If you listen closely, you can hear a hollow ring to all the triumphalist talk about America’s superpower monopoly since the end of the cold war. True, it is a position without precedent for any government since the days of …
The simplest way to locate the Midwest is to accept that its borders aren’t fixed on the map. Unlike New England, which is a culture of six identifiable states, or the South, which at the very least includes the states …
Whatever questions dominate this year’s presidential campaign, however they are reported in the media, the context in which they will eventually be answered has been “globalized.” We are all internationalists now. Politics is still local, of course; as Göran Therborn …
A couple of years ago I picked up my fifth-grade daughter from an after-school rehearsal for her East Harlem school’s chorus. The mother of two other children was late, and I agreed to wait with them until she arrived. I …
Imagine the possible political arrangements of international society as if they were laid out along a continuum marked off according to the degree of centralization. Obviously, there are alternative markings; the recognition and enforcement of human rights could also be …
The Human Stain by Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 365 pp., $26 What Philip Roth has always needed—and what, like Joseph K., he has been unfairly denied—is a proper trial. If not for the attacks on Jewish suburbia in Goodbye, …
The historical lesson of the kibbutz in pre state Israel lies in the deep pragmatism of its early leaders, who were committed to understanding young people and so created a medium for them to lead lives relevant to their personal …
Retrospectives on the twentieth century give ample space to its horrors. Natural catastrophes are overshadowed by wars and other human made disasters: six million murdered in the German Holocaust, thirty million starved to death in Mao’s Great Leap Forward, eleven …
Jo-Ann Mort and Gary Brenner present a kind of recipe for saving the Israeli kibbutzim from the existential-economic-demographic–ideological crisis they are undergoing (“Kibbutzim: Can They Survive the New Israel?”, Dissent, Summer 2000). Their article is mainly a description and analysis …
At the risk of being called a spy, or worse, a journalist, I set out, entry visa in hand, to cross the Serbian border. As I traveled by car service to the border, my companions consisted of another American, a …
Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic by Jim DeRogatis Broadway Books (a division of Random House), 2000, 332 pp., $15.95 “If love is truly going out of fashion forever, which I do …
On April 7, just two months after the formation of a coalition government that includes members of Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), Alfred Gusenbauer, newly designated chief of the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ), a former youth leader not known …
On January 14, 1991, when the first Iraqi scuds hit Israel, one of the central commitments of the kibbutz—that children are best educated among their peers in the communal children’s house—shattered within a few hours. Parents swooped up their children …
Crabcakes by James Alan McPherson Simon & Schuster, 1998, 288 pp., $13 Pulitzer-Prize winner James Alan McPherson has written two highly regarded collections of short fiction, and the pleasures and insights offered by Crabcakes are those of a well-crafted story. …
Arnold Kaufman’s The Radical Liberal was originally published as an entire issue of Dissent and then released as a book by Atherton Press in 1968. Read today, it smacks of its time. One of America’s most divisive presidential elections is …
