Michael Walzer Responds  

I AGREE WITH Jim Rule on the wrongness of Israeli settlement policy. I don’t believe, as he suggests, that ending American support for that policy would reduce hatred for the United States in the Arab and Muslim worlds. People who …



Letters  

Editors: Alfred Kazin (“They Made It,” Dissent, Fall 1988) suggests that I find the legal execution of innocents “acceptable” in the implied sense of “unobjectionable, “wherefore I am despicable. This is an adscititious misinterpretation. In the context “acceptable” meant “predictable” …



The Strength of Memory  

WRITE a long, flowing political novel about a small group of Old Left, Anti-Stalinist socialists, tracing their paths from a youthful idealism in the late thirties to a weariness in the early sixties. Weave together their tangled personal lives and …



“Pluralism” and American History  

FEW SCHOLARS HAVE INFLUENCED our thinking about “extremism” as much as Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of social relations at Harvard. The first writer to apply the concept of a “radical Right” to American social movements (in 1951), he later proposed …





Rolf Hochhuth’s “The Deputy”  

No play as important, as interesting as Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy has been shown for a very long time—and no play as interesting in an important way. I would insist, too, that the importance of the work is due not …



The Student Movement  

In the last few months, especially since the war in Vietnam and protests against it have both escalated, a number of commentators from many wings of opinion—right, center, and socialist—have expressed a great deal of doubt about and disapproval of …



Reconstruction and Indecision  

I never met a colleague in the teaching of a college history course who expected to learn very much from grading a batch of blue books. Yet an untidy pile of essays on my desk—essays designed to persuade me that …



A Mighty Story Retold  

Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor by Thomas R. Brooks, foreword by A.H. Raskin Delacorte, 300 pp., $6.00 There are Civil War buffs who read and reread the chronicles of that immensely important time. There are labor buffs …



“Partial, Passionate, and Political”  

The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience by Harold Rosenberg Horizon Press, 270 pp., $7.50 I praised Harold Rosenberg’s first volume of criticism (The Tradition of the New) for its variety: this new volume must be praised for its …





Scholars and Public Debates  

In her excellent, tightly reasoned “Against Academic Boycotts” (Dissent, Summer 2007), Martha Nussbaum notes that the “main force of the boycott” is directed against “individual members of the [Israeli] institutions,” who are accused of not condemning their “government as much …