On Campus

The Middle East

Democratic Capitalism

The Final Solution

From Brandeis to Jerusalem

The Pollard Case

A Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe?

Because of the differences among Western allies, a fully coordinated economic response to the unfolding events in Eastern Europe is unlikely. Nor is it necessary. This is one area in which America can go it alone.

Power, Powerlessness & the Jews

One of the inescapable facts of modern Jewish life is that the destruction of European Jewry by the Germans in World War II led to no sea change in the ethos and mores of the Jewish people as a whole. It is now time to begin taking stock of the consequences for Jewry of the all-but-total elimination of what was unquestionably its heartland.

ABC and Me

The Act for Better Child Care Services (known as the ABC bill) will, among other things, provide federal assistance for day care, underwrite training of day care workers, and establish national standards for day care. This is how it affected one mother.

The Scandal of the Boat People

Recently, 65 nations gathered under UN auspices in Geneva to contrive a legal means to send the boat people back to Vietnam, a country they had been fleeing ever since 1975 when it was unified by the Communist regime in Hanoi.

What Heidegger Wrought

In the early months of 1988 rumblings began to be heard in the United States about a new controversy over the immensely influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) that was setting Paris afire. The translation of several books involved in the dispute should finally give English-speaking readers an opportunity to see that the "scandal" was not really where it pretended to be.

From “Lolita” to “Piss Christ”

Recent uproars over Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, Martin Scorsese's film, The Last Temptation of Christ, and the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano have raised again the vexed question of how society should treat offensive or shocking content in art.

Gardens and Ghettos

The fluctuation between extremes is what gives Italian Jewish history its volatile and contradictory character, and that complex, elusive character has been the subject of a panoramic exhibit mounted at the Jewish Museum in New York this fall, Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy.

Lost Victory, by William Colby

William Colby, director of Central Intelligence (1973-75), and perhaps the highest ranking American with the longest record of service in and about Vietnam (1959-75), has written "my contribution to the effort to achieve understanding... of the vital lessons to be drawn from the suffering and agony of the Second Vietnam War. "

Abba Hillel Silver, by Marc Lee Raphael

Abba Hillel Silver, who died in 1963, occupied a unique place both in American public life and in the public life of the American Jewish community.

Fear of Falling, by Barbara Ehrenreich

The debacle of the 1988 presidential election not only left the very word "liberalism" badly battered, but may have administered the coup de grace to the only opposition movement with a shred of intellectual and political vitality: the so-called "neoliberals."

Nowhere to Go, by E. Fuller Torrey

E. Fuller Torrey, a wellknown psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., has written a scathing account of the community mental-health centers which were created by the federal government in the 1960's to take the place of state hospitals in caring for the majority of the seriously mentally ill, vast numbers of whom were still warehoused in often miserable conditions.

Journey to the Stars, by Robert Jastrow

A good deal of intellectual energy has been expended lately in the debate over whether history is coming to an end now that there is, allegedly, an almost universal consensus on the ultimate goals of society.

The Founding of Israel

Mapplethorpe & the Flag

Jewish Mysticism

1992

The U.N.

Britain

Against the Legalization of Drugs

Over the past 20 years, there have been relatively few new heroin addicts. High prices and low supplies have played a large role in this. Legalizing drugs will only increase drug use.

The Making of the Mayor 1989

David Dinkins's election in 1989 as the first black mayor of New York City was treated by the media as a civil-rights story of the old sort--the story of a black candidate who won by overcoming lingering pockets of white racism. Yet few New Yorkers who went through the campaign saw it quite that way.

Bork Revisited

The battle over Robert H. Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 marked a momentous occasion in our politics. Two years after the event, discussion goes on, now in books.

Bilingual Miseducation

The New York State Board of Regents has recently voted a 74-percent increase in the number of children eligible for the state's bilingual program. Thousands of new students will now be assigned to classes in which instruction is in a language identified as "native" to them--although many of these children will actually be more fluent in English.

Hertzberg's Complaint

Arthur Hertzberg's new book, The Jews in America, is not so much a history as it is a sermonizing put-down in chronological form.

Cutting Beethoven Down to Size

By the 1970's, the struggle between the "moderns" and the "romantics" of classical music had degenerated into a generalized cult of personality, with each increasingly less individual performer measured artistically by commercial success in concert halls and in record stores. One of the main efforts to fill the resultant vacuum has been the authentic-performance movement.

Agnon Without End

The translation for the first time of a major work by S.Y. Agnon (1888-1970), the greatest writer in modern Hebrew, is sufficient cause for celebration; the fact that this work is a novel makes the event that much more interesting, but also more equivocal.

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, by Ralph David Abernathy

Ralph David Abernathy's autobiography has been subjected to a concerted and often uncivil attack by the civil-rights establishment, led by Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP.

The Labyrinth of Exile, by Ernst Pawel

A few months before his death in July 1904, Theodor Herzl set off for Rome in his unending quest for diplomatic support for the Zionist cause.

From Kabul to Managua, by Fred Halliday

Addressing the 26th Congress of the Soviet Communist party in 1981, Leonid Brezhnev spoke triumphantly of the USSR's gains in the Third World, taking special pride in listing the growing number of developing nations which had adopted some form of Soviet-style socialism.

Real Presences, by George Steiner

We live in an era of theory, George Steiner declares in his new book. Our current philosophies ridicule the search for fundamental truths, call into question language's capacity to communicate meaning, deny the existence of God.

How War Came, by Donald Cameron Watt

Donald Cameron Watt's volume is the result, as the author tells us, of a lifetime's concerned reflection on and study of the causes of World War II, a process that began when, at age eleven, he helped his father fill sandbags in the English Midlands.

Israel's Options

Sidney Hook

To the Editor: Sidney Hook's fascinating interview with Norman Podhoretz, “On Being a Jew” [October 1989], raises an important issue that deserves comment.

The Piano

To the Editor: The end of the novel, the end of history, the end of the world.

Housework

To the Editor: In her review of Arnie Hochschild's The Second Shift [Books in Review, November 1989], Charlotte Low Allen does men a great disservice by constraining them to a stereotype of slovenly imbeciles incapable of cooking a good meal or understanding what makes a home attractive

Interfaith Dialogue

To the Editor: In his otherwise laudatory review of my recent book, Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification [Books in Review, November 1989], David Singer faults me for paying relatively little attention to Zionism and Israel in my philosophical and theological argument.

Harvard Law School

To the Editor: In his article, “The Campus: ‘An Island of Repression in a Sea of Freedom’” [September 1989], Chester E. Finn, Jr. mentions my runin—as a visiting professor at the Harvard Law School in the spring of 1989—with the Harvard Women's Law Association (HWLA). Here is a more detailed account of that incident.

Gorbachev's Russia: Breakdown or Crackdown?

To say that we live in the midst of a Worldwide political earthquake is to state the obvious.

Is Olof Palme the Wave of the Future?

Does the rout of Communism in Eastern Europe, and its apparent loss of nerve in the Soviet Union, also presage the end of non-totalitarian forms of socialism throughout the world, or does it mean, as Mikhail Gorbachev's adviser on German affairs, Nikolai Portugalov, recently proclaimed, that “the tree of socialism is greener than before”?

Death With Dignity & the Sanctity of Life

“Call no man happy until he is dead.” With these deliberately paradoxical words, the ancient Athenian sage Solon reminds the self-satisfied Croesus of the perils of fortune and the need to see the end of a life before pronouncing on its happiness.

The Sad Story of the Boy Wonder

By the time I first met Robert Maynard Hutchins, in 1966, he was sixty-seven years old and, I now realize, intellectually quite dead.

Interpreting the Bible

It is a revealing symptom of our cultural malaise that for two decades our academic institutions have been shaken by spasms of radical reevaluation of what we do with texts, ranging from uneasy self-doubt to incipient panic to the exhilaration of an intellectual witches' sabbath.

Rap and Racism

For the average middle-class listener, whether black or white, rap music is a landscape too alien for anything but discomfort.

T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, by Christopher Ricks'

This is a very curious book.

Private Prisons, by Charles H. Logan

During the first six months of 1989, the nation's prison population grew by 46,000, the largest such increase on record.

Vietnam Now, by John LeBoutillier

A strange alliance of 60's activists, Vietnam veterans, and maverick conservatives is pushing to normalize relations with Hanoi.

Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, by Marc H. Ellis

No contemporary movement in Christianity has aroused as much interest as liberation theology, and it was almost inevitable that Jewish thinkers would explore its relevance as well.

Microcosm, by George Gilder

There is no negotiating with Prophets.

Affirmative Action

To the Editor: Congratulations to Thomas Sowell for “ ‘Affirmative Action”: A Worldwide Disaster” [December 1989].

The Congress for Cultural Freedom

To the Editor: One may differ about whether the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a “success” or not, but in “The Intellectuals & the Cold War” [December 1989] George Szamuely rides a strong hobby-horse in claiming that “liberal anti-Communism” had given up the struggle against totalitarianism, as the Congress expanded its activities.

Eastern Europe

To the Editor: Irwin M. Stelzer is to be congratulated for his fine article, “A Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe?” [January].

Gorbachev & Khrushchev

To the Editor: In “What Glasnost Has Destroyed” [November 1989], Leon Aron's quotations and the figures he cites are impressive, but I think his conclusions are a bit rushed.

The Jewish People

To the Editor: David Vital wants the rest of us to avoid using the Holocaust as a primary reference point in relations between Jews and non-Jews [“Power, Powerlessness & the Jews,” January].

"Between Passovers"

To the Editor: I read the article, “Between Passovers,” by Ruth R. Wisse [December 1989] and it moved me to tears . . . More power to her for such splendid writing. Barnett Bittner Albuquerque, New Mexico

ABC

To the Editor: Jessica Gress-Wright's article, “ABC and Me” [January], is outstanding for its lack of interest in the content of child-care arrangements.

The Case for More Immigration

For the first time in a quarter-century, and only the fourth in our entire history, Congress is attempting a comprehensive update of our immigration laws.

Can the Palestinians Make Peace?

In November 1917, Britain's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour made public the dramatic announcement that “His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Mencken on Trial

Reading what is printed about myself, I am made to realize how little a man makes himself understood by his writings. —H.L. Mencken

My Two Weeks' Vacation With Norman Mailer

Day One Here we are, just arrived.

"There Go Our Little Jews"

On January 7 of this year, Christmas day in the Eastern Orthodox calendar, a group of young Evangelicals dressed in native Ukrainian costume gave a spirited performance of religious folk songs right under Lenin's stony gaze in the Plaza of the October Revolution in Kiev.

Newspeak, Feminist-Style

In the spring of 1974, the local Board of Education in Kanawha County, West Virginia, began the process of selecting new readers for the following school year, as required by state law.

Why Whittaker Chambers Was Wrong

Whittaker Chambers (1901-61) was a Communist who left the party in 1938 to become one of its most determined enemies.

Pynchon's Progress

For anyone who has suspected that in literature the postmodern really amounts to the posthuman, the work of Thomas Pynchon will supply abundant proof.

Intifada, by Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari

A word to start with concerning the credentials, resources, and politics of the authors of this book.

Goodnight!, by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky)

“I was born under the ‘Stalin-Kirov-Zhdanov-Hitler-Stalin’ constellation,” says Andrei Sinyavsky, one of Russia's greatest living writers, in his new autobiographical novel.

Justice, Gender, and the Family, by Suspn Moller Okin; Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, by Catherine A. MacKinnon

For career military, civilian life can sometimes appear aimless and drab.

The Examined Life, by Robert Nozick

With his first two books, Robert Nozick, professor of philosophy at Harvard, set off metaphysical tremors in the American academy.

The Ambition and the Power, by John M. Barry

In Washington every decision made, every word spoken, every scandal uncovered, occurs in the context of a perpetual political struggle among the parties, the ideologies, and the branches of government that together wield power in America.

On the Legalization of Drugs

To the Editor: James Q. Wilson's article, “Against the Legalization of Drugs” [February], perpetuates several myths about drug use and drug legalization.

Boat People & Refugees

To The Editor: In “The Scandal of the Boat People” [January], William McGurn makes a serious logical error.

Heidegger

To the Editor: I agree with Mark Lilla, in “What Heidegger Wrought” [January], that although Victor Farias's evidence in Heidegger and Nazism is partly unoriginal and partly out of focus, the book offers essential information on Heidegger's affiliation with Nazism. . . .

Art & Criticism

To the Editor: According to Carol Iannone in “From Lolita to Piss Christ” [January], “One of the wonders of modern criticism has been its ability to see art in its own terms, as a ‘sacred wood,' a separate universe, a self-contained sovereignty; this approach has yielded some superb criticism, and is certainly an excellent way to teach literature in the classroom.”

Stalin & the Jews

To the Editor: In Richard Pipes's review of Nora Levin's book, The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917 [Books in Review, December 1989], he writes: “On the eve of [Stalin's] death, which did not come a moment too soon, he began to kill off the Jewish intelligentsia and to set in motion measures that clearly pointed to mass deportations of Jews to Siberia and Central Asia.”

Totalitarianism

To the Editor: In “Totalitarianism, Dead and Alive” [August 1989], Stephen Miller gives a definition of totalitarianism which is not very accurate. What is essential for a “classic” totalitarian regime, he writes, is “an omnipotent leader, someone whose interpretation of the ideology is infallible.”

Backward & Downward With the Arts

This spring and summer will witness a bitter fight in Congress, and perhaps even across the country, over the quinquennial statutory reauthorization of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Toward a Real

Talks between the U.S. and the PLO began in 1988, after Yasir Arafat declared—in language that the State Department accepted as satisfying the conditions for such talks specified by a 1984 act of Congress—that the PLO recognized the existence of Israel and renounced the use of terrorism.

Who Won Nicaragua?

On Sunday, February 25, 1990, Nicaraguans went to the ballot boxes and quietly voted out of office Marxist President Daniel Ortega, running for reelection against Mrs. Violeta Chamorro, publisher of the opposition daily La Prensa and head of a fourteen-party coalition known by its Spanish acronym UNO.

America the Victorious

Victory. Triumph. Even mere Success.

Out of Egypt: A Memoir

It happened that my great aunt Elsa had had strange forebodings the week before we lost everything in Egypt.

Two Views of New York

The ex-American arrived in the city having just done thirty-five days of reserve duty in the Israeli army. He needed rest and recreation.

The Andy Rooney Affair

Andy Rooney is now back at work as a regular commentator on CBS's 60 Minutes, his three-month suspension having been abbreviated by the network in response to widespread protest and a drop in the ratings.

What I Saw at the Revolution, by Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for Presidents Reagan and Bush from 1984 to 1989, is hardly the first of her breed to publish a memoir, or a best-selling one at that.

C. S. Lewis, by A. N. Wilson

C. S. Lewis became in his lifetime and remains after his death the most popular and effective Christian apologist of the 20th century.

Productivity and American Leadership, by William J. Baumol, Sue Anne Batey Blackman, Edward N. Wolff; Made in America, by Michael L. Dertouzos, Richard K. Lester, Robert M. Solow, and the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity

The perennial debate over the position of the American economy in world affairs has lately intensified.

Near the Magician, by Rosalind Baker Wilson

The title of Rosalind Baker Wilson's memoir refers not to her father's intellectual powers but to the fact that he loved to perform magic tricks.

Kife, by Nancy Traver

With the crumbling of the Soviet bloc, an ideological scramble has begun over the facts responsible for its undoing.

Politics By Other Means, by Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter

In Politics by other Means, Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter argue that the plague of accusations, scandals, investigations, and prosecutions which have crippled Washington represents only one side of a new political coin; on the other side are a shrinking electorate, the decline of the parties, and the appearance of elected officials who cannot be unseated.

The Boat People

To the Editor: I should like to respond to William McGurn's article, “The Scandal of the Boat People” [January], attacking the decision by the governments of the United Kingdom and Hong Kong to repatriate Vietnamese people from Hong Kong to Vietnam.

"Bork Revisited"

To the Editor: In response to Terry Eastland's article, “Bork Revisited” [February], I would first like to point out that The People Rising: The Campaign Against the Bork Nomination does indeed include an index.

On the Legalization of Drugs, Round 2

To the Editor: . . . After many columns of rambling argumentation, James Q. Wilson in “Against the Legalization of Drugs” [February], states his premise in the next to last paragraph of his article: “Human character is formed by society; indeed, human character is inconceivable without society.”

The Dual Torah

o the Editor: Robert Alter's truly splendid article, “Interpreting the Bible” [March], contains a somewhat puzzling, though offhand, statement: “Jews always conceived this corpus as a textual object complete in itself. . . .”

Bilingual Education

To the Editor: In “Bilingual Miseducation” [February], Abigail Thernstrom conducts a rat her misleading discussion of both the aims and end results of bilingual education.

Abba Hillel Silver

To the Editor: I have recently come upon David G. Dalin's review of Abba Hillel Silver by Marc Lee Raphael [Books in Review, January] and I am appalled by the description of Rabbi Silver.

The Holocaust

To the Editor: In his instructive and penetrating article, “Power, Powerlessness & the Jews” [January], . . . David Vital points out that almost forty-five years have elapsed since the Holocaust, yet there has been no “sea-change in the ethos and mores of the Jewish people as a whole.”

The Shape of Things to Come

For more than forty years, the affairs of the world have been greatly troubled but also structured by the Soviet-Western antagonism.

One-and-a-half Cheers for German Unification

Writing in the International Herald Tribune, a German Jewish journalist poured it all out. A “unified Germany,” this son of Holocaust survivors warned, “may grow into everything the world abhorred in the Germany of the early part of the century: a powerful country never content to accept limits on its political or economic strength, a self-centered society . . . whose rulers remain happily oblivious to foreigners' concerns.

The Hebrew Imperative

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Narcissus Goes to School

Seven years ago, Americans were warned that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened to drown their schools, their children, and their nation.

No Jewish Split on Israel

In the last half-dozen years alone, there have been about a dozen reputable studies of American Jewish opinion on Israel.

Feminist Pilgrims

In one of the finest specimens of biblical narrative, we are told how David, fleeing from Saul, finds himself at the court of Achish, king of Gath, and how the servants of Achish blow David's cover by spreading the word of his military success:

The Adventures of Mordecai Richler

When Irving Howe wrote in World of Our Fathers that the immigrant Jewish experience in the New World had encompassed its share of outlaws, rebels, criminals, prostitutes, and reprobates, he was not saying anything most Jewish writers needed to be told.

My Enemy, My Self, by Yoram Binur; Children of Bethany, by Said K. Aburish; Palestine and Israel, by David McDowall

For a while this past winter it must have seemed that all over the world, liberation, self-determination, and reconciliation were the order of the day, and that only in China and Israel were the old men continuing to hang on, fearfully and violently resisting the wave of the future.

Right Places, Right Times, by Hedley Donovan

In the opening sentence of his memoir, Hedley Donovan, editor-in-chief of Time Inc. from 1964 to 1979, tells us his life's work has been “trying to manage the almost unmanageable: intellectuals.”

The Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose

For the past two years, Stephen Hawking's A Short History of Time has been ensconced on the best-seller list, a rather unusual place for a serious work that deals with a scientific topic.

Tenured Radicals, by Roger Kimball

nyone familiar with the ongoing debate on humanistic education sparked by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy, and two successive reports by the National Endowment for the Humanities, issued under William J. Bennett and Lynne V. Cheney, will recognize many of the charges leveled in this book.

Our Man in Panama, by John Dinges; Divorcing the Dictator, by Frederick Kempe

Dictator, drug dealer, double agent, sexual deviant, devil worshiper, Manuel Antonio Noriega was one of the most unlovable characters on the international scene in recent years.

Gorbachev's Russia

To the Editor: It is easy to agree with Richard Pipes in “Gorbachev's Russia: Breakdown or Crackdown?” [March] that the collapse of the Soviet empire is due to force of circumstance rather than a sudden conversion of Gorbachev to democratic liberalism, a miracle only to be rivaled in history by Constantine's embrace of Christianity.

Affirmative Action

To the Editor: Thomas Sowell's provocative article, “‘Affirmative Action’: A Worldwide Disaster” [December 1989], points to many weaknesses in the theory and practice of affirmative action.

Ukranians and Jews

To the Editor: In “‘There Go Our Little Jews’” [April], David G. Roskies mentions the Ukrainian, nationalists who came to Moscow in order to provide extra security for the All-Russian Conference of Jewish Organizations.

Private Prisons

To the Editor: In his review of Charles Logan's book, Private Prisons: Cons and Pros [Books in Review, March], John J. DiIulio, Jr. asserts that private-prison firms “have assiduously avoided going into [the] area” of high-security facilities.

T.S. Eliot

To the Editor: In his review of Christopher Ricks's book, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice [Books in Review, March], Hilton Kramer points out that the question of Eliot's prejudice is disproportionately made to turn on whether he showed prejudice against women in the recurring lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

The Founding of Israel

To the Editor: Shabtai Teveth's reply to my letter [Letters from Readers, February] offers your readers another dose of distortions and misrepresentations but no evidence to substantiate the original charge he made in his article, “Charging Israel With Original Sin” [September 1989], that my larger aim in writing Collusion Across the Jordan was to provide “fresh sources of political sympathy for the Arabs, and fresh sources of antipathy to the Jews.”

How to Save Free Trade-and Still Trade With Japan

It is almost half a century since the great and the good of the postwar Western world forged a new economic order, based on the belief that a regime of liberalized trade would increase human welfare.

On the Scarcity of Black Professors

Derrick A. Bell of the Harvard Law School has announced that he will be teaching classes next fall but refusing any pay.

A Talmud for Americans

What is a Shas?

What the Anti-Communists Knew

What you now see as a change for the worse (“Stalinism”) is really a change for the better in knowledge on your part. —Vladimir Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, 1948

Marshall Wexler's Brilliant Career

In 1963 I was twenty-eight years old, a newly-minted Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, and spending the year as a visiting assistant professor at Harvard.

Trashing Wall Street

To a visitor from, say, Mars, it might come as a surprise to learn that the 1980's—a decade of stable prices, unprecedentedly low unemployment, and the longest sustained economic expansion in history—were also one of the lowest, greediest, most venal periods in modern American economic history, comparable with the dark era of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.

From Judaism to Jewishness

A debate has raged of late over the spiritual condition of American Jewry, and in particular over the forces that make for continuity in that condition as opposed to the forces that make for change.

Bound to Lead, by Joseph S. Nye

Intellectual fads differ from commercial fads in that most often they come from the top down, not from the bottom up.

Franz Werfel, by Peter Stephan Jungk

Posterity has not been kind to Franz Werfel, born in 1890 and on his death in 1945 perhaps one of the most famous and successful German writers of the 20th century.

Continental Divide, by S. M. Lipset

In Continental Divide Seymour Martin Lipset returns to a topic which has fascinated him since early in his long and distinguished career as a political scientist: the similarities and the differences between the United States and Canada.

Military Misfortunes, by Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch

This is a timely and an important book.

The University: An Owner's Manual, by Henry Rosovsky

This a cozy book and is meant to be.

Life and Death Questions

To the Editor: In “Death With Dignity and the Sanctity of Life” [March], Leon R. Kass addresses the serious and growing problem of when and how a human life should end in these times.

Hutchins of Chicago

To the Editor: Joseph Epstein's insightful article on the career of Robert Maynard Hutchins [“The Sad Story of the Boy Wonder,” March] misses the larger meaning and achievement of Hutchins's career, apparently because Mr. Epstein, though not an academic, operates from the standard academic viewpoint.

Russia's New Jews

To the Editor: I read with interest your recent article, “‘There Go Our Little Jews’” by David G. Roskies [April]. . . . Both the American and the Russian Jewish communities know little about each other's real lives.

Middle East Options

To the Editor: In “Can the Palestinians Make Peace?” [April], Daniel Pipes comes to the unavoidable conclusion that there can be only one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, he goes even farther, by stating that to think otherwise is “either naive or duplicitous.”

Was Chambers Right?

To the Editor: In his article, “Why Whittaker Chambers Was Wrong” [April], Charles Horner concludes that the apparent demise of Communism proves that Whittaker Chambers was wrong when he asserted his belief that in breaking with Communism, he was leaving the winning side for the losing side.

Western Civ-and Me

Fellow Elitists: If I were E.D. Hirsch, of “cultural literacy” fame—people do tend to mix us up—I might ask, “What is the literary influence on my salutation?”

America's

The flood in recent decades of Asian immigrants to the U.S. was planned by no one, and would likely have been forestalled had a lingeringly racist Congress foreseen it.

The Anti-Cold War Brigade

The virtual collapse of East European Communism and the apparently irreversible decay of Communism everywhere else would seem to offer powerful vindication to those who advocated anti-Communism as the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era.

Was Spinoza a Heretic?

Benedict De Spinoza (1632-77), the frail, frugal, reclusive lens-grinder, may have been the most passionately dispassionate thinker in the history of the Western mind.

Surviving Affirmative Action (More or Less)

In the mid-1970's, I became increasingly interested in what I assumed were two sociologically compelling questions: (1) how did white males (and their families, coworkers, and friends) respond to reverse discrimination?; and (2) how were the media portraying affirmative action?

Incident at Carpentras

Is France in the midst of an anti-Semitic wave?

Israel's Dilemma, by Ezra Sohar

Start with government owner-ship or effective control of the bulk of the manufacturing, agricultural, and financial sectors, themselves saturated with monopoly enterprises.

The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben

The huge amount of media attention lavished upon this year's celebration of Earth Day was foreshadowed in the earlier enthusiastic reception accorded Bill McKibben's environmentalist tract, The End of Nature. Deeply flawed as it is, McKibben's book is also the latest incarnation of what Edith Efron has called apocalyptic environmentalism, an impulse in which “spurious knowledge is . . . used to rationalize [the] expectation of catastrophe.”

Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman

The American poet John Berryman (1914-72) liked to excuse his excessive drinking and argumentative, sometimes violent nature by reminding himself that he was a genius and a poet.

Small Victories, by Samuel G. Freedman

Small Victories is an account of a year spent by a former New York Times reporter observing Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust, by Judith Miller

Judith Miller, an editor at the New York Times, here looks five countries where the Germans waged their war against the Jews, and at one, her own, where it was just a well-established rumor, in order to report how that episode is being dealt with today.

Government and the Arts

To the Editor: I read with interest Samuel Lipman's “Backward & Downward With the Arts” [May]; in fact, I read and reread it several times.

Immigration Policy

To the Editor: . . . In their effort to minimize the scale and impact of immigration, Ben J. Wattenberg and Karl Zinsmeister [“The Case for More Immigration,” April] employ a barrage of debater's tricks that I am surprised to find in the pages of COMMENTARY. After mentioning a figure of 200,000 illegal immigrants per year, the authors add that annual emigration (which has nothing to do with illegal immigration) is 160,000; this leaves the average reader with the impression (without its being said outright) that net illegal immigration is only 4 0,000—a gross falsehood.

Textbooks

To the Editor: In “Newspeak, Feminist-Style”[April], Robert Lerner and Stanley Rothman confuse censorship of curriculum by small groups on religious grounds with broad-based educational-reform movements which advocate a more inclusive curriculum.

Interpreting the Bible

To the Editor: When Robert Alter wrote “Interpreting the Bible” [March], on the Jewish Publication Society's Torah commentaries, I was at a loss to respond to his discussion of my COMMENTARY on Numbers.

The American 80's: Disaster or Triumph?

The 80's are more and more coming to be characterized by journalists, historians, and intellectuals as a costly if not a disastrous decade for America.

Fighting for Peace, by Caspar Weinberger

The New York Times's reviewer called this book a work of fantasy.

Men at Work, by George Will

Intellectuals and would-be intellectuals cannot seem to leave baseball alone.

The Encyclopaedia of Judaism, edited by Geoffrey Wigoder

What is a Jew?

Willa Cather, by Hermione Lee

Willa Cather's subject was America.

The Civil Rights Era, by Hugh Davis Graham

In his new book, Hugh Davis Graham, a historian at the University of Maryland, has made a significant contribution to our understanding of one of the critical social-policy issues of our time.

Germany United

To the Editor: Josef Joffe, in “One-and-a-Half Cheers for German Unification” [June], analyzes the social, economic, and political ingredients that poisoned the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic.

Self Esteem & the Schools

To the Editor: . . . Chester E. Finn, Jr. begins his article, “Narcissus Goes to School” [June], by citing the conclusion of a California “Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility” that “the lack of self-esteem is central to most personal and social ills plaguing our state and nation as we approach the end of the 20th century.

H. L. Mencken

To the Editor: In “Mencken on Trial” [April], Joseph Epstein has, as usual, written a thoughtful and entertaining article. But his conclusions are seriously flawed, it seems to me, by his insistence that the question of Mencken's anti-Semitism can be resolved by a simple yes or no verdict.

Andy Rooney

To the Editor: In “The Andy Rooney Affair” [May], Eric M. Breindel laments that as a probable result of the controversy, public persons with “views” on the sexual practices of others will keep their opinions to themselves.

Mandela in America

Neither Vaclav Havel nor Lech Walesa nor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn nor any other foreign visitor in memory was received by America with as much celebration, as much adulation, as much ecstasy as Nelson Mandela, the deputy president of the African National Congress (ANC), during his triumphal eight-day tour this past June.

The Killing Fields of Kiev

Half an hour's drive east of Kiev—from the gold-domed cliffs that survey the Eurasian expanses, across the Paton Bridge over the Dnieper, through the snarled streets of the new residential districts, the stucco on the apartment houses crumbling, the balconies cluttered with canned food and drying clothes, along the Avenue of the Sixtieth Anniversary of October toward the town of Brovary, where the road bends north to Byelorussia, past a traffic-control tower manned by militiamen with submachine guns, to a weedy shoulder almost opposite a garrison on a prerevolutionary artillery range—a sign the size of a folded map points into a pine forest.

Who, Really, Was Bruno Bettelheim?

When a famous man dies and is eulogized, those who knew him often feel a shock of non-recognition.

Germany's Worst Enemy

“Those Who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The Best Songwriter of Them All

When Irving Berlin died last year, almost all his obituaries included some version of Jerome Kern's famous praise: “Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music.”

Another Rare Visit With Noah Danzig

I am writing this with a five-for-a-dollar Bic ballpoint on lined notebook paper, both purchased for me in the hospital gift shop by a black orderly named Andre with a bebop walk and the hairdo known, I believe, as the Drippy. For someone who has always been quite sniffy about the materials of his craft—stationery by Balfour, pens by Mont Blanc—these are damned poor tools.

Are We Spending Too Much on AIDS?

If there is one thing Americans seem to agree upon about AIDS, it is that we are not spending enough on the disease.

The Politics of Rich and Poor, by Kevin Phillips

Just when you thought it safe to go into the water again . . . the malaise is back.

The Future of the Jews, by David Vital

David Vital brings to this extended essay on Jewish national identity the virtues of clarity and cogent analysis that have made him a distinguished historian of Zionism and a highly regarded authority on international relations.

Justice, Not Vengeance, by Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal, who has devoted his life to hunting down Nazis, believes that “guilt cannot be forgiven but only paid for by expiation.”

American Cassandra, by Peter Kurth

The German playwright Carl Zuckmayer's word for Dorothy Thompson was “double-portion,” and it seems right.

Japan and Free Trade

Irwin M. Stelzer's “How to Save Free Trade—and Still Trade With Japan” [July] is . . . sensible, but I would like to raise a minor though possibly important point.

The Anti-Communists

n Sam Tanenhaus's refresher course on anti-Communists [“What the Anti-Communists Knew,” July], he offers Friedrich A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom—a classic, no doubt about it.

Hebrew

To the Editor: I agree with Ruth R. Wisse [“The Hebrew Imperative,” June] that Hebrew and English are necessary for Jewish survival, but I would urge a course in remedial English for the countless Jews who out of ignorance use or accept . . . language that reflects non-Jewish definitions, interpretations, . . . attitudes, and values. For example, many Jews use the term “pharisaic” pejoratively; “crusade” or “crusader” honorifically; “gospel” to stand for unchallengeable truth; “The Lord's Prayer” for the name of the prayer that a sensitive Christian would call “The Pater Noster” or the “Our Father” in conversation with a Jew.

The Talmud in English

To the Editor: Edward Alexander's article, “A Talmud for Americans” [July], omitted mention of another remarkable publishing event related to the one he discusses.

Affirmative Action

o the Editor: In his reply in the July issue to my letter commenting on his article, “‘Affirmative Action’: A Worldwide Disaster” [December 1989], Thomas Sowell begins with a misleading definition.

Ukranians, Jews, Russians

To the Editor: I have just read David G. Roskies's “‘There Go Our Little Jews’” [April] and the letters that followed it [Letters from Readers, July and August].

A Statement on the Persian Gulf Crisis

On September 11, just after returning to Washington from his one-day summit meeting in Helsinki with Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush addressed a joint session of Congress.

How to Fight Iraq

As I write in early October, war may well lie before us in the Persian Gulf.

Harold Bloom's

The well-known literary critic Harold Bloom will no doubt provoke, as he clearly intends, a storm of excitement, consternation, and ire by proposing that the so-called J writer, usually thought to be responsible for the earliest strand of the Pentateuch, was a woman.

Living With Roe v. Wade

There Is something decidedly unappealing to me about the pro-life activists seen on the evening news as they are dragged away from the entrances to abortion clinics across the country.

The Nuclear Bubble

In June 1989 the press carried accounts of a project which had encouraged adolescents to write to Congress about the issues of most concern to them. Over 5,000 seventh- and eighth-graders had done so.

Race Fever

American universities are aflame with race fever.

In Poland Again

I had long hesitated to return for a visit to Poland, though it is the land of my birth and that of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

Darkness Visible, by William Styron

When an individual suffers the horrors of Auschwitz, survives to write inspiringly about man's ability to endure in extreme circumstances, but years later takes his own life over what many would deem no more than the ordinary unhappiness of the human condition, the event seems bound to become at the very least a source of sorrowful wonder.

Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens, British-born, Oxford-educated, a columnist for the Nation and Washington editor of Harper's, a widely published book reviewer, and a doer of countless other odd jobs, is a highly visible piece of leftist bric-a-brac in East Coast literary salons.

Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938, by Steven Beller; The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph, by Robert S. Wistrich

It was in turn-of-the-century Vienna, seed-plot of the modern intellect, that Sigmund Freud developed his psychoanalytic theories; that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein first posited a formal relationship between language and the real world; that the composer Arnold Schoenberg abandoned tonality and embarked on the restructuring of music; that the architect Adolf Loos first realized an aesthetic of unimpassioned functionalism.

Our Country, by Michael Barone

This book is mislabeled.

Crime But No Punishment

To the Editor: I read with great admiration and also growing anger Marco Carynnyk's “The Killing Fields of Kiev” [October].

Black Professors

To the Editor: In her article, “On the Scarcity of Black Professors” [July], Abigail M. Thernstrom seriously misstates Wellesley College's policy on increasing the representation of faculty of color.

Sovietology

To the Editor: Of course I fully agree with Arch Puddington when he says in his splendid article, “The Anti-Cold War Brigade” [August], that Reagan's policies greatly contributed to the favorable evolution of the Soviet Union—and pretty well every Soviet I've met, both official and unofficial, supports that view.

The 80's

To the Editor: . . . COMMENTARY's symposium, “The American 80's: Disaster or Triumph?” [September], provided a veritable orgy of food for thought on the 80's and the Reagan administration.

French Anti-Semitism

To the Editor: Roger Kaplan's thoughtful analysis of the extent of anti-Semitism in today's France, “Incident at Carpentras” [August], misses one key point.

The Holocaust Museum

To the Editor: I commend Edward Norden's thoughtful review of Judith Miller's One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust [Books in Review, August]. But I cannot let pass the questions he raises about the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Pilgrims & Palestinians

To the Editor: I enjoyed reading “Feminist Pilgrims” by Paul V. Mankowski, S.J. [June] on some of the recent absurdities in Nicaragua and the predictable reaction by some North American observers from the loony Left.

Israel's Economy

To the Editor: In his review of Ezra Sohar's Israel's Dilemma [Books in Review, August], Irwin M. Stelzer writes: “Other than calling . . . for tax cuts and privatization, and urging Israelis to ‘tell their government to get off their back,’ Sohar has little to say by way of prescription.”

Socialism: Guilty As Charged

Dear C., It has been over a decade since this silence as durable as an iron curtain descended between us.

How They Teach the Holocaust

A scandal erupted in 1988 when the United States Department of Education rejected an application for a $70,000 grant to disseminate Facing History and Ourselves, a privately-produced curriculum to teach junior-high-school students about the Holocaust.

Who Lost Hong Kong?

It is better to keep Hong Kong the way it is. —Chairman Mao Zedong, 1959

The Great Hack Genius

Nowadays, as the media boys down at the ad agency are likely to tell you, the name Ben Hecht doesn't have much carry.

Why College Sports

Collegiate athletics, it is generally agreed, are a mess.

Where the New Music Went Wrong

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. —Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

The Closest of Strangers, by Jim Sleeper; Devil's Night, by Ze'ev Chafets

here is an almost old-fashioned tone to Jim Sleeper's impassioned dirge for New York's lost civic culture.

By Way of Deception, by Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy

When the government of Israel asked a Canadian court to prevent the publication of By Way of Deception it guaranteed a succès de scandale.

Final Analysis, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson has lived much of his adult life in the spotlight, enmeshed in controversy. He is an erstwhile professor of Sanskrit who became a psychoanalyst, and who shortly thereafter caught the eye of Kurt Eissler, a man deeply learned in and devoted to the psychoanalytic movement and its history.

Pledging Allegiance, by Sidney Blumenthal

When Sidney Blumenthal first came to notice as a writer he was at the further edges of the Left, the co-editor of a conspiracy book about, among other things, Kennedy and King assassination plots (Government by Gunplay, 1976), and a contributor to an “alternative paper” in Boston.