher Dickey

Christopher Dickey's book about the contras is a bloodflecked account of how in his view U.S. policy in Nicaragua has gone from debacle to depravity: from fumbling efforts to contain the anti- Somoza revolution to support for a brutal and futile anti-Communist insurgency.

The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, by Jean-Denis Bredin

Befpre Captain Alfred Dreyfus was charged with high treason in 1894, he was a thirty-four-year old, career-conscious officer on the French army general staff.

The Moral Life of Children; The Political Life of Children, by Robert Coles

"God, has he a bad case of the preaching bug." This comment, reported to us by the Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles, comes from a fourteen-year-old boy who is speaking about a movie he has just seen.

Setting Municipal Priorities 1986, edited by Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton; Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis, by Martin Shefter; Beyond Entitlement, by Lawrence M. Mead

Approaching a City, Edward Hopper's somber-hued painting of 1946, offers a blocked view of an urban landscape as seen by arriving railway passengers.

The Holocaust, by Martin Gilbert

How is it that the scholarly literature on the Holocaust, which began some forty years ago as a narrow trickle of articles and monographs almost unnoticed amid all the massive treatises on the military, diplomatic, and political history of World War II, has now turned into a deluge of books attracting more popular attention than any other aspect of that terrible conflict?

The Constitution & the Court

Zionism

Reinhold Niebuhr

Conscription

The Family, the Nation, and Senator Moynihan

Last year, Daniel Patrick Moynihan delivered an address on a topic on which his ideas had generated great controversy two decades earlier, when he was serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration--the family. Moynihan devotes the first part of the published version of his Godkin Lectures to reviewing the events surrounding the release and denunciation of the policy paper he had then prepared, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action."

Nicaragua: A Speech to My Former Comrades on the Left

Twenty-five years ago I was one of the founders of the New Left. Tonight I come before you as the kind of man I used to tell myself I would never be: a supporter of President Reagan, a committed opponent of Communist rule in Nicaragua

Where Arabism and Zionism Differ

Arabism and Zionism are ideologies. They offer a blueprint for political action based on historical arguments which purport to establish the true character of, respectively, Arabs and Jews. They are, then, nationalist ideologies. Yet they are also the results of the relationship between nationalism and religion, and their outcomes are not the same.

The Scandal of “Peace Education”

Although the nuclear-freeze campaign has faded, it should not be imagined that the schools have abandoned "peace education," "peace studies," or "nuclear war education." A closer look at the three most curricular guides, Choices, Dialogue, Perspectives, is in order.

Reflections on the Art of Lying

The art and the science of lying have both made noteworthy progress since Bacon's day, and most particularly in our century. It was Marx who discovered the blinding truth that truth itself is a relative notion like any other related mental constructs reflecting a certain historical organization of society.

Variant Text

A story.

The Political-Literary Complex

At one point during their week of deliberations and festivities, the writers who had assembled in New York last January for the 48th International PEN Congress were counseled by one of their number to "go back to your ivory towers." But in truth many of the 700 or so delegates to the conference from some 40 countries did not seem ivory-tower types to begin with. Theirs had been a week of petitions and statements and strategy meetings, of walkouts and protests and confrontations.

Murrow: His Life and Times, by A.M. Sperber

Television news leaves few clear traces in our collective memory. (Ask a baby boomer to identify Eric Sevareid.) So it is rather remarkable that anyone below the age of fifty should remember Edward R. Murrow at all, that his reputation should be more than just a dusty piece of trivia known only to World War II buffs and lovers of 50's nostalgia.

The Utopian Dilemma, by Murray Friedman

Out of his many years of service in professional Jewish life, Murray Friedman has written this small book about American Jewish organizations and the public policies they advocate.

Franklin of Philadelphia, by Esmond Wright

Franklin of Philadelphia seems an odd title for the biography of a native Bostonian who spent nearly twenty-six years abroad in London and Paris.

The Unwanted, by Michael R. Marrus

"Home," Robert Frost once wrote, "is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." But suppose there is no such place.

The Outside Story, by Richard Brookhiser

Richard Brookhiser, the managing editor of National Review, has written a thorough and interesting account of the 1984 election, tapping the impressions he formed as one of the magazine's chief reporters on presidential races since 1980.

Art and Civilization

Death and the Doctors

Affirmative Action

Ethiopia

The Fate of Vietnam

The Press and the Holocaust

Losing Central America

One of the keys to the outcome of the Nicaraguan conflict is the anomalous reaction to it around the world. All it takes to appreciate that anomaly--which is "no accident" and is not generically unique to Nicaragua--is a brief rehearsal of the basic facts.

Syria: The Cuba of the Middle East?

Americans usually understand who is the foe and who the friend, but not in the Middle East. The question of who is on what side is constantly being argued. This explains why high-level officials within the government have a tendency to change their minds and even contradict themselves about Syria. And it points to the need for a closer look at where Syria does stand in international politics.

Petropower and Soviet Expansion

The constant focus on the attitudes of individual Soviet leaders, measured by their public pronouncements, style, and degree of apparent enlightenment, obscures the extent to which Soviet foreign policy depends on an underlying economic reality: the world price of a barrel of oil.

Whose Palestine?

Apart from who the critics of journalist Joan Peters's book From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine have been, there is the matter of what they have said. Much of the criticism is not merely ill-intentioned, or downright vicious, but silly. Yet despite all the faults of Miss Peters's critics, her book does indeed deserve some of the criticism.

Miss Pym and Mr. Larkin

My suspicion is that, if Anglophilia is not yet dead, it is well on its way to dying. There will always be an England; yet, slightly seedy and exhausted land that it now seems, there is a good deal less likelihood of there always being Anglophiles to admire it.

The Staged 60's

A story.

Ortega y Gasset Revisited

Nobody claims that Spain has been at the center of 20th-century thought. Now, however, there is occasion to take a fresh look at Jose Ortega y Gasset. A new translation of his The Revolt of the Masses is of special interest in view of Spain's still-recent turn toward modernity and democracy.

Star Wars, by Alun Chalfont

This brief, undogmatic book by the chairman of the House of Lords' All-Party Defense Group may not make many ripples in the ever-growing community of American defense intellectuals since since it does not uncover military incompetence, develop war-winning strategies, or warn of impending disaster.

The Big Dance, by John Castellucci

Two policemen and one guard were murdered during the bungled holdup of an armored Brinks truck near Nyack, New York on October 20, 1981.

Heroes and Hustlers, Hard Hats and Holy Men, by Ze'ev Chafets

In his first book, Double Vision: How America's Press Distorts Our View of the Middle East, Ze'ev Chafets, who served as chief of the Israel government press office for most of the Begin era, gave the Western media a well-documented (and well-deserved) bashing for their unprofessional and sometimes downright dishonest coverage of various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende, by Nathaniel Davis

This past March, after Ferdinand Marcos left the Philippines, President Reagan dispatched a message to Congress declaring his opposition to right- as well as left-wing tyrannies.

The Passion of Ayn Rand, by Barbara Branden

The history of any ideology is in large part a catalogue of purges, a sour and acrid rule to which the American Right has been no exception. One of the earliest right-wing purges carried out in this country took place in 1957 when the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand was for all intents and purposes read out of the conservative movement.

SDI

Sandinistas & Contras

Computers & Poets

Erik Erikson

Richard Strauss

Why Reagan Won and Stockman Lost

David A. Stockman believed that the window of opportunity for bold change had opened in 1981, for conservative policies that would reverse rather than expand the welfare state. He was wrong. What is puzzling is that he should ever have supposed he was right.

Paying Less Attention to the Middle East

Few ideas have been more influential in shaping American foreign policy in the Middle East than that which can be summed up in the shorthand phrase, "territory for peace." Yet despite the continuing allure of territory-for-peace as a diplomatic paradigm, with the important exception of what was achieved by the Camp David Accords, no exchange of territory for peace has actually taken place.

Feminism, Stage Three

Twenty years ago women were assured that psychological fulfillment and a previously unsuspected need for independence from men could be met by paid employment, or, as it was usually called, pursuing a career. The contrast between those brave promises and current reality could hardly be more stark.

In Berlin Again

In October 1985 I went to Berlin for the third time in my life. Long before I set foot in Berlin I was preoccupied by the problem of reconciling past and present. How could I be an objective observer in the land of the murderers of the Jews?

The Prince of English Poets

Few English men of letters have enjoyed greater recognition during their lifetime--or suffered a more degrading post-mortem--than Alexander Pope, author of such masterpieces of the mock-heroic epic as The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad.

Yalta and the Neoconservatives

Last January, in an article in the New York Review of Books entitled "Neoconservative History," Theodore Draper delivered himself of a fevered attack on four pieces in Commentary which he accused of slandering Franklin D. Roosevelt and misrepresenting the role he played at the Yalta conference of 1945.

Archeology as Politics

One of the world's most prominent academics, specializing in the history of the ancient Near East during the Roman period, has accused Israeli archeologists and historians of that most heinous of scholarly crimes: distorting facts for political purposes and deliberately misinterpreting history.

Hydra of Carnage, edited by Uri Ra'anan et al.

This volume contains two distinct full-size books: a collection of documents consisting of interviews with persons formerly involved in terrorism and papers captured in the invasions of Grenada and Lebanon, and the contributions to a conference held at Tufts University in 1985.

Against All Hope, by Armando Valladares

The 20th century, possibly because it has been a century rich in failed utopian experiments, has also been an epoch of anti-utopian literature. One should not, however, overestimate the influence of the genre: the illusion of a perfect society just beyond the horizon persists almost in inverse proportion to the actual facts needed to support it.

The Road from Babylon, by Chaim Raphael

Chaim Raphael has in the past written on the Jewish response to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in The Walls of Jerusalem, commented on the Passover seder in A Feast of History, and, most recently, reflected on the dynamic interplay among the Hebrew Bible, the rabbinic tradition, and Jewish history in The Springs of Jewish Life.

Pollock and After, edited by Francis Frascina

A variety of considerations has caused the defunct New York School to emerge once more as a matter of urgency in the critical discussion of contemporary art.

Morality, Reason, and Power, by Gaddis Smith; The Uncertain Crusade, by Joshua Muravchik

These two books--which have in common only their price--are useful reminders of the Carter Presidency, and both help us, albeit in very different ways, to think anew about some of the basic problems facing any American government in its efforts to design and conduct foreign policy.

Family Matters

Israel's West Bank Policy

Fun City

The Question of Belief

A Neglected Novelist

Why Hart Lost

Religious America

Will Gorbachev Reform the Soviet Union?

The current "crisis" of the Soviet system about which everybody has been talking must seem strange to an outside observer: there are no starving crowds or dead bodies along the roads, no riots, nothing to show or hide on the evening news. Yet in short, the implacable logic of Marxist-Leninist analysis predicts the inevitable demise of socialism. Here is a fundamental crisis of the entire system.

Sandinista Anti-Semitism and Its Apologists

In May 1983, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization dealing with instances of anti-Semitism worldwide, issued a statement denouncing Sandinista Nicaragua as "a country without Jews, but not without anti-Semitism."

The Demotion of Man

A coherent and ordered picture of the world has gradually emerged in the 20th century. It is modeled on the old idea of an ordered hierarchical universe, except the terms have been reversed. Where once man was at the top of this order--only a little lower than the angels--now he is somewhere near the bottom; where once his authority was taken to be divinely inspired and ordained, now it is seen as a kind of usurpation.

A Case of Academic Freedom

Academic freedom, which earlier generations of professors had struggled to obtain, used to be about the right to hold any political views one wished outside the classroom. Today, that has been extended to include the right to teach one's political views as part of the subject matter of one's courses.

The Manchester Connection

How does one understand the result of the influx of Sephardim into Israel, which split the population into what seemed like two nations: "Western," well-established Ashkenazi Jews at the top; the new Sephardi immigrants, largely poor and illiterate, at the bottom. One parallel lies to hand, though in a topsy-turvy way: the immigration of Sephardi Jews into the dominantly Ashkenazi community of Manchester, England, in the 19th century.

Yuppies in Rhyme

To have written the "perfect book for the 1980's" may sound like a dubious achievement, but in the case of Vikram Seth's first novel, The Golden Gate, a publisher's blurb may for once approach accuracy.

Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians, by Gertrude Himmelfarb

There is nothing academic about Gertrude Himmelfarb's splendid collection of essays, Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians.

Game Plan, by Zbigniew Brzezinski

This reviewer must confess to having some initial doubts about a book whose dust jacket sports endorsements from both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Yet such is the case with Zbigniew Brzezinski's Game Plan, an interesting if uneven discussion of American grand strategy for the long-term competition with the Soviet empire.

Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale, by Dan A. Oren

When an outraged Yale trustee complained that too many Jews had been admitted to the Yale class of 1933, the chairman of admissions, Robert Corwin, agreed: "The list as published reads like some of the 'begat' portions of the Old Testament and might easily be mistaken for a recent roll call at the Wailing Wall."

Soviet Defectors, by Vladislav Krasnov

Only a slave society produces defections, a word still burdened by a pejorative root signifying a failure, or lack, but which has come to denote the opposite: proof that even at the risk of death, the human spirit refuses enslavement.

God's Choice, by Alan Peshkin

Some good ideas never catch on. The American people, for example, have consistently failed to show serious interest in an educational voucher system. The reason for this is obvious.

Dispensations: The Future of South Africa as South Africans See It, by Richard John Neuhaus

The subtitle of Richard John Neuhaus's important and fascinating book is "The Future of South Africa as South Africans See It." Happily the book does not live up to the subtitle.

“Whose Palestine?”

Anti-Communism

Soviet Jewry

Team B: The Reality Behind the Myth

To understand the evolution in American strategic thinking regarding nuclear war it is worthwhile recalling the episode of "Team B" which occurred ten years ago as a result of the decision of the then-Director of Central Intelligence, George Bush, to commission alternative assessments of the Soviet strategic threat.

The Tenured Left

Two campus projects involving tiny fractions of the collegiate population have precipitated reactions of surprising scope and visibility. The first has been the divestiture movement, with its demand for liquidation of university investments in firms with holdings in South Africa. The second is Accuracy in Academia (AIA), which charges the intellectual products of the academy with being tainted by tendentious radicalism.

Shcharansky's Secret

On the Ides of March 1977, Anatoly Shcharansky was seized by agents of the KGB, the Soviet secret police, and taken to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow to be investigated for "crimes against the state." No one doubted that he had been arrested and accused of treason as a Jewish leader.

Sodomy and the Supreme Court

Until 1961, sodomy was a crime in every American state. Yet since the American Law Institute recommended that state legislatures decriminalize "deviate sexual intercourse" between consenting adults, largely on the grounds that it did not harm the secular interests of others, about half of the states have followed this suggestion. The U.S. Supreme Court, during this same period of time, had begun to develop a constitutional right of privacy.

Our Conservatism and Theirs

In common with any other ideological camp, conservatives quarrel among themselves, but it is only recently that their quarrels have begun attracting the attention of outsiders. In fact, however, factionalism has characterized the intellectual Right in America since its reconstitution in the wake of World War II.

The Truth About Titoism

Over the years the Yugoslav Communist regime, like the Soviet Union's other partners, has trampled on domestic critics, particularly those who favor political pluralism; and, in this still very Christian country, it has systematically excluded religious believers from political life. Yet in its postwar transformation from peasant to industrial society, the country has received a great deal more help from the West than from the East.

Walter Laqueur at Sixty-Five

To commemorate his sixty-fifth birthday, there has just appeared a bibliography of the writings of Walter Laqueur, the prolific, erudite, polyglot, polydisciplinary historian and and journalist who is known not least for his longstanding association with Commentary.

America Can Win, by Gary Hart, with William S. Lind

The first two-thirds of this book by Senator Gary Hart and William S. Lind chronicle in laborious but loving detail, and without the benefit of a single serious counterargument, what the authors take to be the misdeeds, defects, and outright idiocies of a deeply-flawed military.

Third World Ideology and Western Reality, by Carlos Rangel

In the post-colonial era, few political events have come to seem more predictable than the proclamation by a new Third World government that it intends to pursue a socialist path of development.

Camp David, By William B. Quandt; Sadat and Begin, by Melvin R. Friedlander

In September 1978, at the presidential retreat of Camp David in the mountains of western Maryland, the leaders of Egypt, Israel, and the United States concluded the framework agreement that led, in March 1979, to the first peace treaty between the Jewish state and an Arab nation.

The Lyrical Left, by Edward Abrahams

The Lyrical Left is not merely a historical account of the rise and fall of cultural radicalism in pre-1917 New York City, but a parable about the need for radical prescriptions in today's America.

The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, by Sidney Blumenthal

Sidney Blumenthal began his career as a political reporter by writing for "alternative" newspapers in the Boston area and contributing to magazines of the radical Left like the Nation and the Progressive.

“Peace Education”

The New Feminism

A Hostage's Release

Yalta

Ortega y Gasset

The “Protocols”

Ayn Rand

“Variant Text”

Sandinistas & Contras

The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Last March, in a special issue commemorating its 120th anniversary, the Nation published an article by the novelist Gore Vidal entitled "The Empire Lovers Strike Back" which impressed me and many other people as the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II.

Shades of Containment

Politicians have the obligation to return to earth and to be made to see first, if ghostly, hand the remote consequences of what they did and what they failed to do. What follows is a discussion by Harry S. Truman, Democrat, U.S. President (1945-53), principal American architect of the policy of "containment" and of the NATO alliance designed for its implementation, and Robert A. Taft, Republican, U.S. Senator (1939-53), steadfast opponent of that policy.

“And That's What I Like About the South”

When I lived in Little Rock, I now realize, the old South had been in its last throes. Sometimes I had thought about returning to live in Little Rock, where life is less expensive, more scenic, calmer, rather out-of-it perhaps but not unpleasantly so. But this, I recognized on my recent visit, was sheerest fantasy. The city has changed and so have I.

Middle East Perplexities

From World War I on, the Middle East has presented foreign and native policymakers with a large number of awkward and perplexing situations. The resolution of these dilemmas has generally led to failure and loss, not only with respect to the interests which the policy-makers had set out to protect, but also for groups and communities in the Middle East who were willy-nilly affected by the fallout from these decisions.

Lionel Trilling and His Critics

A recent event in our literary life is probably not without political meaning: a number of writers who once sharply attacked Lionel Trilling (died 1975) have recently recanted, substituting praise for their former criticism.

Nicaraguan Journey

I arrived in Nicaragua at the height of the recent confrontations between the Sandinistas and the country's internal opposition. Nicaragua is not an inspiring example of revolution in action. But many of the "revolutionary tourists" who visit the country lack eyes to see this, and lack enough Spanish to hear and understand what the people feel. The same seems to be true of many American and other foreign journalists on the scene.

The Powerful Simplifiers

That notable economist, Henry David Thoreau, writes in Walden: "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."

Less Than One, by Joseph Brodsky

In 1972, Joseph Brodsky, a poet with a prison record (for "parasitism") at home and a high critical reputation abroad, was exiled from the Soviet Union.

The Mythmaker, by Hyam Maccoby

The New Testament speaks of Jesus Christ as "a sign spoken against" and "a stone of stumbling." But at least since the 18th-century Enlightenment, it has been the apostle Paul who has often been cast in the role of (in the words of Thomas Jefferson) "first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus".

Storm Over Biology, by Bernard D. Davis

The success of science is due in great part to its emphasis on objectivity: the separating of evidence from preconceptions and the willingness to draw conclusions even when they conflict with traditional beliefs.

Suing the Press, by Rodney A. Smolla; Talking Back to the Media, by Peter Hannaford

At one time in this country, observes the constitutional scholar Walter Berns, there were two ways of dealing with journalists who damaged a man's reputation by publishing false and defamatory statements: pistols at dawn or a horsewhip in the public square.

The FBI-KGB War, by Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shachtman

For most of Robert Lamphere's fourteen years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he specialized in Soviet espionage cases. He was responsible for directing the investigations that culminated in the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and oversaw numerous other less publicized but important probes that uncovered KGB agents working in the United States.

Nuclear Ethics, by Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

Of the writing of books on nuclear weapons and morality there is no end. The current debate over nuclear ethics, however, which was provoked in the United States by the Reagan administration's efforts to move toward restoring the strategic balance and by the 1983 pastoral letter on war and peace of the U.S. Catholic bishops, seems to owe more to the public temper than to any actual urgency.

Academic Freedom

The Middle East

The Soviet Union

Germans and Jews

How the Nicaraguan Resistance Can Win

United States military aid is at last beginning to flow to the Nicaraguan resistance. The question of whether the U.S. should help at all has for the moment yielded to another: how are we going to go about it?

Palestine for the Syrians?

The Assad government of Syria joins a long tradition in Syrian politics of presenting itself as the rightful ruler of the land that Israel controls. Since, according to this view, the existing republic of Syria is but a truncated part of the Syrian lands, the government in Damascus has a duty to recover and unite all other Syrian regions, including Palestine, under its control.

Capitalism and Selfishness

Western societies are routinely denounced from within and without for the sin of selfishness--a sin with which they are said to be afflicted not in some incidental or private way, but deep down and by the very nature of their social system. Is it fair to say that ours is a social system based on selfishness?

The Judaism Born in America

Unlike Orthodox and Reform Judaism, Conservatism is a native American product, and its history is completely accessible. It has changed much over the century of its existence, and the story of its metamorphosis is in great measure the story of American Jewry.

Wish List A Story

A story.

For Whom the Bell Tolled

It is now fifty years ago, the "wound in the heart." Rightist risings against the Republican government occurred throughout Spain and succeeded in Seville, Galicia, and Badajoz. General Francisco Franco arrived in Morocco to take command of the Spanish Foreign Legion. The war in Spain became a political obsession in the West.

W.E.B. Du Bois: Up to Slavery

A new volume of W.E.B. Du Bois's writings affords a fresh opportunity to reassess Du Bois's evolution from scholar to romantic ideologue to intransigent Marxist. Du Bois's story, if not exactly tragic in a grand sense, is an indictment of both his country and him. His life (1868-1963) and writings encompass the modern history of black life.

“The Target is Destroyed” by Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh, the famous investigative reporter, clearly means to convince his readers to stop thinking so harshly about the Soviet Union for shooting down a civilian passenger plane on September 1, 1983, killing 269 innocent men, women, and children; instead, he means them to think harshly of the President of the United States and of most of the people who run U.S. intelligence.

Going to the Territory, by Ralph Ellison

In 1965, the book-review supplement of the old New York Herald Tribune asked two hundred critics to pick the best American novels published since World War II. The first choice of the critics was Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which was published in 1952, and the book still stands as probably the best American novel to be published since well, pick your favorite Faulkner.

Thinking in Time, by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May

Thinking in Time grew out of a course taught jointly by Richard Neustadt, a political scientist, and Ernest May, a historian, at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Mexico: Chaos on Our Doorstep, by Sol W. Sanders

The major difference between Mexico and most of the rest of Latin America is that in Mexico, civilians unambiguously control the political life of the country, and have done so ever since the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) tamed the military in the 1930's and 40's.

The Nazi Doctors, by Robert Jay Lifton

The barbarism of the Nazis stops most people cold. Many admit to an emotional incapacity for any but a brief and partial glimpse into Nazi cruelties.