At First Glance  

Suppose the Golem had been made, not of the clay that legend has it, but of plastic: what would have been his fate? Well, he might have been elected president and as he acquiesced in the engineering of a depression …



Letters  

In order to help move the United States “toward a sane defense policy,” Bogdan Denitch [in Dissent, Summer 1982] calls for “a fundamental examination” by the democratic left of “the assumption behind U.S. defense policy.” Denitch characterizes U.S. society as …



The Agonies of Bertura in Brazil  

The book most prominently displayed on Sao Paulo newsstands in recent months might strike some passersby as a curious anachronism—if they have ever heard of its long-dead author. Sandwiched in between the usual soccer magazines and pornography one stumbles upon …







At First Glance  

Suppose the Golem had been made, not of the clay that legend has it, but of plastic: what would have been his fate? Well, he might have been elected president and as he acquiesced in the engineering of a depression …



A Talk with Victor Reuther  

The Automobile Workers Union (UAW) will be holding its convention this May in Dallas; we expect to have a report in our next issue. Meanwhile, we print below excerpts from a conversation recently held in Washington, D.C., between Irving Howe …



Solidarity at Work in Paris  

In the Paris office of the Coordinating Committee of Solidarnok, Jacek xeroxes pages of the underground press recently smuggled into France. “We are a clearing house for most of the information coming out of Poland,” he says. Holding up a …



Brezhnev: A Bureaucrat’s Profile  

In the U.S.S.R. the death of the leader of the party and state is a political event of extraordinary significance, usually marking the end of an era. Protracted tenure in office permits Soviet leaders to conclude a fair number of …



Takeover on the West Bank  

Benvenisti stresses [that] it’s not so much the number of settlements as the type of settlement that is the most significant factor. During the period of the Labor government the concept of settlement dictated the building of kibbutzim and moshavim, …





Letters  

I have subscribed to Dissent for many years—since 1960, I believe—and know I have helped the magazine gain a wider exposure. I convinced a librarian at the University of Western Ontario to establish a subscription, and to order all available …



Legacies of New Deal Liberalism  

The United States, as Louis Hartz argues in The Liberal Tradition in America, may have been born liberal, and it may have grown up over two centuries confined within an unselfconscious Lockean consensus about an “American way of life” based …