About a week before Arafat, I visited Jericho to see how “the autonomy” (as my Israeli friends call it) was faring. It was, that week, faring well. The city, bedecked in Palestinian flags, was quiet; the old police and new …
From time immemorial the prime agency of individual and social reproduction has been inertia, the biological form of which is instinct and the cultural form, tradition. That is to say, things were done because they had been done before— an …
Alas, the editors of Social Text have discovered that my article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which appeared in Social Text #46/47, is a parody. In view of the important intellectual and political issues raised …
Characteristically, Stanley Hoffmann assesses the challenges facing American foreign policy with the touch of a master: broad brush strokes set on an enormous canvas, with impressive attention to nuance. The stance adopted is neither critical nor apologetic, but rather magisterial: …
The dominant wisdom about the Holocaust is that its enormity surpasses comprehension. Having shattered traditional faith (how could God have permitted it to happen?), the Holocaust has acquired the sanctity of deity and become the object of a kind of …
Few Americans, of whatever political persuasion, would disagree with David Plotke’s four “good things that health care reform should try to do.” My own list of the aims of health financing reform (as distinguished from delivery system reform) includes those …
I have no particular quarrel with Stanley Hoffmann’s comments, not even with the one endorsing a “free enterprise system” in Russia. But since Dissent is a journal of the left, allow me to exhume an additional point from the ancient …
“Nobody reads Dissent but a bunch of old lefties.” So said one of our friends in the course of discussions about the magazine’s future after Irving Howe’s death last year. The remark was meant as a provocation, and so the …
Eugene D. Genovese writes powerfully against bad faith, against prevarication championed and recognized but not admitted. He is relentless: how can one confront impostors of liberation with timidity? Least of all when mendacity concerns mass murder and you admit your …
In Brussels, in August 1830, the revolution began at the opera. It was William I’s birthday and the fifteenth anniversary of this Dutch king’s rule over Belgium, a spoil of the Congress of Vienna. The evening was to crown three …
Earth Day 1970 marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Twenty million Americans gathered to demonstrate their distress over the state of the environment. Their message was historically distinct. In the past, environmental concern revolved mainly around establishing and …
In my spare time, I collect significant encounters that never took place. Karl Marx and Charles Darwin were intended by a mutual friend to meet but the rendezvous did not occur. George Orwell waited for Albert Camus to keep an …
For Eugene Genovese the time has come to confess, to acknowledge the silences of the 1950s, and, perhaps, to free ourselves to move forward. In a belated recognition of the evils of Stalinism, he condemns those on the left who …
I very much appreciate the manifest content of Eugene Genovese’s piece, although I’m impatient with its deeper import. As for the first, I agree entirely that it remains difficult, often impossible, to discuss publicly within the sociable circles and academic …
Confessions? Apologies? Nothing could be further from my mind. It has never occurred to me to apologize to anyone for the content of my life, which I would have judged on its balance of good and evil. I share Christine …
