Irving Howe - Dissent Magazine

Know Your Enemy: “Write Like a Man,” with Ronnie Grinberg

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ April 17, 2024

Matt and Sam are joined by historian Ronnie Grinberg to discuss her book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals.

A Modest Exercise in Freedom

Brian Morton ▪ Summer 2021

The left is at its most intelligent and most ethical when it believes—and vigorously promotes the belief—that everyone has the right to be heard.

Irving Howe: A Socialist Life

Mitchell Cohen ▪ Fall 2020

If Howe’s intellectual evolution has meaning for today’s left, it is to be found in his struggle to transcend sectarian mindsets while remaining principled.

Tributes to Michael Kazin

Editors ▪ October 6, 2020

Celebrating Michael Kazin as he retires from co-editorship of Dissent.

Mr In-Between

Michael Kazin ▪ Fall 2020

Working on Dissent has been both a great pleasure and a ceaseless responsibility. It is time to let others have all the fun and carry most of the burden.

Irving Howe at 100

Michael Walzer, Maxine Phillips, Nicolaus Mills, and Joanne Barkan ▪ June 11, 2020

Remembering Irving Howe, the founding editor of Dissent, on his 100th birthday.

Bad Romance

Alyssa Battistoni ▪ Spring 2020

The afterlife of The Romance of American Communism shows that no political movement ever really ends. We bear the weight of dead generations—and sometimes living ones, too.

We’ve Been Fighting Authoritarianism Since 1954. Are You With Us?

Editors ▪ December 2, 2016

Dissent was founded in a moment that must have felt as bleak as today, with two principal aims: to “defend democratic, humanist and radical values” and to attack all forms of authoritarianism. For 63 years, we’ve done just that, and we’re not going to stop now.

Eighty Years Since Bread and Wine: Ignazio Silone’s Christian Socialism

Vaneesa Cook ▪ May 6, 2016

Ignazio Silone’s 1936 classic served as a moral compass to a generation of U.S. leftists seeking alternatives both to capitalism and to Soviet-style communism.

On Democratic Internationalism

Michael Walzer ▪ Spring 2016

Struggles for democratization are always local struggles: the first thing their protagonists want is a state governed by the people who live in it. We must relearn how to support them.

Bogdan the Speaker

Harold Meyerson ▪ April 4, 2016

The first time I heard Bogdan Denitch speak, he intimidated the hell out of me. That wasn’t, I hasten to explain, his intent. Far from it. The occasion was a national board meeting of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in …

[EVENT | December 14] Michael Walzer: On Democratic Internationalism

Editors ▪ November 23, 2015

Join Michael Walzer for a lecture on politics and democratic internationalism.

What Is Democratic Socialism?

Editors ▪ November 14, 2015

A selection of key essays on democratic socialism from the Dissent archives.

Worlds in Waiting: The Promise of Little Magazines

David Marcus ▪ November 13, 2015

By remaining outside the mainstream, little magazines can articulate those demands and alternatives that are just left of the possible. Our hope is that these ideas will trickle up.