In the last one hundred years, war-induced worries about unity and loyalty have led to fears of foreigners in our midst and campaigns to restrict their rights and opportunities. This has been especially true at times, such as the 1910s …
Dear ______, I knew something had gone wrong by the time the Dissent public forum called “Patriotism in a Time of War” ended that evening last October in New York City. Some people in the audience (although by no means …
During the first month of this year, the nation’s major newspapers used the phrase “class warfare” in 267 stories, compared with 372 times in all of 2002. One might think the revolution is at hand. The reality, though, has more …
I am a Korean-American law professor with two very different research agendas. On the one hand, I am deeply curious about technology and its impact on society. My undergraduate degree is in physics, and I write about communications. On the …
Harvard philosopher John Rawls’s name is not a household word, but it is unusually well-known around universities. Students often assume he must have been dead for many years, like the other great philosophers. A student told me that he and …
On October 27, 2002, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva-lathe operator, leader of the independent Brazilian labor movement that emerged in the late 1970s to challenge the military regime, a founder of the Brazilian Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores-PT), and a …
This is a defining moment for the American left. As Michael Wreszin, a distinguished historian, is well aware, reform and radical movements always get transformed in the crucible of war. The Civil War turned abolitionists into militant Republicans, World War …
Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has generated an increasingly hostile view of Israel throughout Western Europe. Much of this reaction consists of sharp criticism …
In the six years since I published a book about my son Jamie, Life As We Know It, a great deal has changed in Jamie’s life-starting with his realization that there is a book about him. When I completed the …
Downsizing Democracy: how America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public by Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, and Where Have All The Voters Gone? by Martin P. Wattenberg
Pascal Bruckner is one of the leading figures of the Generation of 1968 in France-which is to say, he is someone who, in his student days, agitated for the revolution. And he is someone who, as he grew up, never …
In November 1932, deputy Fabien Albertin took the floor of the National Assembly in Paris to denounce tax evasion by eminent French personalities-politicians, judges, industrialists, church dignitaries, and directors of newspapers-who were hiding their money in Switzerland. “The minister of …
The Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right by Richard Goldstein
The New McGovernites
In critical reviews and essays about my father, Irving Howe, one frequently encounters a certain neat formulation that declares he was a man who wrote about what he lived and knew.* He grew up with Yiddish as his first language, …
