There’s scaffolding around the Anne Frank House on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam, the main thoroughfare in the now-trendy Jordaan section. A brochure you receive upon entering explains that the back annex needs a thorough restoration because of foot traffic …
In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s classic nineteenth-century utopian novel, Julian West falls asleep on Decoration Day in 1887 and awakens from a deep trance 113 years later at the start of a new millennium. Julian’s trance has kept him from …
One audacity of neoconservatives is their appropriation of the radical egalitarian rhetoric of the 1960s. In his recent book, The Affirmative Action Fraud, for example, Clint Bolick calls for a restoration of the Founding Fathers’ “civil rights vision.” According to …
One of the great canonical shifts of recent decades has been the enthusiastic rediscovery of earlier American painting. Thanks to the success of the abstract expressionists after the war, Americans began to realize that they too had a world-class art, …
On June 15, 1990, the Los Angeles police attacked a peaceful demonstration of janitors and their supporters in the tony Century City district of Los Angeles. Local 399 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was seeking a union contract …
Has the American culture that could once generate an Edmund Wilson become incapable of generating anyone similar today? Has something fundamental changed in American life, and is the age of critics-in-general (and readers-in-general) behind us? The idea that some such …
Workers have had a difficult time in the move to a market economy in Eastern Europe. In the first few years after 1989, prices skyrocketed and real wages plummeted. Hundreds of thousands have lost once-secure jobs. In June 1996, even …
Even the most sober-spirited could not help but feel a thrill seeing the long line of people on the steps of Columbia University’s Low Library on October 3, trying to get into the opening session of a “Teach-In with the …
Explaining his now famous parody in Social Text’s “Science Wars” issue, Alan Sokal writes in Dissent (“Afterword,” Fall 1996): But why did I do it? I confess I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed …
This past fall, Hilton Kramer, America’s angriest art critic, began his fifteenth year editing the New Criterion, the neocon journal of art and culture. In Kramer’s lead comment in the journal’s “special anniversary issue,” he rededicated the journal to fighting …
If you go to Britain and attend a Labour party rally, you will probably hear the audience sing “The Red Flag.” That song begins, “The people’s flag is deepest red. It’s shrouded oft our martyred dead. But ere their limbs …
I am a product of the social compact that lifted America out of the Great Depression and working Americans into the middle class. My father was an Irish immigrant, a New York City bus driver, and a proud member of …
Why do we worry so much about multiculturalism? The “we” is, as usual, deceptive, for worries about multiculturalism come from different and incompatible directions. For some people, the main complaint is that too many people from minority cultures have been …
The year 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan, and the creation of the United Nations. The founding of Commentary in the same year hardly ranked with …
The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History by Lawrence W. Levine. Beacon Press, 1996. 212 pp. $20.00. Almost ten years ago the collected complaints of a conservative University of Chicago professor became an unexpected bestseller. Allan Bloom, …
