On the November issue:

An Israeli Soldier

To the Editor:
Thank you to John Podhoretz for describing the reality of Alon’s life in Israel (“The Story of an Israeli at War,” November). The only thing missing is hearing from Alon himself. His thoughts, his words, his hopes for his future, and his reasons for staying in Israel with his children and raising his family under G-d’s protection and divine love.

I will pray for Alon, his family, all Jews, and all residents of Israel. I cannot even begin to understand what it must be like to experience the kind of savagery against innocent Jewish people that I have seen documented recently. Alon and his people are enduring unspeakable, heinous cruelty by an evil enemy devoid of all human compassion.
Anthony N.
Taichung City, Taiwan

To the Editor:
John Podhoretz’s article brought me to tears. By describing the trajectory of his nephew’s life, he illustrates what it’s been like to grow up in Israel over the past 30-plus years. I knew about all these regional events, but it makes such a difference when their effects are personalized and brought down to the scale of one life. Alon is a true Jewish hero. Thank you for sharing his story with us.

Estra Grant
Beachwood, Ohio

Amalek

To the Editor:
Regarding John Podhoretz’s mention of Amalek, many Jews had come to interpret that story as a metaphor for our internal evil inclinations and the need for us to confront ourselves (“In Every Generation,” November). October 7, however, reminded us that Amalek still walks the planet. 

In Deuteronomy, Moses described the Amalek tribe’s behavior and for all time defined true evil: “Remember what Amalek did to you … he attacked those who were in the rear … the weak … the thirsty … the exhausted.” And God said to Moses, “I will utterly wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”

Hamas is our modern-day Amalek.

October 7 was not only a security failure. It reflected a widespread reluctance to consider the Bible as more than a book about values. It is also a book of history.
Stephen Bashein
Potomac, Maryland

Reading Wars

To the Editor:
In his essay “Getting Reading Right,” Robert Pondiscio offers a scathing but confused critique of the “balanced literacy” approach of Columbia University professor Lucy Calkins (November). He notes that only 20 percent of his students were reading on grade level, implying that this was at least partially the result of Calkins’s methods. Pondiscio also applauds New York City’s decision to switch to reading programs that are “phonics-heavy.” These two points are worth examining.

As I understand it, “balanced literacy” refers to curricula or teaching approaches that balance phonics and phonological-awareness instruction (i.e., decoding, sounding out, and knowledge of letter-sound relationships) with instruction in the other components of reading, such as fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—while also emphasizing affective learning components such as enjoyment, interest, motivation, and confidence. It is very much an umbrella term, however, because balanced-literacy curricula and pedagogy can vary by program, teacher, school, or school district. Some are “ad hoc and improvisational,” as Pondiscio describes Calkins’s program. Some are more structured, such as those based on commercial textbooks and workbooks. Critics of “balanced literacy” usually claim that it doesn’t include enough systematic instruction in phonics, but that can vary widely from one balanced-literacy program to another.

As Pondiscio writes, the concept of balanced-literacy instruction was a response to the reading wars of the 1950s and 1960s between reading educators who wanted to emphasize phonics and those who wanted to emphasize whole-word recognition, comprehension, motivation, and interest—the “whole language” approach. Balanced literacy was developed to find middle ground by emphasizing multiple components of reading, including phonics. Pondiscio quotes Tim Shanahan, a member of the 2000 National Reading Panel, as saying, “Kids need decoding. Kids need reading comprehension strategies. Kids need fluency. And putting time into those things is really critical.” But Pondiscio incorrectly interprets Shanahan’s comment to mean, “The reading wars were over. Phonics won.” This is exactly what Shanahan did not say. He was saying that students needed multiple reading skills, including phonics, but not exclusively or even primarily phonics.

While Pondiscio suggests that New York City students need more systematic instruction in phonics, he acknowledges that the soul of reading is not decoding but reading comprehension—the ability to take meaning from text. Decoding is a skill. We can “read” made up words such as “brillig” and “slithy toves,” and even agree on their pronunciation once we have mastered the code of written language. But knowing what words mean is a much heavier lift. Reading comprehension is not a skill, like throwing a ball or riding a bike. This, too, I witnessed in my South Bronx classroom. I never had a single student who could not “decode.”

If all of his students had mastered decoding such that inadequate phonics skills were not their reading deficiency, why would his school need a new “phonics-heavy” reading program? It sounds like the school was already doing an adequate job teaching phonics and decoding, either because of or despite Calkins’s program.

Pondiscio is correct that schools need to teach science, art, music, social studies, and math so students can acquire the background knowledge and vocabulary required for comprehension. But that doesn’t mean they necessarily need more phonics and decoding instruction. It could mean that they need exactly what they are getting now, or even less.
Emily Dexter
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Robert Pondiscio writes:
It’s ironic that an essay about reading comprehension should itself become an exercise in exactly that literacy skill. Emily Dexter writes that as she understands it, “balanced literacy” (as the name implies) is supposed to balance phonics with “instruction in the other components of reading, such as fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.” To this I can only say, well, yes, that is correct. But as I thought I’d made clear, explicit instruction in anything was frowned upon in my South Bronx elementary school in favor of what one critic described as “vibes-based literacy”—a phrase that captures so perfectly the method I was expected to use to bring struggling readers closer to proficiency. The idea seemed to be that if we cultivated a love of books and stories, children would naturally become good readers.

Emily Dexter also notes that my students’ struggles had nothing to do with phonics. Right again. She wonders why I think New York City students “need more systematic instruction in phonics.” Here she has failed to find the main idea. Replacing vibes-based literacy with a “phonics-heavy curriculum” is just a case of addition by subtraction: less class time spent on ineffective nonsense. But I’d hoped I was sufficiently clear that there is far more to mature reading comprehension than just “decoding” text. Our long-running “reading wars” pitting phonics vs. whole language are themselves a “gross oversimplification” and a false dichotomy that risks leaving unaddressed the root condition that drives poor reading comprehension: inattention to building students’ background knowledge and vocabulary via rich curriculum in history, science, and the arts—all of which have tended to be sacrificed in recent decades to make more time for fashionable and ineffective reading instruction. Phonics is just the starting line. The heavier lift is everything else.

Russophobia

To the Editor:
I greatly enjoyed reading Gary Saul Morson’s essay, but I’m surprised he did not mention one thing I find quite revealing (“What Is ‘Russophobia’?” November). The writer who popularized the term Russophobia, Igor Shafarevich, was famously cited by another far more celebrated Russian author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn, in his 1978 Harvard commencement address, called Shafarevich’s book on socialism “a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”

I gather Shafarevich shared Solzhenitsyn’s courageous dissent against Soviet brutality, and in fact Shafarevich lost his university post for protesting in Andrei Sakharov’s defense. This makes both authors genuine heroes, while at the same time both were most likely sympathetic to the Russian anti-Western chauvinism that Morson explores in this piece.
Peter Blau
Belmont, North Carolina

Gary Saul Morson writes:
I thank Peter Blau for pointing out that Shafarevich, a well-known mathematician, also wrote an influential book on socialism. Solzhenitsyn admired Shafarevich’s work as a dissident, but I see no evidence that Solzhenitsyn shared his anti-Semitic views. Solzhenitsyn was a patriot, but to call him a chauvinist suggests that, for example, he supported Russian imperialism, when the exact opposite was the case. He thought Russia should give up its ambition to be a “great power” and look inward to reform the terrible deformations of soul and character occasioned by the Soviet experience.

Shafarevich is a good example of why being opposed to Soviet cruelty does not mean one cannot hold cruel opinions. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Bookshopping

To the Editor:
As a longtime bookshop haunter, I deeply appreciated Joseph Epstein’s great essay (“The Old Curiosity Bookshop,” November). If he hasn’t read it, he should check out George Orwell’s essay “Bookshop Memories,” first published in November 1936 and now included in various anthologies of his essays. In it, Orwell remembers his time as a bookshop employee in England in the early 1930s, a bookshop being “a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios.”
Richard Zuelch
Lakewood, California

To the Editor:
A wonderful piece by Joseph Epstein. Having lived in Rogers Park in the ’70s, I am well-acquainted with both Bookman’s Alley and Great Expectations and have spent a small fortune at both. Morse Street and Evanston boasted other great used bookstores. Epstein mentions Tattered Cover in Denver, which, along with Chinook Book Store, was my favorite bookstore in Colorado when I lived there. Some, like Powell’s and the Strand, I thought overrated, being too full of remaindered books and not the finds of discerning used-book buyers. One of the best bookstores in the country is Hyde Brothers Books, in my now hometown. The owners have impeccable taste and reasonable prices, even for hardbacks in perfect condition. I could have bought a lake house for what I’ve spent there.

But the best spot for books is my own library, which houses the thousands of books, bought from the stores I’ve mentioned and many more besides. If every bookstore in the country closed, I wouldn’t suffer—except for missing the unique and sensual experience of browsing that Epstein describes.
Christopher Guerin
Fort Wayne, Indiana

To the Editor:
Joseph Epstein writes, “A poem in pixels doesn’t seem like a poem at all.” Maybe not, but that sentence does. Epstein alone is worth the price of a subscription to COMMENTARY.
Ehud Neor
Nitzan, Israel