The fate of the American family has become news. Even casual exposure to the media reveals this recurring preoccupation. Throughout television and the popular movies, the public is bombarded with themes of incest, divorce, runaways, parental abandonment, nonmarital cohabitation, and …
Intellectuals, whatever their national or ethnic origins, often have had to make hard choices between creative and political activity. This problem is particularly acute for black American intellectuals. In no generation have they escaped the simultaneous pulls of creative and …
On “The Legacy of Herbert Marcuse” Editors: Jean L. Cohen writes of “The Legacy of Herbert Marcuse” (Dissent, Winter 1981), expostulating his “penetrating analyses” and “spirit.” In the spirit of Dissent, I dissent. Marcuse was a sad figure and his …
Military conscription is once again on the national agenda, but neither conservatives nor liberals, neither proponents nor opponents of registration seem interested in confronting the underlying issues of the place of national service in the life of a democratic republic. …
Israel is, of course, Semitic. It is rooted in the Middle East. Its population is, in a steadily growing majority, non-European. Yet Israel is perceived-—by itself as well as by others-—to be a European nation. That this should be so, …
A new battle of political statements has begun— this time about El Salvador. Most of those I’ve seen appear to be little more than rewritings of statements produced in the ’60s about Vietnam, and this doesn’t encourage one to rush …
The economic and social situation of American workers is deteriorating. The purchasing power of their earnings is declining, and that decline is barely offset by family incomes bolstered by the earnings of a working wife. Workers’ families thus must work …
I am holding what our Chinese friends would call a “Speak Bitterness Meeting” with my typewriter. The subject of my bitterness is Doctors; Medical Doctors, “Doctors Doctors.” Doctors, as a group, are no better, certainly no better, but also no …
I have written in Dissent [in the Summer 1980 issue] about activities of rightist groups in France that are openly racist although they now call that age-old hatred by new and discreet names. They’ve surely had some success with the …
Contrary to nearly universal expectation, the suit against the State of California’s Board of Education by Kelly Segraves, a fundamentalist foe of evolution, did not turn into a repeat performance of the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925. Nevertheless, systematic comparison …
The onset of stagflation in the ’70s has stimulated attacks on the welfare state and its chief proponent, social democracy. The right-wing attack has sought to link causally social democracy’s program—redistribution through public-sector expansion—to the economic problems suffered by the …
One would have thought that the Thatcher government would provoke a much needed renewal of the Labour party. Thatcherism has involved an explicit repudiation of the whole framework of postwar consensus politics, and has defined the policies of both the …
Our readers will remember the extremely informative article by Olivier Roy on Afghanistan in our Winter 1981 issue, which we translated from our sister publication in Paris, Esprit. We now provide some excerpts from a conversation, again taken from Esprit, …
If we try to grasp the Orient, it trickles through our fingers like desert sand. What is the Orient? It is best described as the contrast of opposites: the Orient is what the Occident is not. Once again let’s cite …
The oddest things cause consternation in the Reagan White House. For example, on April 30 the president was carried away by his subject matter and departed from prepared text. It was a public ceremony (for the victims of the Holocaust) …
