Still Believing in the Dream  

Still the Promised City?: African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York by Roger Waldinger. Harvard University Press: 1996. 374 pp. $35.00. Last January a report by New York’s Department of City Planning verified what most New Yorkers already knew: …



Assault on City University  

Public higher education is under attack, and nowhere is this more evident than at the City University of New York. Many of CUNY’s 213,000 students are poor. Most are minority and more than a few are on public assistance. The …



Bitter Journey  

It’s probably unfair, but I would like Nicholas Lemann’s account of the causes and consequences of the great black migration better if it were not so widely and extravagantly praised. It is, in some ways, a very good book. Well-written …



Approaches to the Homeless  

It is sobering to read the entry on “homelessness” in the 1968 edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which declares that although wandering men can be found in many societies, “homeless women and children are relatively rare. …



A Private Times Square?  

We live, my more literary minded friends tell me, in an age when irony is highly valued. So I suppose I should not be surprised that the continuing overbuilding of midtown Manhattan has taken a distinctly ironic twist. Still, there …



The City’s “New Immigrants”  

New York is, once more, an immigrant town. Not only do the public schools now give instruction in seven languages (eight if you count Mandarin and Cantonese separately), but programs to serve eight additional language groups with instruction primarily in …



Neo-Marxist Views of the State  

The revolution is not at hand. Although this fact is no surprise to anyone, it does merit some reflection. At the very moment when the industrialized West faces something akin to those “crises of capitalism” that Marxists have talked about …