Khrushchev And The Jews

Les Juifs Ne Savent Pas S’Orga’niser En Collectivitd. (The Jews Do Not Know How to Organize Themselves Collectively.) So ran the headline over an interview by Nikita Khrushchev to Le Figaro, a Parisian newspaper, on April 9, 1958. Staring at this headline, I found myself thinking back, with apparent inconsequence, to a catch-phrase which a few decades ago socialist and Marxist groups frequently used to employ. The catch-phrase was: “a society can be judged by its treatment of women.”

Socialists had not said that the character of a society can be determined by its production statistics; they had said that the true quality of a society could be discovered in its treatment of women—women who from t...