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Letter from Berlin: Utopia or Auschwitz?  

The German new Left was too close to the history it so desperately wanted to negate; it could not develop a sane or truthful relationship to the crimes and the cruelty of the Nazi era. Haunted by visions of the gas chambers, it believed that the only alternatives were the creation of a utopia or the recreation of Auschwitz.



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Zionism and Its Discontents  

Given the level of alarmed debate and self-criticism in at least some major sectors of the Israeli press, the tsunami of vitriol that has descended on Peter Beinart and his book is fascinating, puzzling, and profoundly depressing.



Phantasms of Revolution  

The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin Princeton University Press, 2010, 391 pp. IT WOULD BE EASY—and perhaps entertaining—to write a history of Maoism in France that would …







The Bleeding Wound: Zimbabwe’s Slow Suicide  

[contentblock id=17 img=gcb.png] Zimbabwe was known as the “jewel of Africa,” as Samora Machel, the Marxist president of Mozambique, told Robert Mugabe when the new nation won its independence in 1980. As the second-most-industrialized country on the continent, the former …



A Remembrance of Ellen Willis  

Ellen Willis, who died in November at the age of 64, was such a unique and wonderful set of contradictions—or seeming contradictions. She was a staunchly radical feminist who believed in pleasure, happiness, and freedom. She was a fierce polemicist …



The Last Page  

When I hear professional critics, or my students, bemoan the commodification of art, a wave of irritation engulfs me. Yes, yes, I think, we live in a capitalist society where art, like other things, is bought and sold. This is …







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