Bruce Ackerman and I are both passionate about opera; we both have egalitarian commitments. We both, I suppose, are “secular humanists.” We both would separate religion and state. And we diverge—markedly. Is it because Bruce Ackerman is a “liberal” and …
We on the left are in search of a new model for egalitarian society, after the definitive failure of what was called communism, and the evident victory, on an international scale, of capitalism. In my view, however, labeling that search …
I am struck by Mitchell Cohen’s embattled tone. It is as if we were locked in a life-and-death struggle with the Religious Right, which will settle for nothing less than the utter destruction of secular humanism. Liberals and social democrats …
I have suffered much anguish over NATO’s war in Yugoslavia. Unlike almost every U.S. military intervention of the past half century, this is a just war—but badly and irresponsibly led. It was cowardly of the White House to decide on …
On March 16, the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews released a long-awaited statement, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” examining the Catholic Church and the Holocaust. Well, not exactly the the Catholic church, as Lenny Bruce …
The year 1999 will be second in significance only to 1989 in the history of postwar German politics. The transition from Bonn to Berlin as the country’s capital was completed this year, and the Euro was inaugurated during a German …
Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism by Daniel Horowitz The University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, 352 pp., $29.95 In 1967, when I first became immersed in the women’s …
Debates about ethnic diversity are now a common feature of the political landscape. The term “multiculturalism” enjoys currency among those who welcome, or are resigned to, a decline in the type of cultural homogeneity usually associated with the classic nation-state. …
The doctrine known as the Washington Consensus was the Apostle’s Creed of globalization. It was an expression of faith that markets are efficient, that states are unnecessary, that the poor and the rich have no conflicting interests, that things turn …
Monica’s Story by Andrew Morton St. Martin’s Press, 1999, 288 pp., $24.95 In September 1998, when Congress released independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s referral to the U.S. House of Representatives, a rivulet of amateur cultural anthropologists and professional literary critics appeared …
Thirty-five years ago this summer, a group of college students—most of them white, most of them Northerners, most of them middle class—began gathering at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. They were at first glance no different from the …
Asian democrats, human rights activists, and scholars, including some whose essays are under review here, have debunked the idea that there is a set of values that are “Asian” in the sense that they span the continent’s diverse cultures.
The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy by Russell Jacoby Basic Books, 1999 ,236 pp., $26 “If you can’t say anything nice,” my mother used to admonish, “don’t say anything at all.” Presumably Russell Jacoby’s …
The big thing about any New York neighborhood is its relationship to the center. The city center in Manhattan, with its spectacular cluster of big buildings and bright lights, has a magical aura. It is the focal point of every …
The walls of Maurice Bishop’s prime ministerial office are still blackened from the flames that swept through Butler House during the U.S. invasion in 1983. Some Grenadians say the fire that engulfed the government compound high upon the bluff at …
