My object is to defend Barack Obama against attacks on him by what has been his liberal constituency. Again and again he is accused of timidity and excessive caution for not fighting for their agenda. The assumption is that his …
It is a difficult time for a rational defense of religion. Because for most of my life I thought of myself as an atheist (and in certain moods still do), I never imagined that I would find myself a defender. …
In his essay “‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism” (first released by the American Jewish Committee in 2006 and reported to a wide readership in the New York Times in 2007), Alvin H. Rosenfeld takes to task liberal Jewish …
Critics, mostly though not exclusively European, who hammer away at Israeli misbehavior often show no concern about the dangers that beset Israel. Their one-sided animus verges on scandal. Criticism of Israeli behavior may be justified, but it loses credit when …
I am surprised that Frederick Crews acknowledges Freud’s suggestiveness and persuasiveness and his brilliant transmutation of late-Romantic literary culture into “science,” for nothing in his article “The Unknown Freud” (New York Review of Books, November 18, 1993) grants Freud’s work …
Revisionist scholarship on Freud has become a total assault on his achievement. If it were to succeed, virtually nothing would be left to value in his work. What would remain is a view of his legacy as a poison in …
The dominant wisdom about the Holocaust is that its enormity surpasses comprehension. Having shattered traditional faith (how could God have permitted it to happen?), the Holocaust has acquired the sanctity of deity and become the object of a kind of …
The editorial credo of the New York Review of Books, which began publication in February 1963, was what one might expect of a highbrow journal. … Neither time nor space … have been spent on books which are trivial in …
