For most of my politically conscious life,the idea of social transformation has been the great taboo of American politics. From the smug 1950s to the post-Reagan era, in which a bloodied and cowed left has come to regard a kinder, …
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 …
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 Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu boasts a long, international-award-winning bibliography of poetry and prose. Yet in his fiction, he often speaks through narrators hostile to publication and recognition.
There are all sorts of ironies in a Dissent issue devoted to New York City. In one sense, nothing could be more obvious. Most of Dissent’s editors have spent most of their lives in or near this city. Indeed, the …
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 …
The Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art offers a place for working-class art without tokenizing or empty gestures of representation.
It was expected that General Motors would announce plant closings. But when the announcement came last November, the scale was astounding: 29,000 workers in 11 plants laid off. Almost two-thirds of the affected unionized workers (17,450) live in Michigan. As …
It’s almost as though an “iron law” operates in all the communist countries, varied though they are. They seem haunted by the specter of democracy, especially when they seek to reform their moribund economies. Their economic growth and individual well-being …
I AM NOT, I HOPE, INDULGING in that most middle-aged of pastimes, boasting of how terrible things were when I was young. And yet, it must be said that, for all the current talk of repression in American society, what …
So we have left footprints on the face of the moon. An admirable feat. We can congratulate ourselves, we can be proud, we have shown that it can be done. Most likely, it had to be done even though the …
ONE AFTERNOON last summer I happened to be watching a TV discussion among five or six black teenagers. All were speaking out of a deep pride in their blackness, as it is almost mandatory to do today, and also out …
Like other minorities, black Americans have a history of their own peculiar sufferings and peculiar experiences, as well as special forms of resistance or of protective evasion. But this history is distinguished from the history of all other minorities in …
