SDI & the Scientists

The Law & Iran Contra

Theodore Herzl

South Africa

“Unsung Hero”

The War Against Robert H. Bork

Pro-Bork and anti-Bork politicians worked together at the end to hustle the Bork debate off the public stage as quickly as possible. Well they might. The war against Robert Bork showed the modern American Left at its ugliest, and the response by pro-Bork forces showed the Right at its most impotent.

Responding to the Bible

The Hebrew Bible, that thunderous, juicy compendium of sacred law, poetry, history, and novella, is supremely a reader's book, a book for reading and even a book about reading.

McCarthyism: The Last Refuge of the Left

In the 1950'S Senator Joseph R. McCarthy made a career of finding Reds under every bed. Today, the culture which so despises him finds traces of McCarthy himself under every bed. In some sense, the term is just another weapon in the language of combat. But it also has a more specific function in our political culture.

On Being Black and Middle Class

Not long ago a friend of mine said to me that the term "black middle class" was actually a contradiction in terms. Race, he insisted, blurred class distinctions among blacks. But today, when I honestly look at my life and the lives of many other middle-class blacks I know, I can see that race never fully explained our situation in American society.

Hollywood Goes to Vietnam

As soon as Platoon, Oliver Stone's movie about the Vietnam war, was released a year ago, it was showered with praise. Three more Vietnam films followed hard on the heels of Platoon in 1987. They all articulate today's "apolitical" view of the Vietnam war.

My Hungary and Theirs

Hungary under the long reign of Janos Kidar has often been seen in the West as a wave of the future, a model of evolutionary transformation within the Soviet bloc and its only success story. My recent visit provided me with a new understanding of both changing conditions and the limits of change in this small but resourceful nation.

Righting Wrongs

In his autobiography Bertrand Russell mentions many brilliant people he had known at Cambridge early in the century. But one of these, John Maynard Keynes, left on him a unique impression of intellectual force.

The Long Peace, by John Lewis Gaddis

In the spectrum of historians writing about the cold war, John Lewis Gaddis belongs in the category of post-revisionists.

The Italians and the Holocaust, by Susan Zuccotti

When I went back to school in Turin after World War II, I learned that most of my teachers had been members of the resistance, participants in the anti-fascist network which suffered many losses and supplied heroes and legends to my generation of young Italians.

Enterprising Elite, by Robert F. Dalzell, Jr.

To anyone familiar with recent trends in the field of social history, with its disdain for traditional literary sources, its self-conscious determination to rewrite history "from the bottom up," and its disregard for great men, great events, and great ideas, this book must come as a refreshing surprise.

Looking Forward, by George Bush with Victor Gold

The jacket copy of Looking Forward promises "the first autobiography written by a Vice President while still in office." That is not a reason to read it, of course; a better reason is the fact that, despite a gift for the maladroit remark and the presence of a host of rivals, George Bush is still the odds-on choice to win the first post- Reagan Republican presidential nomination.

Miami: The City of the Future, by T.D. Allman; Miami, by Joan Didion; Going to Miami, by David Rieff

Miami is the Hong Kong of the Americas, a dazzling, cashrich entrep6t alongside an alien and profitable presence, the baffling diversity that we prefer to know, simply, as Latin America and the Caribbean.

Heterosexuals & AIDS

Atonal Music

The Constitution

American Jews and Israel A Symposium

Never, perhaps, has criticism of the state of Israel by American Jews been so open, so widespread, and so bitter as it is today. Commentary asked 49 American Jewish intellectuals: Have your attitudes toward Israel changed in recent years? To what extent do you believe Israel has fulfilled, or disappointed, the hopes vested in it? How do you feel about the upsurge of Jewish criticism of Israel?

The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe

What happens when one of the kings of the New Journalism, who throughout his career has employed fictional techniques in his reportage, decides to write a novel?

The Life of the Party, by Robert Kuttner

Robert Kuttner, who is among the more prominent of the Democratic party's younger intellectuals, has the soul of a Tammany ward boss.

Answered Prayers, by Truman Capote

Almost thirty years ago, Norman Mailer wrote of Truman Capote: ... he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm....

The Velvet Prison, by Miklos Haraszti

The Velvet Prison appears at a particularly opportune moment. The author, a prominent Hungarian opposition intellectual, argues that in Communist countries the relaxation of state control over cultural affairs has not--indeed, cannot--enhance the freedom of the artist.

Duke Ellington, by James Lincoln Collier

In recent years James Lincoln Collier, formerly known as the author of several highly praised children's books, has emerged as one of our most prominent writers on jazz.

Sight Lines, by Arlene Croce

Arlene Croce is generally thought to be our most eminent dance critic, but on the evidence of this book, mostly drawn from her reviews over the last five years in the New Yorker, she is no longer responding critically to the current American dance scene.

Freedom, by William Safire

William Safire's new historical novel makes an imposing space for itself on the shelf of contemporary Civil War fiction. Covering the first two years of Lincoln's presidency, from the Inauguration in 1861 to the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year's Day in 1863, Freedom brings alive the political issues, the personal rivalries, and the battlefield tragedy that marked these critical years in American history.

Conversion

Homosexuality

American Foreign Policy

Ludwig Lewisohn

Bilingualism

Pagan, Christians, Jews

Lincoln & Emancipation

Reagan's Rush to Disarm

Whether to his most passionate traditional supporters or to his bitterest long-time critics, President Reagan's unreserved embrace of arms control in the final months of his administration has come as a considerable surprise.

As I See Gorbachev

Three days before the Reagan-Gorbachev summit last December, I was invited to a briefing in which four Soviet officials in the new spirit of glasnost spent 90 minutes answering journalists' questions. It did not take long to realize that the script of the show was the same: the same tired catechisms, the same doubletalk, and the same fear of making "mistakes."

Inventing Hebrew Prose

Most readers of fiction these days, in Israel and elsewhere, take for granted the viability of the Hebrew language as a vehicle of modern literary expression. Behind these recent achievements, however, lies a long, uneven, and in some ways quite improbable growth of the language toward maturity as a medium of realistic fiction.

The New Welfare Debate

Welfare reform, one of the hardy perennials of American politics, has been revived in Washington. But the politics of welfare has altered: where in the past controversy centered on the issue of expanded benefits, today debate has shifted mostly to "workfare"- i.e., proposals requiring that adult welfare recipients work or otherwise better themselves in return for support.

Do Spies Matter?

It is often said that spies are largely irrelevant to the overall course of international politics. Epidemics of treason may be disturbing for what they imply about the societies that spawn traitors, but espionage itself has had a relatively minor impact on world affairs. With respect to contemporary events, the validity of this argument is difficult to assess.

No Pulitzer for Pinsker A Story

A story.

Why Johnny Is Ignorant

Does the enormous popular success of books like Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy prove, as some conservatives claim, that a long-suffering majority is finally venting its disapproval of the way in which America's children are being taught?

The Trial of Socrates, by I.F. Stone

There is something charming in seeing someone begin the study of ancient languages and literature late in life after a very different career devoted to practical and current worldly business.

A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis, by Peter Gay

As anyone acquainted with his work knows, Peter Gay is an enthusiastic partisan of the Enlightenment. From earliest writings, he has consistently championed the rational disenchantment of the world.

The Fords, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

Chronicles of great 20th-century American families tend to fall into two divided camps: on the one side, foot-stomping denunciations of the depredations and corruptions of the powerful; on the other, and these days far less common, side, saccharine, flowery treatments that are often the work of kept biographers.

Korea at the Crossroads, Report of the Korea Study Group

Late in the 19th century, Korea was known in the West as the "hermit kingdom." Remote, impoverished, and unwelcoming to foreign visitors, it was a nation neither greatly affected by nation neither greatly affected by world affairs nor particularly desirous of participating in them.

Timebends, by Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller's new autobiography, Timebends: A Life, is so chronologically scrambled an account of his family, friendships, marriages, and theatrical and political activities that to sort out the temporal sequence of events is likely to give the reader a bad case of "the rapture of the deep."

The Bible & Its Readers

John Stuart Mill

Harry Dexter White

Vietnam

Black and Middle Class

John R. Tunis

Miami

Veterans Memorial

Poles and Jews

AIDS and Needles

The Return of Eugenics

Eugenics--the movement to improve and even perfect the human species by technological means--arose in the late 19th century and flourished in this country and in Europe until the 1930's. Then it was challenged by scientific counter-evidence and discredited by the Third Reich. But now, in the journals and in the textbooks, the story is being told differently. The problem, it is said, was not so much with eugenics itself but with the Nazis.

Can Israel Withdraw?

We have heard about the practical, political, and moral problems that have been created for Israel by the occupation. Rarely have Israel's critics faced the issue of what is increasingly coming to seem the alternative: Israeli withdrawal from the territories followed by the setting up of a new Palestinian state which would almost certainly be ruled by the PLO.

Arms Control & Its Casualties

With the conclusion this past December of the INF accord and the prospect of other agreements to come, an American administration has once again placed arms control at the center of our foreign policy.

Gorbachev Without Illusions

In its first three years under Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union has passed through a period of crisis which began well before his advent to power and which shows no sign of ending.

Bashing Toscanini

Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) was the most highly acclaimed conductor of his time, both in Europe and in this country. But there was always a grudging undercurrent of objection to him.

Varieties of Yiddish Verse-In English

Un vu bizt du geven . . .?--"And where were you when we needed you?"--asks a plaintive old Yiddish song. The question might be asked of Yiddish itself.

Calculated Risks, by Bruce Berkowitz; The Arms Control Delusion, by Malcolm Wallop and Angelo M. Codevilla

Neither Bruce Berkowitz nor Malcolm Wallop and Angelo Codevilla tolerate gladly those who would center America's national security policy in the magic kingdom of arms control.

Trump: The Art of the Deal, by Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz

In an accelerated world, it seems hardly extraordinary that a very rich New Yorker named Donald J. Trump should, at about forty-one years of age, publish his autobiography.

Women and Love, by Shere Hite

The noise over Shere Hite's latest book, Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution, has come and gone, and so has the book itself. This must be an embarrassment for all concerned.

Holy Terror: Inside the World of Islamic Terrorism, by Amir Taheri

Holy Terror represents a major effort by an Iranian Muslim to take stock of a decade of Islamic revolution. To be sure, Amir Taheri, an Iranian journalist now living in London, is no prose stylist or philosopher, nor is he a careful writer.

Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann

In recent decades Oscar Wilde has enjoyed a run on the intellectual exchange like no other Victorian. "With each passing year the figure of Wilde becomes clearer and larger," Lionel Trilling wrote in 1972.

The START Treaty

Bork & His Enemies

Israel & the Intellectuals: A Failure of Nerve?

If Israel rather than the Arabs is to be declared the violator of the rights of others and the villainous perpetrator of the region's refugee problem, what needs to be done is to erase all geographic and historical perspective. And this is indeed where they have scored their most brilliant success in the West today.

What We Know About the Homeless

A recent approach to dealing with the homeless claims that homelessness is a huge problem and is simply or primarily a housing issue. Mental illness and other disabilities have been greatly exaggerated, and radical tactics and objectives are necessary if the problem is ever to be solved.

The Rise of American Decline

Over the last twenty years, American intellectuals have accused the United States of being imperialistic, arrogant, bellicose, exploitative, brutal, and worse. Now they have added another charge to the list: it is in irreversible decline.

“Jews, Jews Everywhere”

Anti-Semites in the USSR like to harp on the numbers of Jews with successful careers. As the popular folk song goes, "Jews, Jews everywhere..."

The First Revisionist Historian

The title of this essay refers to the Greek historian Thucydides, and it raises several questions. Who was Thucydides, and why should we be interested in his work almost two and a half millennia after it was written? What is a revisionist historian, and how can we think of Thucydides as a revisionist when he seems to have been the first man to write a history of the war that was his subject?

Art, Kitsch & Politics

The designation "high kitsch" is useful. With it one is able to praise something with an ironic faint damn that protects the praiser from the possibility that what he praises may turn out to be more tawdry than he first believed.

Conservative Splits

The Old Right historian and editor Paul Gottfried noted that neoconservatives "have always been open in expressing their contempt for the Old Right." Whether or not this claim is valid, the converse seems to be true: criticism of neoconservatism has come to be an increasingly conspicuous feature of Old Right writings.

Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited, edited by Rosanne Klass; Among the Afghans, by Arthur Bonner; The Wind Blows Away Our Words, by Doris Lessing

As the Soviet-Afghan war has continued year after year, it has taken a terrible toll in human lives. Out of a population of 16 million before the war began in 1979, more than 1 million civilians are dead, 5 million live in desperate conditions of exile, and 1.5 million have relocated within the country.

Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, by Mary Ann Glendon

Nearly twenty years ago, a movement was undertaken to modernize two major areas of family law, abortion and divorce. At the time, advocates of both no-fault divorce and divorce and abortion-on-demand heralded the sought-for changes as a victory for individual rights.

Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara, by David Weiss Halivni

The story is told of an overzealous scholar of the Talmud who came up with a brilliant answer and then searched for a question--any question--to which to attach it.

Showdown, by Jorge Amado

Brazil is a marvel, a continent-country that exists simultaneously in the late 20th century and the mid-19th. Like India, but less bellicose, it is an ungainly, shambling, fragile Third World power.

The Failure of Feminism, by Nicholas Davidson; Feminism and Freedom, by Michael Levin

During the mid-1970's I was briefly a low-rung associate attorney for a corporate law firm. It was one of those career mistakes, for both me and the firm.

American Jews & Israel

Population Control

Tom Wolfe

Education in America

Psychoanalysis

Dance Criticism

Balzac

Making Central America Safe for Communism

If settlements between contending parties are to take hold, they must be enforced not merely by control commissions or border forces but by a broader consensus on the desired outcome. This is precisely what is lacking in Nicaragua, and indeed in Central America as a whole. Instead, we have a diplomatic plan underpinned only by a convergence of a single momentary need--to end U.S. support for the Nicaraguan resistance.

Who Is a Jew

Looking back on Israel's fortieth birthday, one of the issues which the existence of the state has created is that of who is a Jew. The issue is a legal one, but it is also an existential issue in the widest sense, which concerns anyone who is a Jew--whether he accepts or ignores or rejects such an identification or appelation.

William F. Buckley, Jr. and American Conservatism

In 1955, when William F. Buckley, Jr. published the first issue of National Review, conservatism stood at the outer margins of intellectual and political respectability. A quarter-century later, Buckley and his conservative movement had moved to the vital center of American political culture. It was an extraordinary progression, and one that can tell us much of what we need to know to make sense of American politics in our time.

Three Books

What I would like to do here is write on three books which stay with me after sixty years and sometimes turn up in my dreams: Walls of Fire, a novel by Marc Worth (a pseudonym), privately printed in 1925 or 1926; Silberstein, a French novel, its author's name not remembered by me; and W.N.P. Barbellion's The Journal of a Disappointed Man, which Ralph Sipper, the Santa Barbara rare-book dealer, tells me is long, long out of print.

“Glasnost,” the KGB, and the “Nation”

Sergei Gregoryants, who has spent ten of his forty-six years in Soviet prisons and labor camps, was among some 150 political prisoners released in 1987 by order of the Politburo, in the first dramatic demonstration of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of openness or glasnost. Today, however, the threat of persecution again darkens Grigoryants's life, a threat brought on by his insistence on taking the promise of glasnost seriously and abetted by a slanderous article featured in the American weekly, the Nation.

Did the U.S. Recruit Nazi War Criminals?

The "revisionist" interpretation of the origins of the cold war appears to be making a comeback. Only, this time around it is thinner, cruder, and meaner than before.

A Failed Musical Genius

Alles ist nach seiner Art--everything goes after its own fashion; or, one's fate is to live up to whatever one is. In the case of Nicolas Slonimsky, editor-in-chief of the standard Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, genius, or at least the possession of many talents, has gone together with a personal awareness of failed ambitions and only accidental success.

The Yellow Wind, by David Grossman

The Yellow Wind is David Grossman's account, written for the Israeli weekly Koteret Rashit, of his "seven-week journey through the West Bank" in 1987.

Right from the Beginning, by Patrick J. Buchanan

These memoirs by Patrick J. Buchanan--the pertinacious political commentator, syndicated columnist, and former resident controversialist in the administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan--are a near-approximation in the pantheon of conservative political manifestoes to Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative.

Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, by Alasdair MacIntyre

Since its publication in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's earlier book, After Virtue, has attracted a level of general attention seldom accorded to serious works in moral philosophy.

The Suicidal Corporation, by Paul H. Weaver

The Suicidal Corporation is a provocative, often incoherent work that records the conversion of an avowedly neoconservative academic and business journalist into a strenuous critic of Big Business alike.

While Others Build: The Common-Sense Approach to the Strategic Defense Initiative, by Angelo Codevilla

An emphasis on strategic weapons that defend territory and people rather than destroying them is the one substantive legacy that the Reagan administration might have left to American national security policy.

Can Israel Withdraw?

Arms Control

Welfare Reform

Church and State

Socrates

Glasnost & Its Limits

Glasnost, both the term and the concept, has a long and honorable history. Glasnost is a specifically Russian phenomenon: the attempt to combine a non-democratic or anti-democratic mode of government with a certain degree of cultural freedom, with accountability, and with "transparency."

Munich at Fifty

It is now fifty years since Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, and Benito Mussolini met at Munich in September 1938 to strip Czechoslovakia of its territory and its defenses. The results were catastrophic. But as is often the case, historians have obscured such moments when the world has turned in new and darker directions.

The ANC in Its Own Words

According to its partisans in Congress and the media, the African National Congress (ANC)--which represents the principal source of armed opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa--is fundamentally pro-Western. Yet this liberal view can only be sustained by ignoring the immense body of hard evidence proving that the ANC is driven by a commitment to Leninist ideology that goes far beyond mere rhetoric and by political intentions that are concomitantly totalitarian.

Will Herberg in Retrospect

Very few people today remember who Will Herberg was. Yet Herberg, who died eleven years ago, was undeniably one of the most interesting Jewish intellectuals of the last half-century, and one, moreover, whose journey from Marxism to Judaism, and from the political Left to the political Right, resonates with peculiar aptness today.

School Days A Story

A story.

Feminism vs. Literature

Scarcely a single scholarly discipline now stands without its corrective feminist insurgency, and the profession of English literature is no exception. In fact, in literary studies feminism is no longer an insurgency but an ascendancy.

Remembering Sam Spiegel

Sam Spiegel died just a few years ago and a biography of him, already out, deals with the big parties he gave in the 40's at his house in Beverly Hills. Spiegel didn't own the house; I think it wasn't even rented to him but loaned.

At a Tender Age, by Rita Kramer

Rita Kramer takes you to the edge of the abyss and lets you have a long, terrifying look. The abyss is Family Court in New York City as it struggles to cope with violent, abused, and disorderly youth.

The Power Game, by Hedrick Smith; Washington Goes to War, by David Brinkley

As I write this, both The Power Game and Washington Goes to War are on the best-seller lists. Both deserve to be there.

Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate, by Eli N. Evans

Praised to the skies in his lifetime as a brilliant counsel to the powerful, and just as violently condemned as a sly manipulator, Judah Benjamin, the first acknowledged Jew to be a United States Senator, right-hand man to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, secretary of state for the rebel government, celebrated lawyer, and author of the classic Benjamin on Sales, received, after his death, a rather icy treatment.

Schoenberg and the New Music, by Carl Dalhaus

Carl Dalhaus is not only "the leading German musicologist of our day" (as the jacket of the present volume quite rightly claims); he is also, to my mind anyway, the most learned and provocative aesthetician and historian of music now writing anywhere.

The Catholic Moment, by Richard John Neuhaus

In another twenty-nine years, it will have been half a millennium since the autumn day in 1517 when Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg.

The New Eugenics

America in Decline?

Men and Women

The Homeless

Toscanini

Who Killed Poetry?

The main modernist poets had written with assurance in their bones, as if they knew their worth and knew that posterity would one day know it, too. But the poets who came after them were less sure; they knew something had gone wrong. And they were right. It had.

What the Kiss-and-Tell Books Tell

The hullabaloo over the recent spate of memoirs by former members of the Reagan administration has been so entirely off the mark that little is known about what these supposedly tell-all accounts actually reveal.

Communism, Anti-Semitism & the Jews

Jews and Communism: in the 1980's, this is a pairing with diminishing resonance, yet one that does continue to quicken images, however disparate, in the collective memory.

Living With Women's Lib

When the women's movement began to show some muscle in the late 60's and early 70's, I decided it was a passing fad, like the hula hoop. It did not seem possible to me that ideas in such obvious contradiction of the facts should be able to inspire and propel a serious mass movement. It was the worst cultural prediction of my life.

A “New Racism” on Campus?

Campus racism is receiving national attention, but questions of fact and of interpretation make its reality problematic and also ensure that discussion of the subject will invariably become heated. Some believe that others are looking for a chance to make an issue out of racism; according to the latter, the former are blinded by their own unadmitted bigotry.

Eyewitness in Gaza

This past May, I rode in the back of a small open jeep as Roni, the captain of our Company A, roared down a sandy side street in pestilential Jebaliya, pursuing a mob of stone-throwers. He tore through a twenty-yard-long putrid-smelling puddle in this rat-infested Gaza refugee camp where the Palestinian uprising, the so-called intifada, began.

Robert Nisbet's America

When a conservative thinker of Robert Nisbet's stature surveys the American scene only to find "a deeply flawed giant; not yet moribund but ill-gaited, shambling, and spastic of limb, often aberrant of mind," his claims to our attention are several.

America Invulnerable, by James Chace and Caleb Carr

Revisionist perspectives on U.S. Foreign policy have been a booming industry since that far-off day in 1959 when William Appleman Williams published his radical classic, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.

Zionism: The Crucial Phase, By David Vital

Seventy years ago, three decades before the Holocaust, the Jews of Eastern Europe were already a broken people, and their survival, both as individuals and as a community, was very uncertain.

Passage to a Human World, by Max Singer

If the quest for material progress has come increasingly to direct our everyday activity, it does not seem to have bestowed upon us any corresponding insight into the nature of the world we are so busily creating.

George Balanchine, Ballet Master, by Richard Buckle in collaboration with John Taras

On the surface, the English dance critic Richard Buckle would seem eminently qualified to write a biography of George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer of the 20th century.

Money and Class in America, By Lewis H. Lapham; America's Upper Class, by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.

Each of these books is by a representative of the patrician, aristocratic, or equestrian class--the choice of term being a function of which part of which book is under scrutiny--and each author expresses at least some degree of dissatisfaction with the value system in which he was schooled.

Israel & the Intellectuals

American Conservatism

One Book

Arms Control

The Grand March

Dorris Lessing

The Coming of Custodial Democracy

Although we may be seeing a traditional liberal cycle in policies that affect middle-class and upper-class interests, education, the environment, industrial regulation, and the like, policies aimed at the black underclass in the inner city are likely to reflect a different, and more ominous, set of dynamics. These policies will turn out to be custodial in nature, and their effect will be to make the underclass into wards of the state.

How Ronald Reagan Weakened the Presidency

There is a general impression that Ronald Reagan has been a strong President, perhaps the strongest since Franklin D. Roosevelt. And indeed in a number of ways Reagan has exercised power very effectively. Yet as keeper of the institution of the presidency, he has been a failure.

Judaism According to Emil Fackenheim

In the course of overlapping careers as rabbi, professor of philosophy, and theologian, Emil Fackenheim has produced a shelf of books that must be considered among the most important works of serious Jewish religious thought in the second half of this century.

En Route to the Gulag

For seven months now, ever since my arrest and trial, I have been living like a queen here in prison: doors are flung open before me wherever I go--into cells, interrogation rooms, the courtroom...Other hands close these doors behind me, too.

The River Temz

A story.

Where Is Zion?

To anyone resident in Israel during the months since the Arab uprising began in December 1987, it will come as no surprise that there has been a drop in the numbers of American Jews visiting the country. The idea of America as a new Zion was a prominent theme of the Puritans who built the country. But recently this idea has been infused with a specifically Jewish--and anti-Zionist--energy, and it has found articulate spokesmen in more than one sector of he ideological spectrum of American Jewry.

Virgil Thomson & Musical Taste

In the case of the American composer and critic Virgil Thomson, the immense pleasure both taken and given over the course of a lifespan that exceeds the bounds of our century has always been evident, in his jaunty and touching musical compositions no less than in his writings.

Fear No Evil, by Natan Sharansky

Of gadflies born to make an alien tyrant's life hell, few have been as high-spirited, or as resilient, as Anatoly (now Natan) Sharansky, the Soviet Jewish human-rights activist who in 1986, by dint of a nine-year international campaign conducted by his wife Avital, was released from the gulag to liberty in Jerusalem.

A Brief History of Time, by Stephen W. Hawking

The title of Stephen Hawking's new book is unduly modest. A Brief History of Time is indeed brief, but it is considerably more than a history and it deals with a far wider range of topics than time.

Peace and Revolution, by Guenter Lewy

A better subtitle for this valuable book would be "The Moral Collapse of American Pacifism." The moral crisis is long past.

The Letters of Edith Wharton, edited by R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis

When one reflects on the popularity of Edith Wharton's work in her lifetime, the vast body of serious literary criticism her work generated and still generates, and her enduring and fully justified reputation as a major American novelist--moreover, our best woman novelist--the fact that her correspondence has been so long delayed in publication is something of a mystery.

Beyond Malice, by Richard M. Clurman; The Coming Battle for the Media, by William A. Rusher

Richard Clurman and William Rusher approach their subject from divergent backgrounds. Clurman, a long-time editor and executive with Time Inc., has behind him a career inside one of the country's mainline media giants.

Who Is a Jew

Nazi War Criminals

World War I

Anti-Missile Defense

Liberalism & American Jews

American Jews, in their overwhelming majority, are politically rooted in a liberal tradition. That is presumably why, as Milton Himmelfarb has noted, Jews in this country have the economic status of white Anglo-Saxon Episcopalians but vote more like low-income Hispanics. How to explain this anomaly, unique in the American experience?

Before and After Glasnost

Gorbachev's reforms have created a new and critical situation in the Soviet Union. What is critical about the current situation can be understood by asking: what will the Soviet Union be like if its economic and strategic situation improves?

Is Jordan Palestine?

King Hussein's recent declaration that "there should be the separation of the West Bank from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan" presents all parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict with opportunities and dangers. The future balance among Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians depends in good part on which of the two conflicting views of the Jordan-is-Palestine theory will prevail.

Religion in Politics; Politics in Religion

Perhaps it is a fair indication of the national mood that each of the parties' 1988 nominees for President is a more or less non-ideological, pragmatic, managerial type, who does not evince more than a faint tinge of religiosity, and who does not have any deep appeal to the religious groups that found Reagan so attractive. In short, the issues of religion-in-politics are dormant, for now. But it would be a mistake to think that they are gone for good.

In Praise of Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon remains the most enigmatic of American Presidents. He has been around longer than any other public man in the West, apart from Francois Mitterrand. We ought to know everything about him by now. Yet we know very little.

Clean Dancing

Among the many targets of the revolutionary cultural spirit of the 1960's, the original and arguably most important were sexual roles and the relationship between the sexes. And in the 1980's, among the many signs of a wish to return to pre-60's cultural styles has been the at least partial restoration of traditional sexual roles, as evidenced by new trends in dance.

Adultery, from Hawthorne to Updike

Surely ours is an age in which a work like Nathaniel Hawthorne's 19th-century masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, could no longer be written. For one thing, the story of a single act of adultery so severely consequential that it fatally transforms the lives of all it touches would be taken as something of a joke in an era that has witnessed open marriage and wife-swapping.

Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies, by S. Steven Powell

The chief issues adviser to Reverend Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign this year was Robert Borosage, for the past decade the executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

The Sisterhood, by Marcia Cohen

Although at first blush The Sisterhood looks like a semischolarly history of American feminism in the 60's and 70's, the reader quickly discovers that it is something else.

Chekisty: A History of the KGB, by John J. Dziak; On the Wrong Side: My Life in the KGB, by Stanislav Levchenko; Secret Servant: My Life With the KGB and the Soviet Elite, by Ilya Dzhirkvelov

For many years, books about the KGB were relatively rare. Now all of a sudden we are waist-deep in them, and many are quite good.

A Life, by Elia Kazan

Elia Kazan's claim to attention is based mostly on his part in a few decades of American entertainment. In the 30's he was a member of the Group Theater, which he left to become a well-known director on Broadway.

A Little Love in Big Manhattan, by Ruth R. Wisse

The story Ruth R. Wisse tells in her latest book is, like the poem from which she takes her title, ironic and bittersweet. It is the story of a group of young Yiddish-speaking immigrants immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York who lived for poetry.

Glasnost

Poetry

Soviet Dissidents

Music in Our Time

Is There Still a Soviet Threat?

George Bush observed this fall that as the result of policies pursued by the Reagan administration, "Peace is breaking out all over." Yet there is still a (highly unfashionable) case to the contrary-- that the Soviet Union is as much of a threat as ever, maybe more.

Evolution and the Bible

These tensions between science and religion, never absent yet recently grown strong, nowadays focus mainly on the subject of evolution and its meaning for the Bible.

The Psychology of Altruism

There is a vast literature on moral psychology. After all the toil, has it been worth it? On one hand, we have begun to move toward a surer understanding, one that occasionally takes us a bit beyond what common sense alone would tell us. On the other hand, much of the work has been misdirected and has produced only a small return on the amount of effort invested.

Losing in Latin America

Critics of Ronald Reagan argue that American influence is now on the wane in Latin America because the Reagan administration was too interventionist. Yet if ever there was a case where political decisions at home, and not "imperial overstretch," undermined American power abroad, it is in Latin America.

The Train A Story

A story.

Alger Hiss: A Glimpse Behind the Mask

Devotees of the Hiss case have long hoped that Alger Hiss would one day share his version of that historic episode with the American people. Hence the eagerness with which many awaited his autobiography, which has now finally appeared under the title Recollections of a Life.

Remembering America, by Richard N. Goodwin

For many people-indeed, probably for most of us-the 1960's in retrospect seem not so much an actual series of years as a drama of rapidly changing consciousness.

The Year After the Riots: American Responses to the Palestine Crisis of 1929-30, by Naomi W. Cohen

Some 130 Jews, including eight Americans, are slaughtered during a week of Arab rioting in Palestine. In both Britain and the United States, amid dire predictions about the bleak future of a Jewish homeland, the riots are blamed on unsatisfied Arab political and economic grievances.

All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca, by Dorothy Gallagher

This book presents one of the most remarkable personalities in 20th-century American history: an Italian-born labor leader of anarchist convictions, a pronounced anti-Stalinist, who was assassinated in 1943 in New York, very possibly at the instance of the Communist party.

Two Jewish Justices, by Robert A. Burt

Louis D. Brandeis grew up in Kentucky, in the comfortable surroundings of an assimilated German-Jewish family. He carried himself as a patrician, with a personal coolness that was impervious to almost all attempts at intimacy.

Goldwater, by Barry Goldwater with Jack Casserly

In 1964 Barry Goldwater ran for President as a conservative activist and lost by the largest popular margin in history to that date.

Campus Racism

Soviet Anti-Semitism

Women's Lib

The ANC

Feminist Criticism

Capitalism: The Wave of the Future

Since the turn of the century the end of capitalism has been regularly predicted by its opponents on both Left and Right. Yet for all these confident predictions, the 1970's and 1980's have seen the adoption of capitalism's central mechanisms in vast areas of the globe where they formerly played a minor role or no role at all.

Racial Perversity in Chicago

My father was very sound on the subject of prejudice against Negroes (who did not yet wish to be called blacks) and on anti-Semitism. All that he left out is that there might be some blacks who were also strong anti-Semites.

Rewriting the Constitution The Mainstream According to Laurence Tribe

Contemplating the career of Laurence Tribe, former Harvard Dean Erwin Griswold has wondered if any legal scholar off the Court "has ever had a greater influence on the development of American constitutional law." With the recent publication of the second edition of his magnum opus, the 1,778-page American Constitutional Law, Tribe provides a river cruise to navigate the question of where the academy's fresh currents would take us.

Agnon's Antagonisms

I thought that if the prodigal Shmuel Yosef Agnon can be present only in Hebrew, to read him in any other tongue is to be condemned to paucity. But Agnon himself has a different idea of translation and its possibilities.

The Forecasting Game A Story

A story.

“Witness” Recalled

When it first appeared in 1952, Whittaker Chambers's monumental spiritual autobiography Witness was hailed as a masterpiece of political writing and became an immediate best-seller. Today, whatever one's view of the man, Chambers's confessional remains one of the most important works of political literature to be written in America.

The First Freedom

In recent discussions of the place of religious liberty in the American polity, a number of people have argued that it is the first liberty, the foundation of all the other rights and liberties. I agree with this proposition, for the simple but overridingly important reason that the polity which recognizes religious liberty as a fundamental human right thereby recognizes the limits of political power.

Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington

Few books in recent years have provoked so unanimous a critical drubbing as Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington's recent biography of Pablo Picasso.

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, by Neal Gabler

The overall thesis of this long, meandering book is that the immigrant Jews who started the American film industry had an outsider's yearning to become part of American society; that their films reflected an idealized version of America; and that these films, in turn, became so influential as to have defined American values.

Making History: The American Left and the American Mind, by Richard Flacks

So far, the 1980's have not been the best of times for radicals. All around the world, collectivist ideologies have been discredited, and left-wing governments and parties are in retreat.

Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, by Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels has devoted much of her career as a scholar of religion to a single proposition: that formative Christianity developed the way it did not because its doctrines best represented religious truth, but because those doctrines were the most expedient to the growing institutionalization of the Church.

In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, by Charles Murray

This deeply thoughtful book by the author of Losing Ground (1984) recalls the boldness of the early 80's, a time when it seemed as if the very assumptions underlying much of domestic policy were ripe for reconsideration.