In my freshman year, when this green kid from the Midwest met Irving Howe, I told him I had read Fathers and Sons that summer and could not understand how anyone could compare Turgenev to Dostoevsky. “You will,” he replied. …
Thanks to the election of Bill Clinton, Americans are going to discover whether a change in leadership can cure the ills of their political system. Are the inadequacies in governing that have given rise to so much discontent mainly a …
Lionel Trilling once told how he had been looking for an appropriate word to characterize George Orwell, whom he wished to eulogize. It finally seemed to him that a very old-fashioned word was most appropriate, the word virtue. This word …
I propose here to discuss the topic of human rights as seen from the standpoint of five doctrines or outlooks that are dominant in our time. I don’t propose to be fair to these outlooks. Rather, I shall treat them …
Nineteen hundred and sixty eight came prewrapped in a mythic version of itself. At every moment, one was aware that this was 1968. The whole year was written in italics. Everything lent itself to media melodrama, but this was not …
The harsh conditions imposed by both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank upon developing countries belie the concern with poverty expressed in the quotations above. The principle of “conditionality” under which the IMF makes loans available is …
Rarely, if ever, are the words “socialism” and “nobility” associated with one another. Early socialists, following in the tradition of the French revolution, sought to destroy the old regime and its inequality. In the twentieth century, neither of socialism’s main …
Sudden deaths of friends still leading vital lives are always shocking. I suspect we were especially shocked by Irving’s death because we assumed, despite his deteriorating physical health, that he would somehow live forever. Irving was such a towering figure …
Some time ago, in an impatient review of Fiddler on the Roof, Irving wrote that the people who, one by one, made up Yiddish civilization in Eastern Europe were to be mourned—not with sentimental homage—but rather with “dignified silence.” We …
After the arson murder of three Turkish women in the town of Moiln last fall, the worst appeared to be over in Germany. Demonstrations and candlelight marches of hundreds of thousands against racism and xenophobia seemed to prove that Germans …
Had he been killed in midlife, as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were, Cesar Chavez would be one of those 1960s figures whose name brings instant recognition and a lump in the throat. We would speak of him today …
I cherished Irving as a generous friend and mentor. We shared a passion for literature, democratic socialism, and Jewish identity, making him irreplaceable in my life. (The one thing he didn’t share, or even comprehend, was my interest in tennis.) …
Lucidity may have been Irving Howe’s favorite word, as much in prose as in politics. In a preface to the re-publication of Politics and the Novel, written shortly before his death, he remarked that nowadays, “when critical writing is marked …
One interpretation of events in Bosnia-Herzegovina is that over recent weeks we have been receiving direct satellite images from Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature.” The accompanying commentary has been mainly outrage and lamentation, punctuated by demands that something be done, by …
It wasn’t good, but it was harmless.” “Harmless and popular.” Thus went an exchange after the movie Sleepless in Seattle. But, I wondered, could there be harm in sentimental romantic pabulum? The plot is harmless enough. Architect Sam Baldwin’s wife …
