On the October issue:

Mourning Friends

To the Editor:
Over the years, articles in COMMENTARY have, at turns, made me laugh, made me think, and made me angry (at the topic, never the author). But Joseph Epstein’s essay about the death of his friends made me cry right out of the gate (“Death Is an Old Joke That Comes to Each of Us Afresh,” October). Epstein begins with a gorgeously crafted tearjerker sentence, “On the debit side of old age, perhaps none ranks higher than the death of friends.” 

The tears came immediately as I thought of my mother, who could have written these exact words. Close in age to the author, she, too, has watched her friends die, in ways strikingly similar to those of the author’s friends. Reading his words opened my heart to my mother’s pain. I hope that I may increase the credit side of her old age with the joy and love of family. I pray that my kids (her grandkids) and I will make a difference. I write to you with tissues in hand and appreciation in my heart.
Jamie L. Dollinger
Cherry Hill, New Jersey

To the Editor:
As I read Joseph Epstein’s article on losing his friends, I thought of my father. In fact, I felt as if he could have written it himself. My dad, an amateur writer, would often talk about his core group of male friends.

They fell into several categories. He had known a couple of friends since high school and college, and though, at one point, they hadn’t seen one another in more than 30 years (at a reunion), they remained in touch through the miracle of email—the perfect way to communicate without saying much of anything. Others were from his Jaycees and Elks years (back when young men joined civic and community groups to get to know one another). Other friendships still my father found after he and my mother divorced. Among my parents’ social group, he got to keep the husbands.

And then, at another level, there were his poker buddies. My father played two to three times a week with these guys and told me that, while he knew some of them were married, he didn’t know their wives’ names. He knew what each of their betting tendencies was; what more was necessary?

My dad would have been 87 this year, so he’s basically Joseph Epstein’s age. Raised Catholic, he grew up in Milwaukee, so perhaps friendships like those Epstein described are both a generational and a Midwestern phenomenon. Or perhaps it’s just a guy thing. Thanks for allowing me to both remember and hear my dad again.
Susan Carusi
Brentwood, Tennessee

To the Editor:
Joseph Epstein’s article about losing four of his friends made me think about the friendships in my life. In the trenches of raising two young children, I don’t have much time for my friends right now. Luckily, I consider many of my co-workers friends, and I’m able to see and talk to them on a consistent basis. I was touched by how much Epstein valued the friendships that even seemed to be surface level. I am not on any social media, and I don’t tend to keep up very well with friends from the past. A silver lining is my inability to engage in small talk. When I do see or talk to a good friend, I can dive right into the deep issues of life: marriage, divorce, parenting, love, finances, etc. With many of my good friends from the past, we can pick up right where we left off 10 or 15 years ago as if no time has passed. I do hope that as my kids grow older, I will have more time for the friends in my life.
John Conyers
Franktown, Colorado

On Marty Glickman

To the Editor:
I grew up in New York City in the 1950s and listened to Marty Glickman endlessly on the radio. Many years later, he was a patient of mine and told me the story about the New York Athletic Club that Rich Cohen touches on in his article (“Why Didn’t Marty Run?” October). He also told me a bit about the 1936 Olympics.

He said that the U.S. team sort of strolled, rather than marched, into the stadium at the opening. As several of the American team members passed Hitler, they saw his mustache and yelled, “Charlie Chaplin!” I hope that Avery Brundage heard it.
David Sibulkin, M.D.
New York City

To the Editor:
At the end of his story about Jewish sprinter Marty Glickman, Rich Cohen writes that he had been wondering about a news peg for the story.

Here’s one: On October 6, 2025, the Israel-Premier Tech professional cycling team, which has participated in major races such as the Tour de France, announced that it was “moving away from its current Israeli identity” by renaming and rebranding the team.

The anti-Semites, who shadowed the team through several international races, apparently got to them. This final straw was the premature conclusion of the Vuelta a España (Tour of Spain) back in September due to violent demonstrations against the presence of Israel-Premier Tech.

The appeasement seen in Marty Glickman’s time is alive and well.
Michael Sultan
Springfield, Virginia

GWU’s Soiled History

To the Editor:
Alvin H. Rosenfeld notes that the Justice Department has found that there was “severe” and “pervasive” harassment of Jewish students at George Washington University following October 7, yet the university administration was “deliberately indifferent” (“After the Campus Settlements, What?” October). 

This is not the first time that GW’s leaders responded with indifference to the victimization of Jews. In the 1930s, Nazi representatives were welcomed to the campus, despite the Hitler regime’s savage persecution of German Jews. Gustav Struve, an official of Nazi Germany’s embassy in Washington, spoke at GW in October 1933, and his colleague Gerrit Von Haeften addressed students the following year. In May 1937, two additional Nazi representatives participated in an event on campus.

During those years, the student newspaper, The Hatchet, which was published by the university, ran advertisements from the Nazi government’s tourism department and touted upcoming summer tours by GW students to Europe that included visits to Nazi Germany. GW also took part in a junior-year student-exchange program with the Nazi-controlled University of Munich, despite the purging of Jewish faculty, implementation of a Nazi curriculum, and mass book-burning at the Munich school. The Nazi official in charge of sending German students to American universities was quoted, in the New York Times, describing the German students in such exchanges as “political soldiers of the Reich.” But that did not deter GW from participating in the program.

Some GW students who spent a year at the University of Munich returned with upbeat reports about the new regime. So did GW faculty members who visited Germany during the 1930s. Assistant Professor of Philosophy Christopher Garnett, returning from a visit to Germany in 1934, announced that “the optimism which permeated the Germans, even those who at first opposed the present regime, is almost unbelievable.” Such apologetics whitewashed Nazi outrages and made Hitler more palatable to the American public.

I shared this information with GW’s president and other senior officials of the GW administration before publishing it last year. They did not respond.

I also suggested they revoke the honorary doctorate that GW gave in 1985 to Mircea Eliade, a scholar of comparative religion who had been a Nazi collaborator. Eliade authored anti-Semitic articles in the Romanian fascist press in the 1930s and served the pro-Nazi Iron Guard regime as one of its representatives in London. He continued to defend the Iron Guard after the war, praising it in his 1963 autobiography. Yet that did not deter GW from honoring him.

Four years ago, public concern over racism in the United States inspired the GW administration to remove the name of its longest-serving president, the late Cloyd Heck Marvin, from the student center because he advocated racial segregation. A year later, the administration changed the school moniker from “Colonials” to “Revolutionaries” because of the many injustices associated with colonialism. Yet GW has shown no similar sensitivity to the concerns of its Jewish students and faculty.

The time has come for GW to acknowledge it was wrong to befriend Nazi Germany in the 1930s and to revoke Mircea Eliade’s doctorate. That would do nothing to address the university’s current coddling of anti-Jewish students, but it would be an appropriate gesture nonetheless.
Rafael Medoff
Director,
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Washington, D.C.

The Meaning of America

To the Editor:
Thank you for Matthew Continetti’s column about recalling our country’s foundational ideas (“Forgetting What America Means,” October). I am deeply troubled by the rhetoric popping up on the right claiming that one can be judged more American the longer one’s roots go back in the U.S. 

As an Evangelical Protestant, I can tell you that nationalizing faith is not scriptural. Many of the Founding Fathers were in fact deists.

We are unified (or should be) by the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If JD Vance continues down the road of Christian nationalism, he is going to lose a lot of Christian believers who do not espouse his view. And if Vance can’t divest himself of Tucker Carlson’s anti-Semitic psychosis, that too will alienate a large part of the Republican Party. The right can ill afford to be fractured by such stupidity.

I always appreciate your thoughtful articles.
Viki Love
Costa Mesa, California

To the Editor:
Matthew Continetti’s piece, “Forgetting What America Means,” reminded me of an important story that my father used to tell about being American.

It was 1946, and my dad was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. He was at the ceremony where he and dozens of others would be proclaimed American citizens. The presiding judge, in black robes and flanked by the American flag, made a little speech to the motley group before him. “You are Americans,” he said, ‘as much as anybody whose ancestors were on the Mayflower.”

May God save this blessed land.
Howard F. Jaeckel
New York City