Even the most sober-spirited could not help but feel a thrill seeing the long line of people on the steps of Columbia University’s Low Library on October 3, trying to get into the opening session of a “Teach-In with the …
This past fall, Hilton Kramer, America’s angriest art critic, began his fifteenth year editing the New Criterion, the neocon journal of art and culture. In Kramer’s lead comment in the journal’s “special anniversary issue,” he rededicated the journal to fighting …
I am a product of the social compact that lifted America out of the Great Depression and working Americans into the middle class. My father was an Irish immigrant, a New York City bus driver, and a proud member of …
If you go to Britain and attend a Labour party rally, you will probably hear the audience sing “The Red Flag.” That song begins, “The people’s flag is deepest red. It’s shrouded oft our martyred dead. But ere their limbs …
Why do we worry so much about multiculturalism? The “we” is, as usual, deceptive, for worries about multiculturalism come from different and incompatible directions. For some people, the main complaint is that too many people from minority cultures have been …
The year 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan, and the creation of the United Nations. The founding of Commentary in the same year hardly ranked with …
The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History by Lawrence W. Levine. Beacon Press, 1996. 212 pp. $20.00. Almost ten years ago the collected complaints of a conservative University of Chicago professor became an unexpected bestseller. Allan Bloom, …
“So: tell me about yourself!” At a dinner party in the suburbs, skewered lamb cooking on the grill, the conversational tone flippant, the answer to this question is no longer framed in terms of a hobby, a sign of the …
I first encountered Bernie Rosenberg in Social Science B at Brandeis, where we read mimeographed chapters of Max Lerner’s forthcoming book on American civilization, and Max sat on the stage of the largest lecture hall on campus and talked, with …
CENTRAL RAILWAY, SYDNEY In a shit-house stall in Central I saw the one word “Mum” and thought once more of young men torn by want or war or hunger from their families, the West Virginian I wrote of thirty years …
Political impotence doesn’t always weaken the critical faculties, and some degree of aloofness from the well-known corruptions of power and money is essential for an independent social observer. Less known, though, is the effect on those faculties of going years …
This is a defining moment for the American labor movement—a moment ripe with opportunity and terror. On the hopeful side, the AFL-CIO is finally moving again. The “new voices” leadership team of John Sweeney, Richard Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson—which ran …
When I heard the sad news, two memories came to mind. I met Bernie in September 1950. I had just finished my graduate course work and been lucky enough to get my first teaching job as an adjunct at Hunter …
ANXIETY… ANGER. . . LOSS. . . DISILLUSIONMENT. . . CONFLICT. . . CONFUSION. . . . SHAME. . . . The dark words, in tall letters on a large pad mounted on an easel, were being taken down with …
If you think of Wisconsin as a progressive pioneer in the development of social welfare policy, the first state to offer unemployment compensation, it pays to remember that it was also the home of Joseph McCarthy, who built his career …
