Liberalism & American Jews

Anti-Semitism

The AFSC

Best-Seller?

Is Communism Reversible?

Suddenly it seems possible to think about the reversibility of Communism. Does this mean that Communism may be not only reversible but destructible?

Jewish Guilt and Israeli Writers

On October 22, I arrived in Berkeley, California, for a three-day conference on "The Writer in the Jewish Community: An Israeli-North American Dialogue." All the guidelines promised a conference for writers, not about them.

Racial Preference in Court (Again)

On October 11, 1988, for the tenth time in the past eleven years, the Supreme Court once again heard lawyers argue the legality of racial preference. In City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Company, the specific issue is whether a city ordinance requiring that 30 percent of all public-works contracts be subcontracted to businesses owned by blacks or members of other officially designated minority groups violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

Self-Determination, Arab-Style

For thirty years now (in some cases longer, but in the Gulf a little less), the Arab states one and all have been free to make whatever political or social arrangements they choose. To an Englishman of my generation, this evolution at first appeared only right and proper. But what have been the results?

Low Anxiety A Story

A story.

Postmodernist Blues

How did it happen, just when the success of modernism seemed most assured, that it should become an object of such derision and loathing, not just to the public, or to the consumers of art, but to the artistic avant-garde itself? Now that we are some years into the postmodern condition, we may be in a better position to answer that question.

The Second Coming of J.F. Powers

Asked to name the contemporary fiction writers he most admired, Saul Bellow answered with three, among them J.F. Powers, the author (at the time) of three volumes of short stories, and a novel, Morte d'Urban, which won the National Book Award for 1962. Although Powers may not have a large following or a secure niche on the best-seller list, he does have a solid reputation as a writer's writer, and he is widely anthologized.

Day of Reckoning, by Benjamin M. Friedman

Whether or not the departure of Ronald Reagan will bring what has come to be called Reaganomics to an end remains to be seen. Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist, hopes so.

Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, by Jonathan Kaufman

A great deal has been written on black-Jewish relations, but, perhaps surprisingly, we still do not have a really good history of the topic.

Meet Me at Jim & Andy's: Jazz Musicians and Their World, by Gene Lees

Clint Eastwood's movie Bird, a remarkably precise evocation of the life and times of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, is a brutally frank portrait of a psychopath who also happened to be a musical prodigy.

Landslide, by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus

Arriving in the bookstores with almost comically bad timing, Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus's hastily written Landslide is an attempt to explain the "unmaking" of the Reagan presidency.

Jordan/Palestine

Israel & American Jews

Stalin's Terror

Why the Democrats Lost Again

In the months since the Democrats lost the election, precious few of them have drawn the lesson that the party needs to alter what it is offering to the electorate. Instead, a rich though often disharmonious chorus has burst forth with a medley of rationalizations, all aiming to explain away defeat.

Victorian Values/Jewish Values

Margaret Thatcher recently reaffirmed her commitment to Victorian values in the name, as she told the elders of the Church of Scotland, of the "Judaic-Christian tradition." Yet those Victorian values are perhaps more Judaic than Christian.

Life Under Communism Today

It is only in the past several years that something approaching an honest accounting of Communism has been given wide publicity. To the policy of glasnost, of course, must go much of the credit for expanding our understanding of Communism's systemic failures.

The Professor and the L-Word

On the whole, the professor was the very model of a solid liberal academic gentleman.

Hemingway: Portrait of the Artist as an Intellectual

Ernest Hemingway is not only seen to exhibit all the chief characteristics of the intellectual but to possess them to an unusual degree, and in a specifically American combination.

Oral History A Story

A story.

The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace, by Strobe Talbott

The idea of arms control is surprisingly old. Ancient writers mention a treaty between two Greek cities banning the use of missiles in battle as early as perhaps 700 B.C.E. (the missiles designated are arrows, javelins, and the shot hurled from slings).

The Men and Women of Yeshiva, by Jeffrey S. Gurock

During his tenure as Secretary of Education, William J. Bennett frequently urged upon American universities a return to the traditional goals of an undergraduate liberal-arts education: instilling the core values of Western civilization, fostering a critical spirit of inquiry, cultivating an understanding of human nature, nurturing a sense of responsibility for the life of society.

Inside the National Security Council, by Constantine C. Menges; Perilous Statecraft, by Michael A. Ledeen

Even before Ronald Reagan left office, a consensus was forming on his foreign-policy legacy. In the now-predominant view, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union have become stable, the cold war is all but over, and tantalizing prospects exist for negotiations on a whole gamut of issues from arms control to so-called regional conflicts to East-West trade.

A Bright and Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan

The Tet offensive occurred a generation ago; the panicky pullout from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon is now thirteen years in the past.

The Soviet Threat

Richard Nixon

“In God We Trust”

IPS

Israel: A Lamentation From the Future

The whole point of establishing a Jewish state was to ensure that with a state of their own, Jews would no longer be the mere objects of a historical fate over which they had no control. Brave sentiments; and for about twenty-five years--from the founding of the state in 1948 through the Yom Kippur War of 1973--they generated brave deeds.

On Not Being a Dove

IN MEMORIAM. In honor of the life and work of John Updike, we offer this piece from the March 1989 issue of COMMENTARY.

What Was T.S. Eliot?

The centennial of T.S. Eliot's birth, 1988, was a year of reassessments of his role in modern poetry. Whatever the intentions of recent scholars, the general effect of placing more of his private life in the public domain is to confirm many of one's darker suspicions about him.

The Least Responsive Branch

The Constitution established two-year terms in the House of Representatives in order to make it the body most accountable to the voters. Yet the near-complete success of incumbents has transformed the House of Representatives from the most responsive to the least responsive political body.

Nuclear Revisionism

One important by-product of the passionate antinuclear controversy earlier in this decade has been a wave of new and influential revisionist writing on the role of nuclear weapons in postwar history. The central theme of the new revisionist movement, broadly speaking, is the alleged unimportance of nuclear weapons.

Purple Smoke A Story

A story.

The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War; The Archidamian War; The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition; The Fall of the Athenian Empire, by Donald Kagan

Imagine that the only contemporary record of most events of World War II had been written by a well-known general on the losing side, seriously at odds with his own people--a Rommel, say, though of philosophical disposition, moral clarity, evident compassion, and altogether superior intellect.

Response to Modernity, by Michael A. Meyer

In The Origins of the Modern Jew (1967), Michael Meyer deftly described the initial encounter of European Jews with modern secular society.

“They Always Call Us Ladies”: Stories From Prison by Jean Harris

In 1981, Jean Harris, a Smith College graduate and former headmistress of the Madeira School in Virginia, was sentenced to fifteen years to life for the murder of Dr. Herman Tarnower, famous for his Scarsdale Diet.

Hong Kong, by Jan Morris

In Hong Kong, the last great outpost of imperial England, a local TV station has taken to running a weekly series charting the crown's embarrassing forty-year retreat from holdings that not long ago covered more than a quarter of the earth.

The IQ Controversy, by Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman

Not many Americans know a great deal about intelligence testing, but strong opinions about it are rampant. The opinons are overwhelmingly negative.

Genesis 1

Carlo Tresca

Feminism

Agnon and Heine

“Witness”

Can Poland Ever Be Free?

To many observers it seems that over the last year or so Poland has been on the move again, if not so dramatically as in 1980. Yet notwithstanding this initial movement, and the possibility that opposition forces may be brought into the parliament, the atmosphere in Poland today is not one of expectancy and vigor but rather of lassitude, indecision, and defeat--strangely so, since the objective situation would seem in many ways more favorable than in 1980-81.

Behind Behind “Who is a Jew” A Letter from Jerusalem

The three permanent crises in Israel, the trio of open questions, are the Economic, the Cultural-Religious, and the Military-Geopolitical. Now, not only does the Cultural-Religious question remain open--contrary to conventional wisdom, it is the crucial one.

The Only Hope for Latin America

In the so-called Third World, at least to judge by reports in the press, the characteristic motifs are internecine conflict, social regression, and sharp economic decline. This is most dramatically evident in Latin America. In every rubric used to measure well-being, the region as a whole has moved backward.

Why My Grandfather Leon Trotsky Must Be Turning in His Grave

I lived in Moscow in the late 30's with my maternal grandparents. My paternal grandfather, Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein), was in exile in Mexico, where he would be murdered in 1940 on orders of Stalin.

American Jews: Diehard Conservatives

In the United States the 1988 presidential voting showed what diehard conservatives--in their commitment to liberalism--American Jews are. Times have changed and America has changed. Jews have changed hardly at all.

Apocalypse Again

Predictions of the end of the world, as old as human history itself and lately a subject of scholarly inquiry, have by no means abated in our own time. The newest trigger is global warming.

A New Look at Prokofiev

There have been three great modern Russian composers: Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953). Prokofiev began his career at the end of the first decade of this century as a shocking pianist performing his own shocking compositions.

The Brodkey Question

Harold Brodkey has been touted as a literary genius on the basis of a perennially unfinished novel and a handful of difficult-to-read New Yorker stories about his own traumatic childhood. Add to this the image of a self-centered self-promoter, and a figure emerges who seems to epitomize everything inflated, false, and cliquish about literary politics. But Brodkey cannot be dismissed so easily.

Parting the Waters, by Taylor Branch

The United States is probably the most successful political experiment of all time, but it is not utopia. The greatest of its flaws and failings have been in the area of race.

Members of the Tribe, by Ze'ev Chafets

In December of last year my wife and I drove into Natchez, Mississippi. Seeing the dome of a large building that dominated the skyline, we headed toward what we assumed was the town hall or one of the antebellum houses for which Natchez is justly famous.

La Capital, by Jonathan Kandell

Only toward the very end of this huge work does Jonathan Kandell, who covered Latin America for the New York Times and is now assistant foreign editor of the Wall Street Journal, begin to convey some sense of the ecological and economic catastrophe that is modern Mexico City.

The Direction of Poetry, edited by Robert Richman

For much of our century, it has seemed that free verse, which became firmly established in English during the heyday of modernism, was for the foreseeable future to be the inevitable form of poetry, and that metrically regular and rhymed verse would be relegated to the occasional technical exercise or atavistic impulse.

Constitutional Law

French Unemployment

The Arabs

Affirmative Action

Postmodernism

Israeli Writers

Low Anxiety

A Nation Still at Risk

Six years ago, a blue-ribbon commission studying our education system declared us a "nation at risk." After significant reforms, it is fair to ask, how are we doing? What have we to show for these sizable infusions of treasure, energy, and concern? Are we any less at risk?

Drugs and Youth

Drugs and youth--each, taken separately, is the occasion of illusion, and taken together, they multiply our illusions.

The Deal in Central America

Central America is our own local "jungle," and we have been enwrapped now for a decade in a seemingly endless, politically divisive battle over a region that until the late 1970's was remote from our politics.

German Historians at War

There has been a frequent ploy among Left and liberal West German intellectuals: use of the charge of apologizing for National Socialism to delegitimate more conservative opponents. This process is apparent in the now-notorious "historians' controversy." Although the focus of that debate is supposedly limited to "the uniqueness of the National Socialist annihilation of the Jews," what is at stake goes far beyond this particular issue.

The Tower Precedent

As the battle over the nomination of John Tower to be Secretary of Defense raged across the television screens of the republic, careering from White House press conference to talk show to Senate debate courtesy of C-Span, it looked like the attack on Robert Bork all over again.

Our Road to Zion: A Memoir

We--my parents, my sister, and I--were in London in the 1920's. Why? And why, then, did we leave? A proper answer to either question would have at least as much to do with large political events as with any of us as individuals.

A (Jewish) Double Helix

It is notoriously difficult to frame a satisfactory definition of what it means to be a Jew. But if the sheer variety of Jewishness may be exploited for the task. This is what the publishers of a new series of brief biographies called Jewish Thinkers seem to have in mind in assembling a host of exemplars across the ages, each of whom has had a strongly individual approach to Jewish experience and has expressed it in writing.

Science and the Unborn, by Clifford Grobstein

It is widely assumed that, one way or another, Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, will be superseded in the near future.

Trading Places, by Clyde V. Prestowitz, Jr.

When Trading Places was published last fall, the environment for the success of its ominous message about the Japanese must have seemed far from hospitable.

The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi, translated and edited by Mark R. Cohen

In 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, Michel de Montaigne made what must have appeared to his French contemporaries a sudden and inexplicable decision: he abandoned the law, set aside his political aspirations, and retired to his ancestral estate in the Perigord, where he resolved to devote his remaining years to the "freedom, tranquility, and leisure" of intellectual pursuits.

Law and Literature, By Richard A. Posner

Intellectually speaking, the law-and-literature movement, which got under way in the 1980's, cannot be said to exist.

Paul Robeson, by Martin Bauml Duberman

For all of Paul Robeson's manifold achievements as an athlete, a singer, and an actor, it was his political activities, and in particular his long record of devotion to the Soviet Union, that turned him into a culture hero.

The Democrats

Montesquieu & the Jews

Hemingway

Glasnost

The Ayatollah, the Novelist, and the West

The Ayatollah Khomeini has challenged some of Western civilization's deepest values. In February 1989, he struck out against free speech, calling for the murder of a British writer, Salman Rushdie, and of the publishers of Rushdie's most recent novel, The Satanic Verses. The irony is that Khomeini succeeded in demonstrating how few Western governments are prepared to stand up against him and for their own values.

The Rushdiad

It is hard to think of an event more unexpected than the international literary-political brouhaha surrounding Salman Rushdie and his novel The Satanic Verses during the months of February and March 1989. What made the story so startling was the idea that a literary exercise could set off riots and a thoroughly believable death threat.

Writing as a Jew

Like most people, most writers are anything but Jews. And most Jews are not what you would call writers. Yet for those relatively few of us who happen to be both, the question of the writer as a Jew, and the Jew as a writer, can lead to fascinating if also, sometimes, frustrating exercises in self-definition.

A Limit to Affirmative Action?

Virtually all of the people I have known in the musical world have been political liberals. That is why I was startled by the largely negative reaction of the American musical community to the news that, in the name of affirmative action, the Detroit Symphony, one of America's leading orchestras, had hired a black bass player, Richard Robinson, without the formality of an audition.

Tolstoy and the Pursuit of Happinesss

"Whenever--at whatever moment she was asked what she was thinking about she could have answered without fail, 'Always about my happiness and my unhappiness.'" No novelist but Tolstoy could have charged this sentence with so potent a current of meaning. For Tolstoy, happiness and unhappiness were the human matters of the utmost consequence, and they were the principal themes of his writings.

Kaplan's Big Deal A Story

A story.

Where Philosophy Matters.

In Poland, for reasons deeply rooted in its culture, its history, its destitution, and its aspirations, philosophical study occupies an unusually honored place. Despite the difficult conditions in the country for any kind of intellectual work, anyone engaged in philosophy there, as I was for two extended visits, finds in Poland rare satisfactions.

His Eminence and Hizzoner, by John Cardinal O'Connor and Mayor Edward I. Koch

This fascinating cooperative effort by John Cardinal O'Connor, the Archbishop of New York, and Mayor Edward Koch may one day be regarded as an important historical document.

Goldwyn, by A. Scott Berg

According to a by-now-familiar script, the Jewish moguls of Hollywood arrived on these shores penniless, like Joseph in Egypt; even more remarkably than the biblical Joseph, they proceeded not so much to interpret Pharaoh's dreams as to do his dreaming for him.

Why Americans Don't Vote, by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward; Whose Votes Count?, by Abigail Thernstrom

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward's new book should really be called "Why Some Americans Don't Vote," for the truth is that the educated, the middle classes, and the wealthy in America do vote in relatively high proportions.

Unconventional Partners, by Robert Booth Fowler

Unconventional Partners is, quite simply, one of the freshest interpretations of religion and American culture to have appeared in some years.

Crashing the Gates, by Robert C. Christopher

Robert C. Christopher's amiable journalistic survey of the current state of the American ethnic union begins with the sort of bang that might be expected from a writer who was for many years an editor at Newsweek.

“Lamentation”

T.S. Eliot

The GAO

IQ

The Forests & the Trees

How the PLO Was Legitimized

Some leaders win power through inheritance, some through elections, some through civil war or coup d'etat. Yasir Arafat and the PLO are are attempting to come to power through international diplomacy--reinforced by murder. And they have nearly succeeded.

Gorbachev's Strategy, and Ours

As we watch the glasnost-perestroika express train advancing into the unknown, we need not refuse the profound satisfaction that liberalizations already achieved must give us, or renounce hopeful expectations of greater liberalizations to come, in order to focus soberly on the problem that Mikhail Gorbachev's new course presents for Western strategy.

The Curious Case of Chemical Warfare

On the first of March of this year, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Webster, observed that the spread of chemical weapons threatens to change the strategic balance in the Middle East. Webster warned that the most radical countries in the Middle East are either ready or will soon be ready to launch chemical attacks.

Demystifying the French Revolution

On July 14, France will celebrate, with considerable pomp and circumstance, the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Yet so far as historians are concerned, the last twenty years have indeed witnessed a radical revision of the formerly dominant views of the Revolution on which the celebrations on July 14 will still be based.

Public Opinion and the Jogger

When a crime is particularly heinous or unusual, the New York Times will bring the weight of its attention to bear upon it. Its coverage can be factually useful, but more important is the role of the Times in expressing the public opinion of the event. This was evident after the rape of a Central Park jogger.

Still Taking the Fifth

More than a decade ago, I received a visit from an elderly woman whom I shall call Emily, the mother of my best childhood friend. She had come to confess her complicity in a crime committed long ago. Like my own parents, Emily had been a member of the Communist party.

A Major Israeli Novel

During the first fifteen years following World War II, the Holocaust did not figure as a major theme in serious works of Israeli literary art. Even in the 60s and 70s, for a serious engagement of these issues one had to look to the work of a small group of survivors. The recent appearance in English of David Grossman's novel See Under: "Love" must therefore be counted as something of an event.

From That Place and Time, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

Lucy S. Dawidowicz's memoir is at once a historical account, a story of personal development, an act of memorialization, and a tale of rescue.

The Grand Failure, by Zbigniew Brzezinski

In his latest book, Zbigniew Brzezinski reflects on four problems that have deeply engaged his energies for over a third of a century: the Soviet Union, the Communist world in general, totalitarianism, and possible alternatives to totalitarianism.

The Democratic Imperative, by Gregory A. Fossedal

The Democratic Imperative is one of the more sweeping interventionist broadsides in memory, urging the use of any and every lever at our disposal to implant democratic institutions and freemarket capitalism everywhere.

ProfScam, by Charles J. Sykes

ProfScam is muckraking journalism; the muck has never been better, but the raking is not always as good as it might be. Sykes sees only a part of the problem in higher education, and and therefore he exaggerates that part.

The Fettered Presidency, edited by L. Gordon Crovitz and Jeremy A. Rabkin; The Imperial Congress, edited by Gordon S. Jones and John A. Marini

Is the United States doomed to a weak, Whig version of the presidency? Is the country's great constitutional edifice, a model for so much of the rest of the world, sliding toward untrammeled domination by Congress?

Doves & Hawks

The Jewish Vote

The Cuban Missiles

Portrait of a Liberal

Civil Rights & the CP

The Dangers Beyond Containment

Today the conviction is nigh universal that the world is becoming a safer place. But as in the past, this very conviction is helping to make the world more dangerous. For with a blitheness equaling the folly of any earlier generation, we are preparing to disassemble, piece by piece, the structure that has guaranteed peace for upward of forty years.

Gorbachev's Cultural Revolution

What is going on in the Soviet Union? There have been astonishing changes. But in the very same areas we see elements familiar from totalitarian politics as practiced decades ago.

Totalitarianism, Dead and Alive

The current, unprecedented wave of reform and unrest in the Communist world has led many Western observers to proclaim the demise of totalitarianism. Are they right?

Educated by Novels

On more than one occasion in recent years, usually in conversation with quite intelligent people who report to me that they have stopped reading fiction, I have found myself claiming to have been educated by novels. An interesting phrase; but what does it actually mean?

Impeachment by Other Means

The recent conclusion of the trial of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North provides as good an occasion as any to take stock of a remarkable federal law whose influence is increasingly felt in today's Washington. The special- prosecutor law--enacted as Title VI of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978--has been twice amended, in 1983 and 1987, and is scheduled to expire in 1992.

Israel: Some Surprising Polls

Although in some influential circles in the U.S. Israel has suffered a loss in stature, American public opinion on the whole shows no erosion of support for Israel. While there is a growing desire to see the PLO included in the peace process, this attitude is conditioned on Yasir Arafat's promises to eschew terrorism and to accept the existence of Israel, promises generally seen as insincere.

Mr. Yankee Goes Home

For years in Nicaragua, the American envoy, "Mr. Yankee," had been more than a mere ambassador. In the endless days of the American occupation in the 1920's and 30's, the country would hardly breathe without consulting the American ambassador.

Professor of Terror

Professor Edward Said, chair in English and comparative literature at Columbia University and member of the Palestinian "parliament in exile," has written extensively about a novelist whose great insight into modern political life has precisely to do with the special attraction of intellectuals to terror. But Said, whose double career as literary scholar and ideologue of terrorism is a potent argument against those who believe in the corrective power of humanistic values, has swallowed Conrad without digesting him.

Territory of Lies, by Wolf Blitzer

On November 21, 1985, the United States government arrested Jonathan Jay Pollard, a junior civilian employee of the Navy, on charges of spying for Israel.

Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, by Dennis King

Twenty years ago Lyndon LaRouche was teaching classes in dialectical materialism at the New York Free School, preparing members of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to seize political power.

Byzantium: The Early Centuries, by John Julius Norwich

In one of those eminently quotable and hopelessly prejudiced assessments of which he was such a master, Edward Gibbon in Chapter 53 of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire described "the reproach and shame" of the Byzantine empire, "a degenerate people."

The Jewish Way, by Irving Greenberg

Can the Orthodox religious tradition speak to contemporary Jews? The answer, of course, is yes, provided they are willing to listen.

Barbarian Sentiments, by William Pfaff

Born sixty years ago in Iowa, William Pfaff has traveled far from home. For the past twenty years he has lived in France, from where he has offered periodic tours d'horizon to readers of the New Yorker.

“Who is a Jew”

El Salvador

Prokofiev

Jewish Variants

Law and Literature

The Campus: “An Island of Repression In a Sea of Freedom”

Two weeks before the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment protects one's right to burn the flag, the regents of the University of Wisconsin decreed that students on their twelve campuses no longer possess the right to say anything ugly to or about one another.

Charging Israel With Original Sin

A trend has recently emerged in Israel and elsewhere to rewrite the history of the founding of the Jewish state. The trend has several leading protagonists.

Boredom, Virtue, and Democratic Capitalism

It appears to many that of the three great systemic ideas of the 20th century--Communism, fascism, and democractic capitalism--only the last is still vigorous and growing. What are the virtues of democratic capitalism?

Strictly Movie

One day a while ago I was back in Beverly Hills, where I had lived for more than thirty years, and on an impulse, since I was in the area, I decided to drop in on my old agent. I had walked to his office I don't know how many times over the years--my home was all of five blocks away--but now everything was changed and different.

Britain: Under the Iron (High) Heel?

Is liberty in Britain--and especially freedom of speech and of the press--under threat from an authoritarian government and a domineering Prime Minister?

Jewish Mysticism in Dispute

The daunting achievement of Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) poses a certain quandary for the evolution of subsequent scholarship. His studies of Jewish mysticism are so comprehensive and searching that it might appear as though further investigations in the field would be no more than a series of elaborate footnotes to his trailblazing work.

The Long Road to Freedom, by Walter Laqueur

In the Soviet Union, glasnost has affected practically everyone, and for some Russians at least, the impact has been to bewilder and frighten people who drew comfort from the status quo, however failed and corrupt. Nationality protest and upheaval have gripped eight of the USSR's non-Russian republics and the fact that the central authorities have not lost control is largely due to the absence of direct challenges to party policies in Russia proper.

From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas L. Friedman

Like many other Americans interested in the Middle East, I became aware of Thomas L. Friedman during the long, difficult summer of 1982.

Sketches from a Life, by George F. Kennan

Kennan-A Prophet Honored" was the headline over Mary McGrory's Washington Post column on George F. Kennan's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this past April.

Rites of Spring, by Modris Eksteins; The Modern World, by Malcolm Bradbury

This is a book about death and destruction," Modris Eksteins tells the reader in his preface to Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age.

The Enigma of Japanese Power, by Karel van Wolferen; More Like Us, by James Fallows; Yen!, by Daniel Burstein; Japanese Investment in the United States, edited by Kozo Yamamura

The United States is obsessed with Japan, and with reason. No foreign power, not even West Germany, has delivered so severe a shock to American self-esteem in the postwar era.

What to Do About the Schools

The Rushdie Affair

The French Revolution

Israel's Future

Drugs and Youth

The Unborn

Virginia

Hastening the Death of Communism

What policy should the democracies adopt toward the Communist world at this stage of its evolution? Toward what end should such a policy be directed?

A False Start in the Middle East

The morgues of newspapers are filled with reports on plans which successive American administrations had hoped would produce peace between Israel and its neighbors: the Rogers Plan, the Vance Plan, the Shultz Plan, and a number of equally futile European initiatives. With Secretary of State James Baker's speech to AIPAC of May 22, 1989, the Bush administration joined this melancholy company.

On Being a Jew

Although Sidney Hook wrote hundreds of books and articles in the course of his great career as a philosopher and political controversialist, he devoted relatively little attention either to his own Jewishness or to issues of specifically Jewish concern. But about nine months before his death, he agreed to be interviewed on these matters

Flag-Burning & Other Modes of Expression

This summer, Washington was given patriotism and obscenity to deal with when the Supreme Court upheld the burning of the flag by an angry Gregory Johnson and when an embarrassed Corcoran Gallery cancelled an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs.

The Politics of 1992

The 1992 presidential election here will take place just a few weeks before the deadline that the European Commission has set for the fall of the last of the non-tariff trade barriers among member-countries of the Community. The political implications of this deserve consideration.

The Goldin Boys A Story

A story.

Perversions of the Holocaust

Nearly half a century has passed since the murder of the European Jews during World War II, yet scholars are still producing new explanations of why the German state under Hitler committed its terrible crimes. Today, however, a number of professional historians are propounding interpretations of the murder of the European Jews so implausible and so perverse that they undermine the credibility of the historical enterprise itself.

Deception, by Edward Jay Epstein

Deception is a seductive subject, as any magician worth his salt knows. It is not true that all people love being fooled, but they do seem to enjoy watching someone fool others.

A Mandate for Terror, by Harris Okun Schoenberg

To avoid misunderstandings," writes Harris Schoenberg in the preface to this important scholarly work, "I wish to stress that while I find much that is wrong with the United Nations in the late 1980's, even beyond its legitimization of international terrorism, I am committed... not to its destruction but to its reform."

My Song Is My Weapon, by Robbie Lieberman

This book is perhaps the strangest example yet of what Theodore Draper has called the "curious academic campaign for the rehabilitation of American Communism."

War, by Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla

American political culture lacks a discriminating discourse on the nature of war, its varieties, its causes and purposes, its uses as an instrument of policy.

A World of Ideas, by Bill Moyers

A World of Ideas, the series of interviews that Bill Moyers conducted on PBS last winter, has now been gathered together in book form.

Free Persons and the Common Good, by Michael Novak

The question this book addresses is profound: can a free society have a common good? Michael Novak maintains not simply that the two are not incompatible but that, properly understood, they fit together naturally.

Gorbachev & the U.S.

Gorbachev & Germany

The PLO

Novels

The Pollard Case

Congress

Pulblic Opinion Polls

Thought and Deed

The Forests

Is the West Bank a Vital American Interest?

What should Washington do at this difficult moment to forward what it calls the peace process? A close evaluation of American interests points to a rather different approach from the ones currently being tried.

Toward a Real Restoration of Civil Rights

In 1989 the Supreme Court ruled in a series of cases involving racial discrimination and civil rights. Those drawing the most bitter reaction were a trio involving affirmative action in the sense of racial preference for minorities.

What Glasnost Has Destroyed

Soviet society is in a state of spiritual turmoil for which there is no precedent in its entire history. The diagnoses being made today no longer center on "individual distortions" and "shortcomings" (no matter how repugnant) but are directed instead at virtually the entire moral universe in which Soviet society functions and from which it derives its legitimacy.

Anti-Semitism and Jewish Identity

Anti-Semitism in the modern world has been a major influence in shaping Jewish identity. At times anti-Semitism has served to squeeze Jews back into the externally devalued group from which they were trying to escape, producing mild or severe rejections of self. But it has also had entirely the opposite effect, creating a renewed affirmation of Jewishness.

Remembering Sidney Hook

Although Sidney Hook, who died this past summer at the age of eighty-six, contributed a number of important articles to the American Scholar, the magazine I edit; although we corresponded fairly frequently and met on two separate occasions, I am reasonably certain that, had we passed on the street, Sidney would not have recognized me.

Of Time and Poetry

A literary work of any depth arises from experiences which are hard to comprehend and articulate. In the act of composition these are transformed, for the writer himself as well as for the reader, into an experience of quite a different order: namely, into the experience of the story or poem or play.

Anatomy of an Execution

When Fidel Castro arrived at his office in the Palace of the Revolution on June 11, 1989, his younger brother Raul, general of the army and second secretary of the party, was waiting for him to discuss a report on the Hero of the Cuban Republic, Division General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez. After fourteen hours of discussion they decided the time had come to jail Ochoa.

A Turning of the Critical Tide?

A major strategy in the current assault on the integrity of art from within the literary world has been the denial of the possibility of transcendence. Any claim that a writer can speak beyond his particular historical circumstances to describe the human experience as lived by all men is considered spurious.

The Second Shift, by Arlie Hochschild

When I first read about this book in a Newsweek report, I gasped, "That's us!" Arlie Hochschild, a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, had spent eight years studying 50 two-career couples in the San Francisco Bay area, some working-class, some upper-middle-class, some academic like herself.

Mad Dreams, Saving Graces, by Michael.T. Kaufman

Michael.T. Kaufman was Warsaw correspondent for the New York Times for three-and-a-half years during the mid-1980's, a period which, by Kaufman's account, was devoid of big news events.

Jewish-Christian Dialogue, by David Novak

Interfaith discussions between Christians and Jews-in professional jargon, "the dialogue"have hit upon hard times. The pace may be undiminished, but the elan that once characterized such discussions has clearly disappeared.

Modern Chile, 1970-1989, by Mark Falcoff

"The election of Salvador Al1lende as president of Chile in 1970 not only capped a long rise in the political fortunes of the Left in that country but also raised hopes for popular-front electoral triumphs elsewhere in the Americas and in Western Europe.

Straight Shooting, by John Silber

The typical college president today is a mild and colorless person with vague but leftish ideas, a product both of the contemporary academic culture and of a search-and-selection process that confers veto power on a hundred campus factions.

“Professor of Terror”

Communism in Decline

German Reunification

“Affirmative Action”: A Worldwide Disaster

Arguments for and against "affirmative action" have raged for about twenty years in the US. Similar arguments have provoked controversy--even bloodshed--in societies around the world. India, Nigeria, Australia, Guyana, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Indonesia are just some of the countries where some groups receive official, government-sanctioned preferences over others.

Between Passovers

The miracle of Passover was renewed for our family when my parents decided to make their own seder in 1941, six months after we had arrived in Montreal from Europe. It is my--our--seder, not that of my parents, that I really mean to tell about, but all its pleasures spring from the seders of my childhood.

Does the Piano Have a Future?

It is unclear how long the piano will be around. To understand what the piano has been in the past and is today, and what its future might hold, we must examine four areas: the instrument, its public, its players, and its music.

The Intellectuals & the Cold War

Few in 1967 bothered to ask the pertinent question: "What was the U.S. government doing funding liberal intellectuals?" This is one of the questions that Peter Coleman attempts to answer in his new history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, The Liberal Conspiracy.

Reclaiming Yeats

The decision to publish a fourteen-volume Collected Works of W. B. Yeats--designed to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death--may help reclaim a poet who has become more or less the property of the universities.

Warrior, by Ariel Sharon with David Chanoff

One comes to this book with many suspicions. Ariel Sharon, after all, enjoys a rather unsavory reputation even in many Zionist circles as the man who brought upon Israel the disaster of the Lebanon war and who today stands foursquare against an Israeli-Palestinian negotiation.

Prisoners of a Dream, by Leo Raditsa

For five days in March 1982, Jeremiah Denton (who was then a Republican Senator from Alabama) held hearings on "The Role of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and East Germany in Fomenting Terrorism in Southern Africa."

Danube, by Claudio Magris

The Danube is an excellent subject for a book, especially today when the question of Central European independence, political and cultural, has been raised with renewed fervor.

The War Against the Intellect, by Peter Shaw

Anyone inquiring into the present state of humanities in the American academy may expect to confront a grotesque spectacle. Many of today's middle-aged and younger aculty and their graduate student proteges, entranced by fashionable but nihilistic French philosophies or compelled by the imperatives of politics and ideology, have abandoned the notion that they have a duty to transmit to their students some idea of the achievements of Western art and thought.

The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917, by Nora Levin; The Jews of the Soviet Union, by Benjamin Pinkus

The Nazis hated the Jews and murdered them. The Russian Communists, while professing to abhor ethnic prejudice, systematically killed the Jewish national and religious community.