In the fall of 2001 a slight book with a stern title, Call to Order: Investigation Concerning the New Reactionaries, sent minor shock waves throughout Parisian intellectual circles. The book’s author was Daniel Lindenberg, a historian and frequent contributor to …
When I was fourteen and fifteen, I used to ride my bike three miles to a bookshop run by people whom I thought of vaguely as beatniks. The owner was a man in his late twenties, dark-haired, bearded, scholastically gaunt. …
Though full-length documentary films go back to the work of Robert Flaherty in the 1920s (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran), they have always been the uncommercial stepchild of movies that tell made-up stories. In their marginal way, documentaries …
Naguib Mahfouz in the Life of an Israeli Friend
Since the start of the second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000 there has been a resurgence of interest in a one-state bi-national model for solving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The idea is achieving increasing popularity among people on …
Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio The Free Press, 2003, 576 pp., $35.00Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin Devon W. Carbado and Donald Wiese, eds. Cleis Press, 2003, 355 pp., …
Over the past ten years, there has been a growing gap in perception over the state of American democracy. The vast majority of the Washington press corps-including many pundits critical of the Bush administration-is inclined to see what has happened …
Alain Tanner’s 1976 film Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 qualified as an instant classic among my cohorts-American leftists of the sixties generation. Ask a few if they saw the film years ago, and you’ll probably get …
Arab Politics Before and After the Iraq War
How is postwar justice related to the justice of the war itself and the conduct of its battles? Iraq poses this question in an especially urgent way, but the question would be compelling even without Iraq. It seems clear that …
Responses to Michael Walzer
Little political magazines try to traffic in big, often unorthodox ideas-the sort of ideas that don’t always enjoy mainstream circulation. Dissent has been making this effort since 1954. Its founders came out of the left, and they considered the mood …
Undercounting Unemployment and its Consequences
Michel Houellebecq’s Platform
Both Jennifer K. Brown and Rosalind P. Petchesky raise important concerns in their replies to my paper. I will try to sort out where they misunderstand my position and where we just disagree. Brown states that I take “it as …
