Sandinista Anti-Semitism

The Academy

Team B

Yugoslavia

Another “Low Dishonest Decade” on the Left

We first became involved with the New Left--that movement which eventually degenerated into the devious and dishonest Left of today--at the end of the 1950's, a time when McCarthyism was dying and a new radical movement was struggling to be born in demonstrations against the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Poland's Jewish Ghosts

The Jewish question has been taboo in Poland for many years. Neither the government, the intellectuals, the Church, nor the people have wanted to invoke the painful memory of the more than three million Jews who once formed such a dynamic minority in their country.

Who Speaks for American Blacks?

This past June a front-page story in the New York Times announced "a major shift of thinking" among "many black leaders." Six years into the Reagan era, it turns out that some black elected officials and leaders of major civil-rights organizations have "discovered" self-help as a legitimate tool for advancing the condition of the black poor.

How “La Prensa” was silenced

During the national insurrection in Nicaragua against Anastasio Somoza, my family's newspaper, La Prensa, opposed his regime with all the resources at its command. Indeed, it was the assassination of La Prensa's editor, my older brother Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Cardenal, which ignited all of Nicaragua into the final battle against Somoza and his regime. But the Sandinistas soon betrayed the revolution that had brought them to power. Among the first pledges they broke was the one concerning freedom of the press.

In the Capital of Modern Cruelty

After visiting the Berlin wall, I told my companion that I could imagine how the Wall's presence must crush Berliners' spirits under its intolerable weight, how it must be a source of relentless and crippling pain. He said that people really seemed to pay it no mind, to go about their lives as though it weren't even there.

Wagner as Anti-Semite

The history of Richard Wagner's Judeophobia has been remarkably well-documented. His most important, though by no means his only, literary work in this area was Das Judentum in der Musik ("Jewishness in Music"), published as a pamphlet in 1850 under the pseudonym K. Freigedank (K. Freethought), and then under his own name in 1869.

The Rise & Fall of Roman Polanski

In America at least, Roman Polanski has at last fallen on hard times. The writer-director's latest movie, Pirates, released here last summer, was met by a critical reception that was at best inattentive, at worst derisive and hostile.

Arab and Jew, by David K. Shipler

On March 28, 1982, the New York Times carried a story headed "West Bank Occupation Now Resembles Annexation," which included the following sentences about three Arab mayors dismissed by Ariel Sharon: "All were the targets of car bombings in 1980.

The Capitalist Revolution, by Peter L. Berger

Peter Berger, a penetrating student of society who has explored issues ranging from the economies of the Third World to political theory and the sundry religions of mankind, here focuses upon a project that is at once grand in purview and yet tightly restrained in its immediate purposes.

The Halakhic Mind, by Joseph B. Soloveitchik

Orthodox Judaism is much in the news these days, and much of the news is not good. In both Israel and the United States, extremist elements appear to hold sway in the Orthodox community, engaging in activities seemingly calculated to outrage Jewish opinion at large.

The Financing of Terror, by James Adams

In mid-April 1986, almost at the moment American F-1ll's were making their way to Libya, a group of experts on terrorism were making their way to a conference in Scotland.

The Media Elite, by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter

American conservatives have tended to approach the question of liberal bias in the news media in much the same way that Justice Potter Stewart approached the question of pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio: they know it when they see it.

Reader Letters February 1987

AIDS & the Law

Conservatism

The Soviet Union

The South

Peace Studies

Shcharansky

Randolph Bourne

Military Reform

Why the Soviets Want an Arms-Control Agreement, and Why They Want It Now

In its potential significance, the Reykjavik summit can be compared to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 among the Soviet-American confrontations since 1945. In both episodes, the Soviet Union sought to convert its nuclear power into a coercive political force. But the stakes at Reykjavik were, and remain, much higher than those of 1962

My Mother's Conversion

My mother, born Jewish, is buried in a Christian cemetery. In her case, destiny really seems to have played tricks with our family. Nobody could have imagined that after having provoked such dismay by her conversion to Christianity she would become the first member of our family in two thousand years to go and die--as is the custom among pious Jews--in the Holy Land.

Of Markets and Myths

Whenever Americans discuss government's role in the economy, the terms of debate are deceptively clear. Either we leave the market free, or the government controls it. But the continuing debate has generally failed to help the public understand the options and the stakes of each issue.

Houses of the Dead

One of the greatest of the Soviet prison-camp memoirs, Gustav Herling's A World Apart, was published in the United States only last year, over four decades after the experiences it describes took place. Herling's book takes its title from a phrase in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From the House of the Dead (1861-62), a work that was the originator and forerunner of the Russian labor-camp chronicle.

Patients

My dentist is a well-trained and careful fellow. And he seems also to be a sympathetic sort. Why is it, then, that I am so reluctant to visit him?

Israel's Alienated Intellectuals

By now the "soul" of Israel has long since been consigned by the international community to a sort of purgatory. Not quite dead, not quite alive, it awaits a final condemnation which seems hardly to be in doubt.

Post-Counterculture Tristesse

To judge by the work of some of our younger novelists, the American dream has died even while coming true. Material prosperity, sexual liberation, unparalleled expansion of personal choice--these often make their way into contemporary fiction more as problems, dilemmas, or occasions of anguish than as the victories for the human spirit they are usually claimed to be.

Eisenhower at War 1943-1945, by David Eisenhower

By 1960 or so it was the consensus of military historians that Britain had managed to fight all of World War II with hardly one good general (Slim of Burma was the ritual exception).

Semites and Anti-Semites, by Bernard Lewis

"By following daily events in the occupied land, we get day-after-day proof beyond any doubt that what is termed 'Zionist racism' is just an extension of talmudic teachings and development of the same teachings."

A Machine That Would Go of Itself, by Michael Kammen

Michael Kammen, the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture at Cornell University, describes this book as a study in popular constitutionalism, by which he means "the perceptions and misperceptions, uses and abuses, knowledge and ignorance of ordinary Americans" concerning the Constitution of the United States.

Fidel, by Peter G. Bourne; Fidel: A Critical Portrait, by Tad Szulc

It is probably best that living legends, particularly living revolutionary legends, not live too long. Ideally, they should die early enough so that future biographers can ponder how much better the world would be today if they had been given time to realize their dreams.

Letters from Prison and Other Essays, by Adam Michnik

A strange country, Poland. A Soviet satellite state whose current dictator, Wojciech Jaruzelski, cannot, we are told, forgive an American Cabinet member for calling him a Soviet general in a Polish uniform.

Anti-Semitism, Left & Right

Capitalism & Selfishness

Genocide

Team B

World War I, World War II, World War III

For decades after World War II most Americans looked at world affairs through the lens ground to fit the vision they had of the 1930's and the broad consensus as to what it revealed. Now, for many American and British intellectuals this analogy is being replaced by a surge of analogies with the great war which broke out after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo in June of 1914.

Modern Ideologies & the Jews

For Europeans, broadly speaking, the history of Christianity commingles nicely with history-in-general. By contrast, the story of the Jews is frequently considered a matter apart. Indeed we still do not have a definitive work placing the Jews within the general context of the history of our times (by which I mean the 19th and 20th centuries).

The Schlesinger Thesis

Once upon a time, the books of the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. were worth reading. Today, having lost his nerve and so much else, Schlesinger speaks of the United States and the Soviet Union in the same breath as "international menaces," acting out fantasies of "innate superiority."

Beyond Abstract Art?

For many observers, Frank Stella has claim to be one of the two or three most important and original abstract artists to have emerged on the New York art scene in the fertile, tumultuous years of the early 60's.

Young People A Story

A story.

The Curious Case of Marek Edelman

Marek Edelman, a member of the Jewish Socialist Bund since his youth, had been the Deputy Commandant in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In 1976, journalist Hanna Krall published in a Polish literary journal a series of interviews with him, focusing on his two lives--first as a young man in the Warsaw Ghetto where, under the German occupation, human life had no value, and later as a cardiologist dedicated to saving human life. In its English translation, Krall's book is unlikely to have the kind of impact it had in Poland.

Reckless Disregard, by Renata Adler

In two articles published last year in the New Yorker, Renata Adler leveled a stinging attack on the press and the lawyers who defend the press.

The Jew as Ally of the Muslim, by Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler

As the title of this study suggests, Allan and Helen Cutler believe that the tendency of medieval Christians to see the Jew as an ally of the Muslim was the decisive factor in the development of anti-Semitism.

Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, by Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich

This magisterial volume, a collaborative effort by two emigre Soviet scholars now residing in Western Europe, may well become, as its subtitle inadvertently claims, the history of the USSR for many years to come.

A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell

In August 1762, Msgr. Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, issued a condemnation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile.

American Blacks

The Contras

Conservative Judaism

The Spanish Civil War

The MLA

The Guns of Watergate

The headline on the cover of Newsweek not long ago boldly announced, "Nixon's Back." Nevertheless, even if the offenses involved in Watergate were the type that pass quickly from public consciousness, it has become essential to consider Watergate once again, as it has had consequences for the way in which we conduct almost the whole of our national political affairs.

Liberty, Equality, Sexuality

Sex and its consequences--love, marriage, and family--have finally become the theme of our national project. And perhaps nowhere is the drama being played out with greater poignancy than among the privileged young, the students at our better colleges and universities.

Is Messianism Good for the Jews?

Ever since biblical antiquity, messianism has been an integral component in the making of Jewish history. But what function, exactly, has messianism fulfilled in Jewish history? And specifically, what positive contribution has it made to the maintenance and survival of the Jewish community?

Requiem for the “Establishment”

The so-called Eastern Establishment is generally considered to have played a determining role in shaping and managing our foreign policy during a crucial period in our contemporary history: from the onset of World War II to the fall of Saigon. But did it really?

Pol Pot in Retrospect

That the Khmer Rouge committed some of the most despicable crimes against humanity of the modern age is today almost universally acknowledged. Yet the motives and ideology which spawned the Cambodian reign of terror are but dimly understood, even eight years after Pol Pot and his accomplices were driven from power in the first shooting war between Communist states.

Senor Borges's Portico

Jorge Luis Borges was fond of speaking of himself as an invention of sorts, as if there were Borges the writer, who contrived his literary work, and Borges the man, who had gradually become lost in the writer and who was destined "to perish, definitively."

Speak of the Devil

Scholarly interest in the devil has lately been intensified by the reading of a remarkable series of books by Jeffrey Burton Russell.

Imperialism and the Anti-Imperalist Mind, by Lewis Feuer; The Tears of the White Man, by Pascal Bruckner

Nearly thirty years ago, a group of conservative American academics led by Robert Strausz-Hupe produced a volume pointing out some of the accomplishments of the old European empires; the British journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, whose Tory sympathies might have been expected to be engaged by such an enterprise, nevertheless likened it to an effort at resuscitating the divine right of kings.

Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism, by Moshe Zimmermann

No one thought much of Wilhelm Marr during his long life (1819-1904) or afterward. Karl Marx called him "loathsome."

The Jaguar Smile, by Salman Rushdie

The Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 must surely go down as one of the best-marketed efforts of its kind in history.

Men and Marriage, by George Gilder

Certain controversial books, as George Orwell suggested in Nineteen Eighty-Four, are influential in inverse proportion to their availability.

How NATO Weakens the West, by Melvyn Krauss

Melvyn Krauss here stumbles through the thickets of international affairs armed only with the analytical tools and moral assumptions of a free-market economist.

Poles and Jews

Contras and “La Prensa”

Arms Control

Dostoevsky and the Jews

Markets

Berlin

Patients

The Latest Myths About the Soviet Union

Among students of Soviet affairs, the publication of Seweryn Bialer's latest book, The Soviet Paradox: External Expansion, Internal Decline, has been treated as an event of major importance. In a variety of ways, Bialer might seem ideally qualified to contribute to the West's understanding of the Soviet state.

Why Blacks, Women & Jews Are Not Mentioned in the Constitution

The bicentennial we celebrate this year honors the original, unamended Constitution written in 1787. Why, some ask, should we celebrate a constitution that treated blacks as less than human, that left women out, and that did not combat religious intolerance? These charges stem from a misreading of the document that comes from not appreciating the importance of knowing how to read the original Constitution on subjects it does not mention.

Crazy in the Streets

Riddled by psychotic illnesses, abandoned by the systems that once pledged to care for them, they are the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, the detritus of the latest fashion in mental-health policy. Like its victims, the policy of deinstitutionalization has been taken for granted. It is difficult to recall that mentally ill persons ever were treated differently.

Churchill at War

Nearly half a century ago Winston Churchill rallied the people of Great Britain with words that have not lost the power to make the pulse quicken. Yet it would be unfortunate if his elevation to our pantheon, merited though it is, were to deprive us of the benefits of a careful examination of his statecraft. This applies especially to Churchill's war statesmanship, and in particular to his conduct of World War II.

The Rise & Fall of Interfaith Dialogue

The entire process known as interfaith dialogue often resembles a dialogue des sourdes, a dialogue of the deaf, in which both parties speak, but neither hears the other. What is the history of interfaith dialogue?

Picasso's Motif

Pablo Picasso's influence has completely overleapt its artistic boundaries, implanting itself, often unseen, deeply within the souls of people everywhere.

Dead from Lincoln Center

Evidence that a massive expansion of the American opera public might be possible has been gathering since the beginning of the 20th century.

Reagan's America, by Garry Wills

Garry Wills has written what is in some respects a conventional biography of Ronald Reagan. There is real research in it, and facts that most readers will not have known before.

Wine, Women & Death, by Raymond P. Scheindlin

Raymond P. Scheindlin is one of the few academic specialists, either in this country or in Israel, in what is surely one of the most exciting eras in all the 3,000 years of Hebrew literary history: the poetry of the so-called Golden Age of Andalusia, beginning in the 10th century and attaining its greatest achievements in the 11th and 12th centuries C.E.

Risking the Future, edited by Cheryl D. Hayes

The United States is undergoing a rise in teen-age pregnancies on a scale hitherto unknown, and without equal in other industrial societies.

Do You Believe in Magic?, by Annie Gottlieb

"See if these excerpts," advises Annie Gottlieb in Do You Believe in Magic?, "seem as familiar, as homey, to you as they do to me."

Deep Black, by William E. Burrows

William Burrows, who teaches Journalism at NYU, here performs a tour de force. He reveals the existence of nearly all U.S. technical-intelligence systems and describes many of their capabilities.

Preventing World War III

History & the Historians

Israel's Intellectuals

Jose Luis Borges

Conservative Judaism

The German Army

“My Mother's Conversion”

Government by Lawyers & Judges

We call it judicial review, and while the point has frequently been disputed, sometimes fiercely, there is really no question but that the Framers intended federal judges to exercise the power to invalidate laws that they consider unconstitutional.

The Uses of Exodus

In the last several years, four significant works on Exodus have been published just in the US. Since two are by biblical scholars, and two by political scientists, and all four authors bring an avowedly Jewish perspective to bear on their subject, their simultaneous convergence in print provides a happy occasion to look both at Exodus itself and also at certain recent trends in biblical interpretation.

Anthony Eden & the Decline of Britain

The catastrophic decline of Great Britain is one of the central events of the 20th century. Should Americans wish to contemplate a life that embodies that collapse and casts some light on its dismal progress, they could do considerably worse than to settle on that of Anthony Eden, now set out in a full-scale biography by Robert Rhodes James.

Letter to a New Israeli

I know that your sons will soon be serving in the army, how you will writhe in the toils of the Israeli bureauracy, what a burden of problems you assume as an immigrant. I take you at your word when you say that you have left Canada for Israel only because you want to, but a hero may well be one whose desires happen to coincide with the national imperative.

Alzheimer's

A story.

Beyond California

From a distance it looked as if the harbor breakwater at Fremantle was covered with moving derrieres, and a closer view confirmed that this was so. Observers must have been surprised and disappointed that this is how the New New Zealanders wish to be remembered by the civilized world. They turn their backs upon it. They wave their backsides at it.

The Fiction We Deserve

To paraphrase George Orwell on the English language, most people who bother with American fiction at all seem ready to admit that it is in a bad way.

A History of the Jews, by Paul Johnson

Perhaps inevitably in our current decade, the vast preponderance of historical writing about the Jews has focused on the Holocaust: its origins, its course, and its implications.

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The author of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, an ambitious work of more than 900 pages spanning a hundred years of family history, from the baptism in Boston in 1863 of John Francis Fitzgerald, the infant son of an immigrant Irishman and his second-generation Irish-American wife, to the presidential inauguration in Washington in 1961 of John Fitzgerald's forty-three-year-old grandson and namesake, simply cannot stop talking about the cooperation she has received from the current generation of leadership in the Kennedy family.

Armed Truce: The Beginning of the Cold War 1945-1946, by Hugh Thomas

More than four decades have passed since the end of World War II and the beginning of what we call the cold war that arose from it, yet the origins of the cold war and the responsibility for it remain the subject of serious controversy.

The Harvest of Sorrow, by Robert Conquest

The Harvest of Sorrow qualifies as a monumental contribution toward an understanding of the modern totalitarian state. Its subject is one of the most shameful chapters in Soviet history: Stalin's war against the peasants.

The Closest of Enemies, by Wayne S. Smith

Over the past three or four years Wayne Smith has become one of the most visible and active critics of the Reagan administration's policy in Latin America. His notoriety began in 1982, when, having recently retired from the diplomatic service, he wrote an article accusing the U.S. government of willfully turning aside repeated Cuban overtures to negotiate our differences.

The Dellmus Record

“The Wise Men”

Borges's Portico

The American Mind

Feminism & Society

Arab vs. Arab Over Palestine

As we have once again been reminded by the great debate over the desirability of an international conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict, that conflict is generally assumed to be about the competing claims of the Jews and the Palestinians to the same piece of land. Yet the truth is that the Arabs disagree, sometimes violently, among themselves as to who should rule Palestine and even where its rightful boundaries lie.

Can the Sandinistas Still Be Stopped?

From the viewpoint of Nicaragua's ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the war against U.S. "imperialism" is not going badly at all these days. It seems almost strange to recall, in the midst of the various investigations now in process, that current congressional policy still officially favors the anti-Sandinista forces. But the likelihood that Congress will provide further funds for the so-called contra war is rapidly approaching zero.

Fantasies About South Africa

"The West" has long been an important presence in the politics of South Africa. "South Africa" has now become, at least for a time, a significant political issue in Western democracies. The quotation marks are indicated because this mutual imagery is a tangle of realities and fantasies, the latter often appearing as projections of pathology from a particular Western society to a rather conveniently distant place.

Enlisting

A story.

Literacy at the Barricades

We are at present embroiled in a public crisis over the literacy of the American people, sparked a couple of years ago by the sensationalist book of Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America, and fed dutifully in the interim by the news magazines and television networks, with their even more sensationalist "coverage" of this latest American failing.

Prophets With Tenure

Michael Walzer is in the front ranks of contemporary social critics. Still, although we know what Walzer has done, until now it has not been quite clear what Walzer himself thinks he has done. That lacuna is filled in part by Interpretation and Social Criticism, an engaging and eminently readable "theoretical preamble" to a larger and "more explicitly political" book Walzer says he is working on.

Defenders of the Faith

Readers may be a little surprised to discover that Cynthia Ozick's new novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, is dedicated to Philip Roth. Has something changed in the work of either writer that these twain should now meet?

Strategy, by Edward N. Luttwak

Among civilian defense analysts, Edward Luttwak has no peer. In part this is because he is quite inimitable.

The Lobby, by Edward Tivnan

Edward Tivnan believes that a principal obstacle to peace in the Middle East--perhaps the principal obstacle--is Israeli intransigence.

The Care of the Self, by Michel Foucault; Foucault: A Critical Reader, edited by David Couzens Hoy

When Michel Foucault died in 1984 at the age of fifty-seven, he had already established himself as France's reigning maitre a penser, hailed on both sides of the intellectual waters as the next Marx, Nietzsche, and/or Freud.

Descent to Suez, by Evelyn Shuckburgh

Over a long period prior to World War II the British Foreign Office was a principal institution in defense not of Britain alone but of the international order.

The Selected Letters of Mark Van Doren, edited by George Hendrick

It is startling how little remains of Mark Van Doren, how little he is present to us today, fifteen years after his death.

Janus and Minerva, by Stanley Hoffmann

Inside this rather fat book by Stanley Hoffmann, a professor of international relations at Harvard and a well-known liberal proponent of realism in foreign policy, there are two thinner books struggling to get out.

Poles and Jews

Watergate and After

Cambodia

The Importance of Sidney Hook

Of the writers who belonged to the original "family" of the now much-chronicled New York intellectuals, Sidney Hook has been in several important respects the most unusual.

A Farewell to Civil Rights

Last spring I resigned as chairman of the Indiana Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The grounds for estrangement between the commission and its critics were many, but at their heart lay fundamentally different conceptions not merely of where civil-rights policies ought to go but of how they should be defined in the first place.

Can the Media Be Reformed?

In the wake of Gary Hart's withdrawal from the presidential race, the American press and its friends are as divided on a major ethical issue as they have been in a long time. Are journalists morally right to train their batteries of criminal-investigation techniques on people who are not perpetrators of any crime? Has the press crossed a vital line in claiming the right to examine even the most private aspects of public persons' lives?

Joanna Loves Jesus A Story

A story.

The Pornography Report That Never Was

Rutledge Hill Press's latest offering bears the nondescript title Final Report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography. This book, the trade edition of the Meese Commission's 1986 report on pornography, is now in its second edition, with sales of 65,000 at last count. Yet no one but Rutledge Hill Press printed it to date. Why not?

Liberalism & the Hebrew Prophets

It has long been an article of faith among American Jews that their political liberalism expresses traditional Jewish values. Liberalism, however, is not an expression of the biblical tradition, but an alternative to it.

Why Europeans Support the Sandinistas

I was invited by the United States Information Agency (USIA) to visit six Western European countries this past May to explain our Central American policy. The following reflections are taken from a journal of the trip.

Bernstein: A Biography, by Joan Peyser

In the brief time since its publication, Joan Peyser's new biography of Leonard Bernstein has been frequently and vigorously attacked in the press.

Enemy in the Promised Land, by Sana Hasan

From 1974 to 1977 Sana Hasan gained notoriety as "the Egyptian in Israel," the wayward daughter of Egypt's former ambassador to the United States who had undertaken a "personal mission for peace" in defiance of her parents, her government, and her diplomat-husband, who divorced her shortly after her arrival in "the promised land."

The Next Left, by Michael Harrington

Michael Harrington's The Next Left, a work of unrelieved economic argument, aims to demonstrate that the prosperity Americans believe they enjoy is both shaky and illusory.

The Special Relationship, edited by Wm. Roger Louis and Hedley Bull

The widespread use of the term "American imperialism" must be counted among the more significant features of the post-1945 political world.

Midrash and Literature, edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick

Over the past fifteen years or so, literary studies in our leading universities have undergone a complete turnabout.

Nixon: The Education of a Politician 1913-1962, by Stephen E. Ambrose

During his 1962 bid for the California governorship, Richard Nixon was not helped by the remark of the master of ceremonies at one of his fund-raising dinners: "Too many people are saying, 'I don't like Nixon, but I don't know why.'"

On Serwyn Bialer

Interfaith Dialogue

Street People

What Price Messianism?

How Eminent Physicists Have Lent Their Names to a Politicized Report on Strategic Defense

The major media uncritically spread the message: the nation's senior physicists had risen above the partisan clamor over the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), conducted an impartial study, and concluded that all the talk of a serious defense against ballistic missiles was nonsense. In fact, the American Physical Society (APS) report was not written by an impartial jury of qualified scientists.

The Imperial Congress

A revisionist version of American history is in the process of being written to account for and to justify the newly assertive role of Congress in the conduct of foreign policy. It claims that with the emergence of the US as a major world power, successive Presidents have violated the letter and spirit of the Constitution, and led the nation into reckless and illegal overseas commitments.

Israel: A House Divided?

Since no one has yet found a way of persuading most Arabs of Israel's rightful and permanent presence in the region, the Jews have to argue among themselves the hypothetical question of which approach is likelier to overcome enemy resistance. The longer the argument continues, the stronger it grows.

Reclaiming the Catholic Heritage

My generation of Catholic students was taught that Communism was the enemy of God and man. My children face a changed ideological climate. Since Catholic schools reflect what the hierarchy is thinking, the view from the strategic promontory of Catholic education upon the ideological battle being waged for the soul of the West, leads one to a startling conclusion: the Catholic Church has changed sides in the war.

The Succession A Story

A story.

Sid, You Made the Prose Too Thin

A story.

Salinger Then and Now

Even though he has published nothing since 1965, the books of J.D. Salinger remain popular. The Catcher in the Rye alone still sells some 250,000 copies worldwide each year.

Chaim Weizmann: A Biography, by Norman Rose

One of the small signs suggesting that Jews are at last beginning to be able to deal with the recent history of their people with relatively cool heads is the change that has come over the reputation of certain major figures in it.

From This Moment On: America in 1940, by Jeffrey Hart

As times change so do preferences for the past. In the 1960's and 1970's, the eras of choice were the American 1930's (on their politically radical side) and 1920's Weimar Germany (on its culturally radical side).

American Society: Public and Private Responsibilities, edited by Winthrop Knowlton and Richard Zeckhauser

Not least among the supposedly novel beliefs attributed to the Reagan administration is that many activities undertaken by government should rather be done in the private sector.

The Complete Yes Minister: The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, edited by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay

In a brilliant lecture about a decade ago, the late Sir Huw Wheldon, then presiding genius of BBC Television, contrasted the traditions informing television drama in Britain and America.

Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, by John S. Rigden

I.I. Rabi is the grand old man of American science. Born in 1898, he is a survivor of a generation of young Americans who traveled to Europe in the 1920's to participate in the intellectual revolution that accompanied the invention of quantum mechanics.

The Black and the Red: Francois Mitterrand, The Story of an Ambition, by Catherine Nay

If Francois Mitterrand runs for a second seven-year term as President of France next year and wins, it will surprise no one. In a long political career he has taught his countrymen to expect of him perseverance beyond every other quality.

The Constitution

Moses

South Africa

New Israelis

Minimalist Fiction

Technical Intelligence

Utopians & Realists

Fact & Fiction

Teen-age Pregnancy

Polish History

“Alzheimer's”

Crime, the Constitution, and the Iran-Contra Affair

It was obvious that the announcement on November 25, 1986 by Attorney General Edwin Meese that profits from the secret sale of arms to Iran had been diverted to the democratic resistance in Nicaragua would trigger the bloodiest political battle since Watergate. It was not, however, obvious that self-evidently illegal acts had been committed in the Iran-contra affair.

Resurrecting the New Left

Wrapped within the current boom in 60's rock-and-roll, and within the more elusive nostalgia for a time when drugs and promiscuous sex seemed there to be enjoyed without consequence, lies a movement to bring about a resurrection of the 60's in their specifically political aspect.

Pagans, Christians, Jews

When, as a schoolboy in England many years ago, I learned of the statement by W.R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, that his Christian faith owed much more to the Greeks than to the Jews, I could not have been more surprised. How, I wondered in some consternation, could an eminent Christian divine ignore the obvious source of his own religion? And how could he identify with the Greeks?

Total Immersion A Story

A story.

Justice to John P. Marquand

"When you are dead," John P. Marquand once said, "you are very dead, intellectually and artistically." Twenty-seven years after Marquand's death, he is very dead indeed.

Israel's Providential Men

The creation of the state of Israel, one of the few events in our tragic century of which one can truthfully say, "This was a good work," invites serious thought about that curious historical no man's land where spiritual and secular forces meet. It was as though, somewhere in the background, the messiah was lurking, never quite making his appearance. But who was the providential man?

Beyond Glasnost

Literary periodicals are in great demand these days in the Soviet Union, and issues of particular interest are sold out in hours, if not in minutes. The reason is simply that, as in 19th-century Russia, literature in the Soviet Union provides a framework within which views can be expressed that cannot be aired in other venues--even at a time, like the present, of relative relaxation.

Hemingway, by Kenneth S. Lynn

Ernest Hemingway began as a miniaturist, writing highly concentrated vignettes and very short stories, all of them full of multiple shaded meanings.

Waltzing With a Dictator, by Raymond Bonner

Suddenly, it seems, nobody in the West wants strongmen any more. From South Korea to Haiti to Panama, authoritarian regimes that once seemed eminently solid are getting a substantial shakedown.

“With All Your Possessions”: Jewish Ethics and Economic Life, by Meir Tamari

The role played by religion in the development of economic systems has been a subject of respectable scholarly investigation since the time of Max Weber and R.H. Tawney.

Showdown at Gucci Gulch, by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Alan S. Murray

Showdown at Gucci Gulch is an account of the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, told by two young reporters in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal who covered the story for nearly three years as it was unfolding.

Sands of Sorrow, by Milton Viorst

Milton Viorst, a journalist and one of a number of former liberal supporters of Israel who in recent years have turned on the Jewish state and now regularly excoriate its policies, sets out to prove that the fault (dear Brutus) lies not in the twists of contemporary liberal politics but in the metamorphosis of Israel itself.

Philosophy & Faith

Judicial Review

Latin America

Pornogrpahy

Europe & the Sandinistas

Pakistan & the West Bank

Cynthia Ozick

Dialogue

AIDS: Are Heterosexuals at Risk?

AIDS, we have been told, is not just a "gay disease," or a disease of intravenous (IV) drug abusers passing contaminated needles. It can break out into the general heterosexual population at any time. Yet CDC's chief epidemiologist, Dr. Harold Jaffe, has stated that "Those who are suggesting that we are going to see an explosive spread of AIDS in the heterosexual population have to explain why this isn't happening."

The New York (Jewish) Intellectuals

By now, most educated Americans know something of the New York intellectuals and their achievement. This community of intellectuals, most of whom were the children of Jewish immigrant families, changed for all time the atmosphere of American letters.

Population Scares

Since the 1960's, population pressure and growth have been widely regarded as prime causes of Third World poverty and prime obstacles to economic development. The conclusions this assumption leads to all go counter to simple evidence and to widely accepted moral principles.

The Feminization of the American Left

It is ironic, in this putatively conservative age, that such a radical social movement as feminism should be so pervasive an influence. It would be difficult to imagine a more revolutionary transformation that could have occurred in our common life than the rearrangement of relations between the sexes that has developed over the past two decades. What surprises even more is that this transformation should have gone so relatively unopposed and even unremarked.

Atonal Music and Its Limits

The modern era in Western music began in 1911 with the publication of Arnold Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony, which declared that "tonality is no natural law of music, eternally valid."

On Becoming a Jew

One morning in the summer of 1978, and in the manner prescribed by Jewish law, I became a Jew. Such an event is something one does not easily forget, and in my case the occasion was made especially memorable by its setting and circumstances.

A Cautionary Case of Bilingualism

Unlike every other wave of mass immigration to the United States, the influx of Hispanics has been accompanied by widespread pressure for the development of some sort of institutional bilingualism.

Mortal Rivals, by William G. Hyland

When Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger assumed responsibility for the foreign policy of the United States in 1969, they faced a horrendous situation.

Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, by Sholem Aleichem

Sholem Aleichem (pen-name for Sholem Rabinovich, born in Russia, 1859, died in New York, 1916) remains the central figure of modern Yiddish fiction--not with regard to technique or style, which have since followed other paths, but in his profound identification through his characters and his vivid narrators with the collective spirit of Yiddish-speaking Jewry.

“Them”: Stalin'S Polish Puppets, by Teresa Toranska

Some of the fascination exercised by Communism derives from the atmosphere of intense secrecy which has historically enveloped its leading personalities.

Punishment Without Walls, by Douglas Corry McDonald

Over the last two decades, criminal-justice scholars, policymakers, and activists have been tripping over one another in a rush to find meaningful alternatives to incarceration.

Curse of the Giant Muffins and Other Washington Maladies, by Michael Kinsley

The dust jacket of Curse of the Giant Muffins and Other Washington Maladies describes Michael Kinsley as "the hottest young columnist in Washington."

Prison Writings, by Kim Dae-Jung

On a dull Monday morning in June of this year, the presidential choice of South Korea's ruling Democratic Justice party (DJP), Roh Tae-Woo, stunned the world with his announcement that he would urge President Chun Doo Huan to accept every major reform demanded by the opposition, especially direct presidential elections.

Journalistic Ethics

Goals & Quotas

New Zealand

Catholics & Patriotism

The Imperial Congress

J.D. Salinger

Letter to the New Republic

Remembering Vietnam

In Saigon between 1965 and 1966, while I was serving as counselor to the American embassy, I lived for about fourteen months in a street called Phan Dinh Phung, a name that had unaccountably slipped my mind, until I came across it again in The Palace File, by Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold S. Schecter, a recently published history of the last years of the war.

A Light Unto the Nations?

Dear B, In the absence of a letter from you I am reading those of the "father of Zionist socialism," Moses Hess--the ones that make up his 1862 book Rome and Jerusalem.

Inventing the Homosexual

From antiquity until perhaps a century ago, choice was presumed to govern sexual behavior. But in the late 19th century, with a burgeoning medical science as midwife, a new kind of creature was born--"the homosexual"--his entire identity based on his sexual preference.

A Fateful Intellectual Friendship

Intellectual issues--such as just what sort of redemption could be offered to a fallen world--are no less urgent now than they were in the 1920's and 30's, when Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish mysticism, and the German critic Walter Benjamin, debated them. The Scholem-Benjamin friendship is thus of peculiar pertinence today.

A Boy's Own Author

The first author who had a distinct existence for me when I was a boy was a man, still very much alive when I began to read his books in my thirteenth year (1950), named John R. Tunis.

The Columbus Argument

There might be good arguments for being anti-conservative in particular circumstances. But are there any good arguments for being anti-conservative in all circumstances? There has only ever been one very general argument for anti-conservatism, as far as I know. I call it the "They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus Argument."

Toni Morrison's Career

The tension between protest and transcendence, between suffering and strength, between determinism and personal will, between collective and individual identity--inform and structure the work of the much celebrated black woman novelist, Toni Morrison, whose latest book, Beloved, is now high on the best-seller lists.

Veil, by Bob Woodward

Despite the near-total lack of documentation for most of Bob Woodward's tales in this book about the CIA under the directorship of the late William J. Casey, Veil has been widely praised as an insider's account of the secret activities of the Reagan administration.

Gershwin, by Edward Jablonski

It is probably fair to say that George Gershwin (1898-1937) was the most famous American musical figure of his brief time. He died before reaching his thirty-ninth birthday, and did not achieve celebrity until 1924, wth the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, though the date could perhaps be pushed back to 1922, when Paul Whiteman recorded "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise," or even to 1920, when Al Jolson recorded "Swanee."

Sacred Survival, by Jonathan Woocher

The term civil religion, popularized by Robert Bellah in a seminal essay of 1967, commonly refers to the symbols, rituals, myths, and tenets that together comprise "the transcendent universal religion of the nation."

Man of the House, by Thomas P. O'Neill with William Novak

The early 1980's were a dismal time for Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. In the most memorable televised campaign spot of the 1980 elections, an O'Neill look-alike was cast as the ultimate Washington pol, driving an immense, sputtering gas-guzzler, wanting to spend, spend, spend, but short of the cash to refuel.

The Collected Essays and Criticism, by Clement Greenberg, edited by John O'Brian

Clement Greenberg is widely regarded as the most important art critic of his generation. Perhaps best known for his early and vigorous championing of abstract art, Greenberg was one of the first to appreciate the distinctive achievement of what has come to be known as Abstract Expressionism.