Spring 2024

In the May 1963 issue of Unser Zeit, the Yiddish-language journal of the Jewish Labor Bund, there appears an important memoir by the late Lydia Dan, wife of the Menshevik leader Theodore Dan. During the early thirties, relates Mrs. Dan, …

When I was a wee colored tot wearing knickerbocker trousers and with a snotty nose, when Ralph J. Bunche was still an honest-to-goodness “colored” Negro such as Richard Wright, Sterling A. Brown, E. Franklin Frazier, and other angry colored men …

To do justice to the subtleties of life on the Seneca Reservation requires more than ethnographic reportage, or abstract analyses of social structures that we find transfixed in the professional journals. It requires these, yes, but also an authentic literary …

These short pieces were chosen because their subject matter is fit concern for a President. One is of course not throwing any disqualified devil’s wishes into the ring for oneself, no, no, these are the Presidential papers of a court …

In the Spring of 1962 a serious attempt was made to create a Neo-Fabian Society in New York City. Spearheaded by Robert B. Silvers, an editor at Harrier‘s, William Phillips, co-editor of Partisan Review, Stanley Plastrik, an editor of DISSENT, …

On March 20, 1963 the Greenwood, Mississippi Commonwealth carried side-by-side two editorials which graphically illustrate the inability of Southern whites to understand what is happening to their “way of life.” One editorial, entitled “A History Lesson,” chided Latin American oligarchs …

I have been wondering recently why it was that the full barbarism of the University of Mississippi crisis did not strike me until almost three months after Meredith had been enrolled. I bought a newspaper one afternoon in San Francisco …

No one has been more aware and less surprised by the white liberal’s retreat than the Negro intelligentsia engaged in the civil rights struggle. They have been watching with increasing skepticism the liberal’s distress with the fact of integration, a …

An atrocity is an atrocity, is an atrocity. No matter whether it is committed by Russians, Nazis, Frenchmen or Americans. Unless this is kept firmly in mind one succumbs to the fallacy of believing that when we, the children of …

The Negro revolution may be blocked here and diverted there, but it cannot be stopped. It surges up from the very depths of our social life, from people who for decades had been cowed into silence or drugged into apathy. …

Julian Mayfield’s letter rebutting Lewis Coser’s assessment of his piece in the “Young Radicals” symposium was printed without comment, I suppose, on grounds that it damns itself. It does….

Not the least of the consequences of fidelismo has been its effect upon a section of American radical youth. At a meeting organized by Dissent and held in New York City on February 22, an instructive, if ironic, illustration of …

The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream by Daniel J. Boorstin Atheneum, 1962, 315 pp., $5.00 In his study of English poetry and its resources, F. W. Bateson quips about “the non-ruling classes who are more planned against …

The Bureaucratic Revolution by Max Shachtman Donald Press, 360 pp., $2.95 During the 1940s and 1950s the author of this book was the leader of a tiny radical organization, the Independent Socialist League. Originally a fracture from the American Trotskyist …