Even as youngsters playing his music, we were aware that Shostakovich had led a life dominated by the vicissitudes of Soviet politics, that his art was frequently manipulated for the party’s anti-artistic purposes. It seemed to us that his works, …
At one point in The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow’s larky protagonist gets hooked up with an eccentric millionaire named Robey. Augie will, presumably, be his research assistant and, presumably, Robey will write a “survey or history of human …
Last year, on the night of December 10, our friend and long-time member of the Dissent editorial board Henry Pachter died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-three. His “rich and active life,” in the words of his …
Nations annually celebrate historic victories over past injustices and remember other historic events they do not celebrate. These are the recurrent nightmares that follow victories over tyranny and unjust social orders; those periods in which freedom must be defended but …
At the end of the war, the massive revelations of the genocide committed against the Jewish people—and of the way it was perpetrated—stunned the Western world. (The countries of Eastern Europe, long familiar with anti-Semitism, were not exempt from this …
Will President Reagan keep his promises? It depends on which ones you have in mind. Six days after the election an enthusiastic supporter of the victors, David Rockefeller, went to Argentina and exuberantly announced that at least one promise would …
Mistaken Identity Editors: Permit me to point out an error in fact in Jean Bloch-Michel’s article “Anti-Semitism and the French Right” (Summer 1980). Lucien Goldmann was neither a “former anarchist” nor was he killed by the neofascist Police Honor. He …
Among many liberals and leftists, the deepest worry generated by Reagan’s victory is the thought of the Supreme Court justices he is likely to appoint. That seems to me a misplaced worry, but it does reflect the enormous importance the …
In June 1980 the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity, under the chairmanship of Arthur I. Blaustein, submitted its Twelfth Report, Critical Choices for the Eighties, to President Carter (available from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, …
The Kemp-Garcia Urban Jobs and Enterprise Zones bill is a legislative proposal bobbing in the wake of Kemp-Roth and the monetarist ideas that absorb the Reagan administration’s attention. It is of interest because it is the only conservative proposal even …
That science can serve as a “front” for sinister interests and that science can play the whore are shocking statements, doubly so in this time of the apotheosis of Albert Einstein. Yet citizens of a liberal democracy, in which many …
A fair race was what Lyndon Johnson pleaded for in his 1965 commencement address at Howard University that ushered in the era of affirmation action. You do not take a person, who for years has been hobbled by chains and …
In 1963, the young editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, astonished his readers by appealing for “the wholesale merging of the races in the United States”—ending racism through “miscegenation.” His article, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” seemed the more remarkable since, to …
The Reagan administration has a new approach to human rights which, while it won’t affect anyone in the U.S., may have some important ramifications for political prisoners around the world. The philosophy of the new approach was expressed recently by …
Supply-side economics, the official Reagan alternative to the scorned Keynesian prescription, amounts to a gamble on the proposition that lower taxes will stimulate enough new investment and effort to flood supermarkets and showrooms with cheap merchandise of steadily improving quality. …
