Any five minutes of Truffaut show his quickness, his intelligence, his authority in matching images with words, or using them to surprise each other, and his unrelaxed interest in the progress of a story. He sets the pace better than …
I left Warsaw after a recent eight-day stay impressed above all with the fluidity of the situation and the lack of precedent for what is taking place. Yet about several important things I am sure. First, Poland is experiencing a …
Perhaps there are some people in politics who might disagree with the Nobel Laureate and father of the Soviet H-bomb, Andrei D. Sakharov, when he writes in A Letter from Exile, “I feel that the questions of war and peace …
This book is a massive compendium of historical data on people of African descent in the United States. This area of our history is among the least known and understood. Like a ball of tangled thread, it must be painstakingly …
The control and use of power was central to the thought of both Marx and Gandhi, yet they differed sharply in their views on how power should be exercised and for what purposes, and on how to respond to violence …
Perhaps the best way to describe the great debate about American foreign policy in recent years is that it no longer has a place for Henry Kissinger. Nobody, except business, is interested in that kind of cunning. Idealism has been …
Shortly before the elections, Israeli television interviewed a few men and women in the street as to their views of the candidates. Said one of them, “I don’t know why the difference between them matters—after all they are both Jews.” …
Considerations of space made it impossible for us to publish a full-length review of The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist: The Memoirs of Vladimir Medem, translated and edited by Samuel A. Portnoy (Ktav, 70 Varick St., New …
Had he been able to attend the meeting of the First Civil Court on June 1, 1981, at the Palais de Justice in Paris, Hitler would undoubtedly have been overjoyed. Close to 40 years after the masterful—albeit incomplete—realization of his …
On “Commentary” and the American Jews Editors: I find much to disagree with in Bernard Avishai’s lengthy diatribe against Commentary Magazine. However, I write not to present a detailed rebuttal but to refute a statement attributed to me by Mr. …
Why did Francois Mitterrand, after winning an absolute majority in the Assembly, take Communists into his government, thereby risking difficulties with foreign leaders and possibly causing some second thoughts among his center-left constituency? The fact is that, whatever one may …
This may well be the most important book on contemporary Soviet politics to appear in a decade. Seweryn Bialer has undertaken a “synthetic overview” of continuity and change in Soviet politics during the Brezhnev era. The book is divided into …
The turn of the century brought with it a special kind of regimentation for the American worker. As labor historian David Brody has noted, after 1900 the wage earner stood “wholly within the modern industrial order.” There was less of …
In the early 1970s, I taught a course at Harvard on the moral arguments for capitalism and socialism. It was easy to find readings in defense of capitalism. The rights of entrepreneurs, contractual freedom, contribution and “desert” as the basis …
I do not recall a time when the prospects for the left in America have looked quite so dim. By “the left,” I mean both the relatively small group of intellectuals and perpetual activists who have been responsive to Marxian …
