Spring 2025

Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error speaks directly to the experiences of public school teachers who are tired of being labeled as failures for their inability to control the outcomes of standardized tests.

Readers of Dissent are unlikely to be newcomers to Wisconsin’s recent political saga. With oddball events unfolding week by week, however, they may easily have lost track. American conservatives have not forgotten.

“Sixty-five years after its founding,” Ari Shavit writes in My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, “Israel has returned to its core questions. . . . Why Israel? What is Israel? Will Israel?” To answer these questions, he goes far beyond the occupation, touching on many issues that get to the core of Israeli identity.

In 1913, the Armory Show gave thousands of Americans their first glimpse of modern European painting. Now, in an exhibit entitled The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution, the New York Historical Society has made it possible for us to see what all the excitement was about.

As the still-unfolding revelations of NSA surveillance over virtually all of Americans’ telecommunications show, it is clear that privacy advocates have their work cut out for them. Two recent books decry the privacy violations but stop short of formulating workable ways to protect privacy interests.

Violence against gays and lesbians in Russia has never been as intense as it is today. The more politicians discuss implementing anti-gay laws, the more attacks occurred against sexual minorities. And Russia’s LGBT community is too weak to withstand this aggression.

Yossi Klein Halevi’s Like Dreamers tells the story of the members of the 55th Paratrooper Reserve Brigade, who played in securing Jerusalem during the Six Day War. From the peace movement to the settlements, the paths followed by the brigade’s veterans was a microcosm of Israel’s most intense schisms.

Technological innovation has been key to American military policy since 9/11, but it has by no means been the only driver of change. We might better view these years as a story of the U.S. national security apparatus gradually breaking free of the restraints imposed on it in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. It is also a story of the military and intelligence wings of this apparatus becoming increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable from one another.

As new scholarship has challenged the standard view of postwar American history, the need for a new narrative has become obvious. Joshua Freeman’s recent survey of the nation since 1945 is comprehensive in scope, but fails to develop a new way of understanding the recent past.

The Affordable Care Act is better than nothing and it has already had a real impact. But it is a timid law that will likely show timid results in the long run. Real health care reform will require lawmakers to confront the problems that the ACA studiously avoided.