“Schindler’s List” TO THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Having resided in Cracow in the immediate aftermath of the events depicted in Schindler’s List (I was there during the trial of the sadis- tic Nazi murderer, Amon Goeth), I was greatly disappointed with Phil- ip Gourevitch’s article, “A Dissent on Schindler’s List” [February].

That a contributing editor of the Forward (God help us!) cannot dis- tinguish between Yiddish and Pol- ish is difficult to believe: Oskar Schindler’s Jewish “investors” speak Polish, not Yiddish. It is equally hard to fathom that a Jew- ish reviewer writing in a leading Jewish journal is unaware that, upon moving, traditional Jews re- move mezuzot from their doorposts when there is reason to believe that the next tenants would not be Jews. That is why, in the film, CracowJews leaving for the ghetto “are trying to pry the silver me- zuzah from the door,” and not, as Mr. Gourevitch suggests, “because they have been stopped from grab- bing [!] other valuables.” Finally, and most offensively, Mr.

Gourevitch writes: “And here are Jews as the SS invade their apart- ments. Are they consoling their children? No, they are making them eat jewels wadded in balls of bread.” By the time the Cracow Jews began to be moved to the ghetto by the SS, their surviving children were beyond tears and beyond con- solation. They were, in fact, no longer children. As for the dia- monds wadded in balls of bread, they offered a slim chance of sur- vival. Indeed, later in the film, Schindler uses these diamonds- perhaps the very same diamonds- to “buy” from a Nazi commander a trainload of Jewish women who would otherwise have been gassed in Auschwitz. MAURICE FRIEDBERG University of Illinois Urbana, Illinois To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: When I finished reading Philip Gourevitch’s “dissent” on Schind- ler’s List, it remained unclear to me what Mr. Gourevitch has against this “mega-production,” as he calls it. He himself concedes that it is the “most affirmative” film ever made about the Holocaust-by which, I take it, he means that Steven Spielberg has made a movie affirming the possibility of humani- tarian effort even in a genocidal context and a movie, moreover, that can be shown to popular audi- ences, and need not be reserved exclusively for aficionados of “art films.” I found the movie a powerful depiction of its excruciating sub- ject. It amazed me at the time that I was inspired to endure these three painful hours and feel grati- tude to Spielberg for the experi- ence. My amazement and gratitude have not diminished.

It was inspiring to be shown how an initially unprincipled opportun- ist entrepreneur … was stirred, per- haps by his innate individualism, to do what he could to undermine the soulless bureaucratic machine which dominated his environment.

It was not that Schindler appeared to be an ohev yisrael, a friend of the Jews, but that something in him, something ultimately myste- rious but intensely humane, com- pelled him to discover a solidarity with “his”Jews, the Schindlerjuden. I lost so many relatives in the Holocaust; maybe that is why I found the film so appealing and, finally, so uplifting. Is it a perfect film? What would a perfect film be about the Holocaust? For me it is enough that it is an extraordinar- ily-even though painfully-ab- sorbing film which demonstrates the splendor of human sympathies and humanitarian passion.

The film has also left me feeling richer for my Jewishness, more appreciative of what that heritage stood for and stands for in the face of totalitarian evil. Again, a per- fect film? What would that be? A moral film? In a profound sense, yes-hence, a film which has a claim to greatness, pace Philip Gourevitch! [RABBI] URI D. HERSCHER Executive Vice President Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Los Angeles, California To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: It seems to me that there are two serious problems with Philip Gourevitch’s article.

2LETTERS FROM READERS/3 1. The movie is not about the Holocaust per se; it is about Oskar Schindler. Perhaps Mr. Gourevitch would have preferred a movie about the Holocaust, a movie that would, indeed must, be infused with the spirit of bottomless evil.

Hollywood would not make such a movie and that is perhaps justifica- tion for criticism of Hollywood, but not of a movie that never claimed to do what Mr. Gourevitch wishes it had done.

2. Mr. Gourevitch complains that we are given no reason why Schindler was a good person in a world of bad people. Let us ignore the overwhelming probability that critics would have seen such an analysis of Schindler’s develop- ment and motivation as “facile pop psychology.” There is an even bet- ter reason for the film’s avoiding such an analysis: neither the evi- dence of experiential anecdote nor the attempts of rigorous re- search to determine how roots of goodness could have survived in the soil of evil have discovered anything at all. About the best any- one has come up with has been a “finding” that the Schindlers “see people who are different from themselves as still being human.” Such a “finding” might be mean- ingful if identification of this vir- tue had been made before the Ho- locaust (so that the behavior of the Schindlers could have been pre- dicted). But this was not the case.

“Seeing people who are different from themselves as still being hu- man” gives us no explanation of development and motivation, but merely restates the question: why were the Schindlers capable of “seeing people who are different from themselves as still being hu- man”? We do not know why the Schind- lers were capable of this, and this is why Schindler’s List refused, quite properly, to try to tell us. STEVEN GOLDBERG City College-CUNY New York City To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: I was privileged to view Schind- ler’s List at a preview intended for survivors whose lives had been saved by Oskar Schindler. We were graced by the presence of Mrs. Schindler and honored by the many who were there by the grace of her husband’s action.

Despite being fascinated by the replaying of events, long hidden behind an opaque curtain of pseu- do-normalcy, I tried to focus on the faces of my Cracovian breth- ren and gauge their reaction as they searched for the facsimiles of themselves, played by unfamiliar actors. Occasional shrieks of rec- ognition of places and events, mostly expressed by a deep “Oh my God,” and the sporadic appear- ance of handkerchiefs to wipe the streaming tears punctuated the viewing and then, a long eerie si- lence at the end of the film. The picture was over and no one was moving. Stunned, we stared at the credits rolling down the screen. Until someone’s loud exclamation, “incredible,” broke the spell.

No matter what the critics say, no matter what the public’s reac- tions, for us, the survivors, there is only one response, a response usu- ally reserved for another survivor when he concludes giving public testimony. That is appreciatively and warmly to embrace Steven Spielberg in the silent act of bond- ing. … NORBERT FRIEDMAN West Hempstead, New York To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Philip Gourevitch has a big ad- vantage over me: he has read Tho- mas Keneally’s novel, on which the Spielberg movie is based, as well as the reviews of the film, and made a general study of it, which I have not. My (dubious) advantage over Mr. Gourevitch is that I myself am a Holocaust survivor and a five- year inhabitant of the Lodz ghetto. In my opinion, although Mr. Gourevitch makes some valid points (Oskar Schindler, for ex- ample, should have been depicted more accurately), his critique is mostly nitpicking, written by a brainy technician with little heart or feeling. The movie is a great historical contribution. It vividly depicts one aspect of Jewish life in Poland under the Nazis, the horrible ter- ror. Perhaps the other aspects- the enormous, dehumanizing hun- ger and the unimaginably cruel, bone-chilling cold-did not apply as much to Schindler’s chosen group, but they certainly did apply to the general ghetto population.

It would have been of great value had Spielberg shown at least a few of the emaciated faces, like death masks. Still, he deserves the grati- tude of the whole civilized world.

He certainly has mine. WILLIAM SHATTAN Brooklyn, New York 4I U G A YAX/zED #WaXRDf FREFOUENT FL YER Al – A I mm NwF I oil I Rates in U.S. dollars T.L..W- $6per day – mandatory if C.. Wis not purchased Free car phone (Pay for calls only) Based on 7 days minimum rental igih season supplement: Pessach, July, August i I rnraarrn ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~i~~~~~U=~41 14/COMMENTARY JUNE 1994 To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: For years, like many other Ho- locaust survivors, I have been writ- ing and lecturing thousands of high-school and college students on the Holocaust and drawing on its lessons to point out the evil of racism and prejudice-to the detriment of my vocal chords and emotional life. In recognition of my efforts, the New York State Regents have honored me with the prestigious Louis E. Yavner Award.

Now Steven Spielberg has achieved what we, the survivors, have always wanted. By his use of a mass medium to unprecedented effect, millions of uninformed viewers whom we could have ne- ver reached will, hopefully, learn about the most horrible crime in history.

But here comes Philip Goure- vitch and takes up four pages of COMMENTARY to nitpick and find some faults in Spielberg’s univer- sally praised film. Mr. Gourevitch begins by suggesting that warning labels of “nudity,” “violence,” or the “titillating euphemism” of “adult situations” be applied to the movie because of its scenes of na- ked Jews being herded to their deaths in gas chambers. By now Mr. Gourevitch must have learned that stripping the victims of their clothes and hair was part of the Nazi attempt to dehumanize them.

Had Spielberg shown them fully dressed in those instances, Mr.

Gourevitch would probably have accused him of inaccuracies.

Likewise, Mr. Gourevitch’s re- port that Spielberg’s team sought 800 people who looked “‘stereo- typically Semitic,’ . . . with thick lips, big noses, dark curly hair” for casting in the film, ends with the unfounded assertion that “Spiel- berg’s Jewish caricatures . . . seem lifted . . . from the pages of Der Stuermer.” Had Spielberg enlisted a crowd of typical blond and blue- eyed Cracow residents, Mr. Goure- vitch would have complained of miscasting the Schindlerjuden.

The reviewer speculates at length about Oskar Schindler’s motives, the “unfathomable mys- tery” of his decency, and is irked that “Spielberg offers no clues” and no “coherent motive” to ex- plain why Schindler acted as he did to save his Jews, unlike in the Keneally book, where Schindler is depicted as “motivated by disgust, which is to say a sense of common humanity.” Of course, in a film without a narrator, the viewer does not have to be told-the hero’s feelings are evident from the actor’s facial ex- pressions and behavior. But Mr.

Gourevitch was so busy counting the pistol shots (“By my count, Jewish heads explode in Schind- ler’s List at an average rate of one every twelve minutes”) that he did not see the inner emotions shown by Liam Neeson (Schindler) when he witnessed the liquidation of the ghetto and the brutality of the SS. And it was when Schindler re- alized that the Nazis had changed from ghettoizing Jews and using them as laborers to a policy of ex- termination that he became pas- sionately involved in savingJewish lives.

Mr. Gourevitch somehow gets lost in his own confusion: first he states that “From start to finish, ….

Spielberg’s Schindler is simply an- other Nazi who regards the killing of Jewish slaves as a senseless busi- ness practice” (emphasis added).

But a few paragraphs later, he con- tradicts himself by saying, “Schind- ler’s passion for saving Jews and for sabotaging efforts to extermi- nate them completely outweighs his passion for money.” Elsewhere, he reminds us that Schindler “used all his considerable financial and human resources to save from ex- termination the more than 1,100 Jews he employed as slave labor- ers…. By the war’s end, he is close to bankrupt.” Actually, Schindler did not em- ploy his Jews as slave laborers, al- though by the prevailing rules their wages had to be paid to the SS. But the Schindlerjuden were well-treated, well-fed, and pro- tected. No wonder that manyJews vied for jobs at his factory.

On the positive side, we hear that Schindler’s List is enjoying great success in Germany, where a new generation of Germans will be exposed to vivid images of the Holocaust. In this connection, I wonder if the film’s title has been kept; if so, German viewers will read it as “Schindler’s Cunning” (a translation of the German word list), a fairly appropriate descrip- tion of Schindler’s actions, both as a profiteering industrialist and as a rescuer of Jews from the hell of Auschwitz…. ALFRED LIPSON Holocaust Resource Center and Archives Queensborough Community College-CUNY Bayside, New York To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Although in general I respect Philip Gourevitch’s assessment of Schindler’s List, I would have pre- ferred that he had not made such a . . . prejudicial reference to Jews looking as if they had been “lif- ted from the pages of Der Stuer- mer”-especially since, in at least one instance (the scene involving the mezuzah), Mr. Gourevitch plainly misinterprets a depiction of evident religious devotion as one of pecuniary greed … SETH A. HALPERN Scarsdale, New York To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: … Before I went to see Schind- ler’s List, I was skeptical and acute- ly worried that the film’s predomi- nantly Christian audience would be viewing a gratuitous Hollywood version of the Holocaust, showing some good Nazis and some evil Jews-all, hunted and hunter alike, depicted as universal victims. I was also painfully aware that among those who watched it with me, too few would ever read Lucy S. Da- widowicz’s The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 or watch Marcel Ophuls’s documentary film, The Sorrow and the Pity. But what I saw was a masterful and accurate mo- vie which avoids cliches. The Jews in the film are not a “cowering mob or . . . a shrieking, scamper- ing mob,” as Philip Gourevitch de- scribes them. They are defenseless, terrified, and wretched. Nor is the Jewish investor in the car with Schindler “scrunched, simian- looking, grunting in Yiddish,” as Mr. Gourevitch maintains. He is, rather, an elderly, pathetic man who is asked to give money to a Nazi (Schindler) and who knows he has no choice….

What is truly enraging is Mr. Gourevitch’s contention that the Jews in the movie look like car- toons from Der Stuermer, and his assertion that because of their “thick lips, big noses, dark curly hair and even darker eyes . . .

[they] hardly need yellow stars to be identified.” The movie shows Jews-ugly, plain, beautiful. That is how we look. Go to Crown Heights, the jewelry district in New York City, concerts, theaters, and markets. That is what we look like.

Add period clothes and that is how we looked. Would Mr. Gourevitch have preferred glamor? The movie is not perfect, nor can it legitimately be called a “document,” but the film andLETTERS FROM READERS/5 Steven Spielberg deserve more credit than they get in Mr. Goure- vitch’s niggardly and insulting re- view.

RUTH KING New York City To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: . . . Philip Gourevitch’s chief objection to Schindler’s List is that Steven Spielberg “introduc [es] the suggestion of moral ambiguity into the Holocaust.” This derives, it seems, from the “enigmatic” char- acter of Schindler’s decency in the film, as compared with the Ke- neally book: the fact that he is never shown to renounce his Na- zism.

I am mystified that anyone could view this film and not see in the progression of Schindler’s ac- tions a renunciation, if not re- pudiation, of Nazism. The film reports historical events: Oskar Schindler was a Nazi-party mem- ber who, despite his corrupt ori- gins, took great personal risks to save over a thousand lives. Where is the moral ambiguity in this por- trayal? In his eagerness to find fault, Mr. Gourevitch raises several other points that do not withstand scru- tiny. As evidence that “Schindler is simply another Nazi who regards the killing of Jewish slaves as a senseless business practice,” he cites Schindler’s protest to the SS that he expects compensation when a worker is shot. It is hard to see what other reaction was possible in that context, even if Schindler were genuinely pained at the senseless killing and wan- ted to prevent its recurrence (“You know, killing Jews is not ethi- cal” surely would not have suf- ficed) ….

Mr. Gourevitch (along with some other reviewers) objects that few Jews are “individuated from the mob of victims.” This, of course, was Spielberg’s intent. This film is not about the plight of a person or a family. It is about the Shoah, an event whose enor- mity is not grasped by most Ameri- cans, a project which came all too close to “succeeding” precisely because the Nazis stripped the Jews of their individual identities as humans. If this point alone is understood by its viewers, Schind- ler’s List will have accomplished something. JONATHAN BALSAM Lawrence, New York To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: In rereading Philip Gourevitch’s article, I was struck by a certain cattiness that seems to infuse his remarks, as if it were somehow ob- scene that Steven Spielberg should be so universally lauded for this movie. For some people, I sup- pose, there is a certain “enshrine- ment” of the Holocaust so that it can never be adequately portrayed by people who did not experience it first-hand. Mr. Gourevitch stretches hard to make his points, most of which appear to me to be rather pica- yune…. As far asJewish jewels are concerned, Mr. Gourevitch either does not know or conveniently ig- nores the age-old custom, dating back to medieval persecution, when Jews fleeing to other lands sewed diamonds and other jewels into their robes. It was their only means of future economic survival.

In the Cracow ghetto there was not always time for this delicate ar- rangement, so having children swallow jewels was a normal, albeit frantic, variation.

Mr. Gourevitch misses the en- tire point of Spielberg’s presenta- tion. Most people tend to think of the Holocaust in terms of the mur- der of six million. But looking be- neath this stupefying tragedy, one is forced to contemplate the real horror of the Nazi era: the wretched philosophy of National Socialism which dehumanized Jews-which viewed them as a subhuman spe- cies that had infected the world too long. It was this warped and horrifying doctrine that Hitler ap- propriated as justification for the SS and their willing cohorts in the East to exterminate Jews as one would spray mosquitoes or step on roaches, while all but a few of their countrymen watched passively or secretly applauded. Hence Spiel- berg accurately depicts Amon Goeth picking offJewish prisoners from his balcony with no more compunction than if he were shoot- ing an odd sparrow….

This dehumanizing aspect of the Holocaust, I feel, is what Steven Spielberg, more than any- one else up to this point, has suc- ceeded in showing. It was precisely why he chose to eschew develop- ing individual characters. The im- pact would have been lessened, and he wanted it squarely in our faces for two-and-a-half hours- and, it is hoped, for all time and for all future generations. SAM TISCHLER Palm Harbor, Florida Gramercy Park Hotel Minutes away from Wall Street, Midtown shopping and entertainment areas, Madison Square Garden and all the excitement of Manhattan yet…

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New York City, New York 10010 (212) 475-4320 Telex 668755 Fax (212) 505-0535 f Out of state call toll-free: ] ! 1-800-221-4083 6/COMMENTARYJUNE 1994 To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Philip Gourevitch’s petulance is so pervasive that it blinds him to certain realities and concepts, con- cerning which he should know better. A few examples. . .: Mr.

Gourevitch scoffs at the random- ness of Steven Spielberg’s “explod- ing heads,” occurring by his calcu- lation “once every twelve minutes.” But randomness amid the orga- nized horror is precisely the point being made. … If Spielberg cuts to scenes of Nazis dallying with Aryan women, he is simply demon- strating the juxtaposition of hell and hedonism; so near each other geographically, yet so re- moved….

Mr. Gourevitch is very unhappy with the Jewish businessman who exclaims, “money is still money,” at the time Schindler is seeking in- vestors for his factory. But during this period, when the “Final Solu- tion” was not yet apparent, Jews, though desperate and terrified, strove for normalcy in their lives.

While unfortunately not pictured either in the book or the movie, the range of Jewish cultural, reli- gious, educational, health-related, and philanthropic activities was enormous. As Emmanuel Ringel- blum documents in his Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, wealthy Jews contributed astounding sums of money for the relief of fellowJews. The ghettos spawned an extensive responsa literature as observant Jews, trying to cling to some sem- blance of life as they understood it, sought halakhic answers to un- precedented situations. That a businessman was thinking about money at that time is comprehen- sible and realistic.

Straying from criticism of the film, Mr. Gourevitch feels obliged to bash some of the more lauda- tory reviews, and Spielberg him- self. Why is Mr. Gourevitch so up- set that Spielberg seems to have rediscovered hisJewish identity? In interviews in which the issue sur- faces, Spielberg comes across as remarkably sincere. If, as Mr. Gourevitch claims, Spielberg equa- ted himself with an actual Holo- caust survivor, that is unfortunate; but if in exhorting his cast he stated, “We are not making a film, we are making a document,” that is unexceptionable. The film is not a documentary witness, but it can nonetheless become an important secondary document.

Surprisingly, Mr. Gourevitch to- tally ignores one area in which the film is deficient, particularly as the subject was covered in the book. …. Keneally describes a number of instances of sabotage by Cracow’s Jewish youths who dressed as SS officers and bombed restaurants and railroad stations.

This was an important omission from the movie, as it would have taken a little edge off the portrait of unremittingJewish helplessness, and yet Mr. Gourevitch, concerned about the Jews being seen as a “si- lent, cowering mob,” leaves it unremarked….

I believe that in making Schind- ler’s List Spielberg had two goals- one fairly circumscribed, and the other more global. He set out to make the best film he could, not of the Einsatzgruppen, or the War- saw-ghetto uprising, or the Kovno ghetto, but of the Oskar Schindler story. He knew that if he suc- ceeded, his audiences would be- come more receptive to learning about the other horrors, tragedies, and terrors of the Holocaust, in- cluding the civilization that was destroyed virtually overnight. I think Spielberg has succeeded bril- liantly.

Mr. Gourevitch is amused that President Clinton has “implored” the American public to see the film. The President was right on target. ALLEN BODNER New York City To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: That Philip Gourevitch is made uncomfortable by the nearly uni- versal praise that has thus far greeted Schindler’s List is not sur- prising; for too many critics, noth- ing succeeds like failure, and noth- ing fails like success. Films like Schindler’s List raise the ante to such heights that poor Steven Spielberg never had a chance. For where snatching the moral high ground is concerned, the artist simply cannot win, and critics like Mr. Gourevitch always do. Indeed, Spielberg and others-be they filmmakers or fictionists-are ad- monished to keep their distance from material that “artistic repre- sentation” should not-yes, can- not-touch. Unfortunately, such arguments end by advocating si- lence, and I have yet to find the measuring rod that can distinguish between the “silence” that allowed the Holocaust itself to happen and the presumably richer, better si- lence that stands before the Un- speakable in respectful awe. Given the choice, I will take Schindler’s List every time-even with the warts Mr. Gourevitch rightly points out.

SANFORD PINSKER Lancaster, Pennsylvania To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Philip Gourevitch’s article is a real trip. Perhaps it is best under- stood if read while stoned; other- wise, one’s heart might break to see an object of art so callously treated …

The comedianJackie Mason has told us thatJewish audiences were embarrassed because in his act he appeared “too Jewish.” One gets the impression that Mr. Gourevitch was similarly embarrassed by the film. He asks why Steven Spielberg had to hire such Semitic-looking actors to playJews. Perhaps French peasant villagers would have been more appropriate…. In the movie, Schindler wit- nesses the destruction of the Cra- cow ghetto. For Mr. Gourevitch, Schindler’s emotional reaction to this episode is caused only by re- gret that he will lose his source of cheap labor. But many people see the destruction of the ghetto as a turning point for Schindler; his humanity will no longer permit him to condone the behavior of his nation toward the Jews. He be- comes a light in the darkness. How could Mr. Gourevitch have missed this? ….

In Schindler’s List, Steven Spiel- berg has told the story of the Holo- caust in a way that has not been matched…. It is not clear whether Mr. Gourevitch understands the magnitude of the Holocaust, but we hope his dissent will not dimin- ish the magnificence of the film. JAMES B. HEFT RUTH WEINSHALL New York City To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: . . . If you believe there is at least a possibility that people may do good, even when it requires them to rise above themselves, you will not need to have explained to you why Schindler saved the Schindlerjuden. In the movie, Ste- ven Spielberg does not, as Mr.

Gourevitch claims, advance the “false and foolish notion that goodness is incomprehensible.” He assumes that it is comprehen- sible, on sight. It is the barbarity of the Nazi Amon Goeth that comes closer than Oskar Schindler’s decency toLETTERS FROM READERS/7 being an “unfathomable mystery.” . . Yet, unhappy as we must be that it is so, Goeth’s evil can be fathomed. How hard do we believe it would be, here and now, to find people who, given Goeth’s abso- lute power, would be as absolutely corrupted? Who would, specifi- cally, as freely blow out the brains of Jews-or of homosexu- als, blacks; whomever they de- spised? . . . Of Schindler’s acts in “con- stantly enlarging the roster of his Jewish employees, often taking in people who seem less than able- bodied laborers,” Mr. Gourevitch says, “we never know why.” We do know; these acts speak for them- selves. Despite the Nazi-party but- ton in Schindler’s lapel, we have seen him show no sign of enthusi- asm for Nazism. On the contrary, in the opening nightclub scene we have watched him happily hood- wink real Nazis…. His party but- ton stands for expediency, not for conviction. It would be harder, more tortuous, more lacking in probable cause to think of a bad motive for Schindler’s acts than to accept as genuine the good motive which comes naturally to mind. And, after all, we take the movie as a whole. At the end, our good esti- mate stands confirmed…. Mr. Gourevitch tells us of a cast- ing call last year in Cracow, where Spielberg’s team sought stereo- typically Semitic-looking people and says that “he certainly found them.”… What’s wrong with that? . . . Watching the movie’s Jews, I thought, over and over, they are real; I recognize them….

It did not occur to me that a character pried the silver mezuzah from the door only because he was “stopped from grabbing other valuables.” He took it because of what it was, not what is was made of. Moreover, the glimpses of Jew- ish homes, from which we see the occupants being ejected, tell us more about the culture of these Jews than Mr. Gourevitch con- cedes …

“Perhaps the strangest thing about Spielberg’s Jews is their ac- cents,” Mr. Gourevitch says, and adds, “This may have been a delib- erate directorial decision….” So far, so good. But the accents do not make the “‘inhuman’ Jews sound as alien as possible.” They make them sound like the East Eu- ropean Jews we ourselves have known. The movie uses a mix of devices to give the speech of the characters “them” and “us” tags; “them” being the SS and their con- centration-camp guards; “us” be- ing Schindler and the Jews….

No single film can tell all about the Shoah; this one could not tell more of Oskar Schindler’s life than the years it covered. What it tells, it tells in truth-not including a study of Nazi psychology (except for brief insights into Goeth). I learned from Mr. Gourevitch that “Spielberg has said that he deliber- ately eschewed interpretation in favor of reporting.” Just so. JANIS DE VRIES Belle Mead, NewJersey To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Philip Gourevitch’s article is an outstanding example of an army of verbiage wandering over four pages in vain search of a thesis. Having decided not to like the movie, Mr. Gourevitch assigns him- self the unhappy task of figuring out why and telling us. The points he makes are more or less trivial, but his biggest problem is that he misses the forest for the trees. The priority in this day and age is to show young people-and older- than-young people who do not know-basically “what happened.” Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film, Shoah, and others along the same line are, of course, outstand- ing statements, but box-office busts. Short of Spielberg’s Schind- ler, we are left with the Holocaust as a made-for-TV movie. That would surely make Oskar Schind- ler “roll over in his Jerusalem grave.” GEORGE HABER New York Institute of Technology Old Westbury, New York To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Philip Gourevitch’s dissent on Schindler’s List seems right on tar- get in some respects, e.g., Spiel- berg’s ‘Jewish caricatures,” but way off the mark in others, most nota- bly his criticism of Spielberg for not suggesting a motive for Schind- ler’s heroism.

Schindler was honored for his actions, not for his motives. … Mr. Gourevitch says that Spielberg’s unfathomable Schindler suggests moral ambiguity in right action.

Not so; the action was unambigu- ously right; the person doing the action, however, was, like all of us I8/COMMENTARY JUNE 1994 presume, a complex and compli- cated human being….

BERNARD ADELMAN Winthrop, Massachusetts To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: … To tell of the Holocaust in words, or in movies, or in any other form of communication is to demean the eternal message of the Shoah, and that should not be. But to let it fall from worldly memory would be the greater evil. What- ever the shortcomings of his film, Steven Spielberg has contributed as brilliantly as any man could to causing that which should be re- membered to be remembered.

RICHARD PENNER Northbrook, Illinois To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Philip Gourevitch helped me personally dispel a sense of unease I felt upon viewing the movie. Mr.

Gourevitch points to Thomas Ke- neally’s book on Schindler which clearly shows a man disgusted with Nazi atrocities and determined to oppose “the system” by both sav- ingJews and manufacturing defec- tive munitions. But the movie ver- sion diminishes Schindler’s trans- formation into an anti-Nazi resister while fabricating an out-of-charac- ter ending showing a pitiful man calling himself a Nazi and criminal while moaning that he could have done more. But, as Mr. Gourevitch explains, this never happened…. The moral awakening Schindler experienced is something millions of people are in need of today. The movie can serve to stimulate think- ing, but it will take much to divert many viewers worldwide from a sense that the movie represents adventure and entertainment on a serious subject. ROBERT J. BONSIGNORE Brooklyn, New York To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Philip Gourevitch’s superbly written and irrefutably argued “A Dissent on Schindler’s List” has my complete assent. I would, however, like to mention two other features of the film which increased my ir- ritation when I saw it.

* The schmaltzy music, which was as necessary as adding salt to a schmaltz herring. * The inclusion of a scene show- ing Schindler (Liam Neeson) cop- ulating in bed with one of his cour- tesans. The depiction of the sexual struggle-accompanied by the usual grunts-has become a man- datory staple of Hollywood films, including this one….

These two features, along with the points raised by Mr. Goure- vitch, reinforce the conclusion that Steven Spielberg has Holly- woodized the Holocaust-the most tragic event in history. MILTON BIRNBAUM Springfield, Massachusetts To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: . . .On reading Philip Goure- vitch’s article, I thought he was probably being too hard on the film. Later, after seeing it, I thought he was not hard enough. Steven Spielberg … has not escaped the animated cartoon style of all his previous work. All the characters are cardboard people, simplisti- cally drawn, representing minus- cule . . . aspects of true human character. Schindler’s List is un- moving and uninvolving, only helping us to distance ourselves from confrontation with the evil that is inherent in fallen man…. ELLIS H. POTTER Basel Christian Fellowship Basel, Switzerland PHILIP GOUREVITCH WRITES: I stand corrected by Maurice Friedberg’s identification of the language spoken by Oskar Schind- ler’sJewish “investor” as Polish and not Yiddish. Otherwise, however, I hold to my criticisms of Steven Spielberg’s version of Schindler’s List, and of the mindlessly inflated adulation with which the movie has generally been received.

Mr. Friedberg is one of several writers offended by my pointing to the obsession of Spielberg’s Jews with money and valuables. Of course I realize that “traditional Jews remove mezuzot from their doorposts when there is reason to believe that the next tenants would not be Jews.” If this is what Spiel- berg sought to represent, however, no one unfamiliar with the prac- tice, or who does not know what a mezuzah is, would comprehend it-a serious defect in a movie whose partisans claim that it can serve as a definitive account of the destruction of European Jewry for a previously ignorant mass audi- ence.

My purpose in describing the scene in which aJew, being chased from his apartment by Nazis, tries to grab various valuable objects and only manages to get hold of his mezuzah was to convey what the movie looks like to a spectator with no prior knowledge of the world it purports to “document.” Jewish behavior, I wrote, is viewed in Spielberg’s movie entirely from the perspective of the German per- secutors, and Jews are given virtu- ally no voice to explain their per- spective or their experience.

Several correspondents object to my comparison of the film’sJew- ish extras to Der Stuermer cartoons, suggesting that I must be ashamed of how “we” look. My objection, however, was not to Jewish looks, which I go for, but to the film’s ham-fisted approach to those looks as the fieldmarks of an unsavory otherness. Indeed, the scene I re- ferred to-in which Jewish black marketeers desecrate a Cracow ca- thedral with their dealings (a scene I could not find in Thomas Keneally’s “nonfiction novel” which was Spielberg’s source for the movie)-is simply a glossy Holly- wood remake of any number of blood-libel cartoons. Whatever purpose Spielberg hoped this scene might serve, it certainly does not make Jews appear to movie audiences as “we” appear to “our- selves.” This was also my complaint about the scene in which Jewish children are made to eat jewels wadded in balls of bread. Obvi- ously it is a normal, and prudent, provision to take precious goods when being herded from one’s home, but I found it regrettable that Spielberg chose not to show expressions of the familial and spiritual community which often helpedJews to endure their ordeal as much as their salvaged dia- monds. Mr. Friedberg maintains that Cracow’sJewish children were “beyond tears and consolation …

were, in fact, no longer children.” But of course they were children, and as countless testimonies of child-survivors make clear, the fact that they were robbed of the tradi- tional shelters of childhood only made them more desperate for the affection and consolations that all children need. Rabbi Uri D. Herscher stands out among my correspondents for being uncertain about what I had against Schindler’s List, and why I spoke of it as “the most affirmative film ever made about the Shoah.” What I meant, and what I said, is that in the movie’s depiction of the Nazi war against the Jews, the audi- ence is largely protected from any intimate knowledge of the people who died.LETTERS FROM READERS/9 But at this point I can hear the protest that, as Steven Goldberg puts it, Schindler’s List “is not about the Holocaust per se; it is about Schindler.” Well, I refer Mr.

Goldberg to Alfred Lipson and Jonathan Balsam. Schindler’s List, Mr. Lipson writes, will allow “mil- lions of uninformed viewers” to “learn about the most horrible crime in history.” And Mr. Balsam asserts that “the film is not about the plight of a person or a family. It is about the Shoah….” This confusion is inherent in Spielberg’s choice of material.

Claude Lanzmann, the director of the nine-hour documentary, Shoah, and a self-described admirer of Spielberg, has written that as soon as he heard of the making of Schindler’s List, he said to himself: Spielberg is going to find himself confronted with a dilemma: he can- not recount the story of Schindler without also telling what the Holo- caust was; and how can he tell what the Holocaust was in recounting the story of a German who saved 1,100Jews, since the overwhelming majority of Jews were not saved? …

No, it did not happen like that for everyone. At Treblinka, or at Auschwitz, the question of salvation was not posed this way at all.

Schindler’s List can be expected to stand for some time as the pri- mary transmission belt of Holo- caust “history” in the world. While the tears of Mr. Lipson’s unin- formed viewers and of survivors like Norbert Friedman and Wil- liam Shattan may bring catharsis, they cannot wash away the fact that as a representation of the Holo- caust, Spielberg’s movie, with its happy ending, is what Lanzmann calls “inverted history” and “kitschy melodrama.” By invoking Lanzmann’s name, I realize I may be exposing myself to more charges of “art-house” elit- ism of the kind that abounds in these letters. William Shattan calls me “a brainy technician with little heart or feeling”; Ruth King calls me “niggardly”; Sam Tischler calls my remarks catty and “picayune”; Allen Bodner decries my “petu- lance”; Sanford Pinsker accuses me, against all evidence, of “advo- cating silence”; and James Heft and Ruth Weinshall advise readers to smoke dope before confronting my callous treatment of Spielberg’s “object of art.” These populist put-downs smack of a bogus and distinctly conde- scending middlebrowism. Taken together, they seem to argue that Schindler’s List is above criticism because it brings an indisputably good message to the great un- washed. The writers of these let- ters, of course, do not count them- selves among the unaware or the unwashed; not one of them claims to have been ignorant of the Holo- caust before seeing the movie, or to have entered the theater with- out knowing in advance with whom he would identify; and none claims to have learned anything from Schindler’s List. Mr. Pinsker even says I am right to point out the film’s “warts,” but avers that its disfigured version of the Holo- caust is nevertheless good enough for the masses.

The double standard that grants a sacred status to representations of the Holocaust, and to the emo- tions they stir up, reflects the dan- gerous trend I described in my ar- ticle: confusing art with event and commemoration with experience.

To judge by the heat of these let- ters, one might think I had been disputing the facts of the Holo- caust itself rather than the manner in which Steven Spielberg chose to dramatize some of them in a Hol- lywood movie. It is incomprehen- sible to me that so many intelli- gent people, who do not, I suspect, like being talked down to, should jump on me as a snooty carper for attempting to view this movie so- berly and seriously.

Some critics of Schindler’s List, Lanzmann among them, argue that it is impossible to represent the Holocaust in a dramatic film, or in any kind of fiction. I do not agree. Superb novels have been written about those years, about the process of extermination and also about resistance and survival: Andre Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, Jiri Weil’s Life With a Star, Primo Levi’s If Not Now, When?, to name a few. On film, the great artistic representations have been documentaries: Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity and Hotel Terminus, and Lanzmann’s Shoah.

Feature films that have treated the period most succesfully, like Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants, have wisely avoided the challenge of representing the Nazi killing ma- chine in full force. But if the his- SpeakHebrew I like a d plomat I I What sort of people need to learn a The sounds of modern Hebrew are foreign language as quickly and effec- relatively easy for Americans to learn. tively as possible? Foreign Service With the advantage of hearing a native I personnel, that’s who. Members of speaking Hebrew on tape, and the ability I America’s diplomatic corps are assigned to rewind your cassette for review, you I to U.S. embassies abroad, where they learn the language as spoken today at must be able to converse fluently in every your convenience and at your own speed. | situation. I Now you can learn to speak Hebrew Basic Hebrew Course: 24 cassettes I just as these diplomatic personnel do – (24 hr.), plus 552-pagetext. Allfor $235. | with the Foreign Service Institute’s (CT residents add sales tax.) I Hebrew course. | This course is designed to teach you to speak and read modern Hebrew. It is To order by phone, please call I not intended as a text for the study of the toll-free: 1-800-243-1234 Bible or other Hebrew literature. The course teaches an easy, unaccented, To order by mail, clip this ad and send with conversational language with emphasis your name and address, and a check or money I on spoken Hebrew, although reading and order – or charge to any major credit card by | writing skills are acquired as study enclosing card number, expiration date, and progresses. your signature. Thecoursetumsyourcassetteplayer The Foreign Service Institute’s Hebrew into a “teaching machine.” It starts by course is unconditionally guaranteed. Try I training you in the sounds and pronuncia- it for three weeks. If you are not convinced I tion of Hebrew. In subsequent lessons it’s the fastest, easiest, most painless way the method of instruction incorporates to learn Hebrew, return it and we will refund I guided imitation, repetition, memorization, every penny you paid. Order today! pattern and response drills, and conversa- 264 courses in 90 other languages I tion. You set vour own oace – testing also available. Write us for free I !l I yourself, correcting errors, reinforcing catalog. Our 22nd year. accurate responses. The accompanying Audio-Forum, I text includes a 15-page glossary and a Room G621, section on the Hebrew alphabet. 96 Broad St., I _U _I____ Guilford, CT 06437 ,| IE LPuNlsssaum BOURCE ar?(203) 453-9794 I I I I a —— _- 0—–1– — % . ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 11~ ~ ~ T a ; L JI ~ J J 1010/COMMENTARY JUNE 1994 tory of the Holocaust is still not universally known, the problem will not be solved by Hollywood.

Schindler was a remarkable man, and it is essential that the exceptional acts of resistance and defiance during the Holocaust by both Jews and Gentiles be told in any full accounting. But when the wish for heroes is allowed to adul- terate history, the consequences are always perverse. A telling side- effect of Spielberg’s movie is that several former Nazi functionaries who have faced trials for war crimes-among them Jack Reimer of Lake Carmel, New York, and Paul Touvier in France-have de- veloped what Jeffrey Goldberg of the Forward has called a “Schind- ler defense.” Touvier, who served in a militia loyal to the Gestapo, sought acquit- tal for the murder of sevenJews on the grounds of extenuating cir- cumstances: he had to kill the seven, he said at his recent trial (at which he was finally convicted), in order to save 93 others. Reimer, whose war record includes partici- pation in at least one mass execu- tion, told Goldberg: “Look at this Schindler. Here was a man who was a Nazi, who was in the Nazi party, and he saved the Jews. Now look at me. I wasn’t even a member of the Nazi party. I was not a Nazi. So why won’t they believe me when I say I did nothing?” Such are the tinsel-town hopes that have been stirred by Schind- ler’s List. Ben Kingsley, who plays aJew in the film, has said that Os- cars are not enough for Steven Spielberg, he should get the Nobel Peace Prize. This asinine fantasy goes hand in hand with the remark of Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of the Walt Disney film studios, who re- cently told the Spielberg-crazed New Yorker magazine, “I don’t want to burden the movie too much, but I think it will bring peace on earth, good will to men.” Meanwhile, back on planet earth, Steven Spielberg hefted his Academy Awards’ Oscar, giving thanks to his family and all the little people who made his happy moment possible-you know, “the six million who can’t be watching this among the two billion that are watching this telecast tonight.” To the many people who left Schind- ler’s List feeling “affirmed,” I can only say that although I experi- enced no such catharsis at the movie, Spielberg’s words made me want to weep.

Talbottism TO THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: One can have thought the USSR an evil empire and Strobe Talbott naive concerning it and still not consider the current announce- ment of future NATO membership for Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic part of an opti- mum policy for East European se- curity. In military matters it is bet- ter to say less and do more. Presi- dent Clinton has said little and will do less. George Weigel’s error, in “Creeping Talbottism” [March], is in thinking that by saying more about NATO now the West will be constrained to do more both now and later. Instead, the West should say less about NATO and more about the European Union (EU).

Meaningful NATO/East European military preparation is more im- portant than any announcement, but less likely to occur. A Western announcement of East European membership in the EU, not in NATO, will more likely lead to such preparation. If it does not, the West will at least have done itself less damage than empty talk about NATO.

When one fully articulates the balance-of-power analysis support- ing Mr. Weigel’s proposal, its weak- nesses become apparent. To the West’s great good fortune, the USSR accepted a unified Germany within NATO; the Soviet Union then disintegrated and left a tur- bulent but potentially democratic Russia in its wake, thereby drasti- cally shifting the balance of power in favor of the West. In light of this, Mr. Weigel urges the West to draw a line in future sand, i.e., to announce future East European/ NATO membership dates, a pro- posal he supports with the follow- ing considerations: 1. Russia is unlikely to be weaker in the foreseeable future than it is now; thus, it is less able to do any- thing about such line-drawing now than it will be later. (True.) 2. Russia cannot “legitimately” complain about the line-drawing.

(True and false. True from the West’s perspective, but even a nonimperialist Russian Defense Minister could be forgiven for be- lieving that, in light of other post- 1988 events, such line-drawing openly attempts to shift the bal- ance of power too far.) 3. Drawing the line now will constrain future Western leaders to observe it even if, as is quite likely, some of them are more Talbottic than Talbott. (False.

Similar past leaders have demon- strated amazing talent for ignor- ing even brighter lines.) 4. Refraining from line-drawing now because it may negatively af- fect Russian prospects for a non- imperial free-market democracy is appeasement. (True only if there isn’t a better way to improve East European security without openly slapping a nascently democratic Russia in the face.) A better solution appears when one reflects on why there is no clamor for France to rejoin, and Sweden to join, NATO. France is a de-facto NATO member; Sweden, it has now been admitted, was a quasi-member all along, of greater military significance due to geog- raphy and preparation than offi- cial-member Belgium (and with- out complicating NATO’s decision- making). Besides, France already is, and Sweden may this year be- come, an EU member.

Thus, a better proposal: have NATO in fact coordinate militarily with Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic on a level some- where between NATO’s coordina- tion with France and Sweden, and require East European countries to qualify politically and economi- cally for EU membership in order to obtain openly acknowledged Western military protection. Rus- sian Defense Ministers are more impressed by actual military prepa- ration but more affronted by pre- mature, particularly if empty, NATO membership announce- ments. EU membership has a pri- marily nonmilitary rationale, but in Eastern Europe it has strong military implications as well. More- over, given the low political and economic demands NATO has his- torically made on its members and the higher ones the EU now makes, East European countries should be required to qualify for the EU to obtain an openly acknow- ledged Western military shield.

The goal of EU membership may do more to inhibit, say, a dema- gogic Hungarian Prime Minister from pursuing a “vive Transylvania libre” policy than NATO member- ship did to inhibit the Greek colo- nels from adventures in Cyprus.

I do not dare hope that Clinton and Talbott thought through the above in opting for their Partner- ship-for-Peace solution, though re- cent EU announcements concern- ing East European membership12/COMMENTARYJUNE 1994 indicate the EU might have. I am thankful, however, that Clinton did … not add the insult to Russia Mr.

Weigel proposes to the injury to the West he will commit by his al- most certain neglect of the re- quired NATO/East European mili- tary preparations. DOUGLAS HOFFMAN Chicago, Illinois To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: In “Creeping Talbottism,” George Weigel either didn’t get it or didn’t dare say it. Talbottism has its true roots in the maddening thirst for absolu- tion by those who, either directly or indirectly, but in any case wit- tingly and calculatedly, supported Hanoi during the Vietnam war, and who now have to live with the fall of the meccas of Leninist- Stalinist Communism worldwide (except in Havana and Pyong- yang). They bet on the wrong horse and lost, but now do not want to concede their loss. That is why they lobbied ardently for President Clinton-the archetype and quin- tessence of the pro-Hanoi crowd- to lift the embargo on Hanoi.

That is why they can be seen now engaged in a frenzied but fu- tile revisionist attempt to rewrite history by proposing that the de- funct Soviet Union did not pose a real threat to the West. Instead of coming to terms with their sorry past and admitting … that Amer- ica was right in containing Soviet expansionism worldwide, includ- ing in Vietnam, they vainly dive into a sea of denial and self-delu- sion.

It must be tough to face the fact of having contributed directly to the suffering and even torture and death of millions of victims of Communism worldwide. Those with a figment of decency must have a hard time in front of the mirror every morning. …. And even worse, what will they say when asked by their children . . . why they didn’t support America’s ef- fort to challenge the Soviets in Vietnam? Escapism seems to be the choice of those attempting a way out, and Talbottism-practiced from the vantage point of most impact, the State Department-provides the best escapism the Clinton crowd could have ever self-servingly de- vised.

But the problem with this self- prescribed and self-applied ther- apy is the damage Talbottism causes to others…. On one side, its false version of history leads the uninformed in America and else- where to the wrong conclusions.

And on the other side, highly criti- cal American foreign policy is be- ing molded in light of the fallacies in Talbottism. Therefore, as if Clintonism weren’t bad enough, the damage that Talbottism will cause to America and to the rest of the world-as a consequence of being applied in these crucial times when genuine democracy should be cemented in the coun- tries of the former Soviet bloc- will be disastrous.

In the same way that Germans have to be reminded of the wrongs of Nazism, Italians of Fascism, and Japanese of militarism, the peoples of the former Soviet-bloc nations, and particularly those of the ex- Soviet Union itself, should be made aware and reminded of the wrongs of the system that they sup- ported, or at least tolerated. However, with Talbottism-which unabashedly embraces the “moral- equivalence” sophism-what those peoples are being told is that the West, and America in particular, was as wrong as they were.

America will pay dearly for the historic mistake committed by 43 percent of the electorate in voting for Clinton; Talbottism, among other “isms” in the Clinton broth- erhood, will guarantee it. REN F. GUERRA Sunnyvale, California GEORGE WEIGEL WRITES: Douglas Hoffman’s interesting “European Union First” proposal would be more persuasive had sev- eral key EU countries, notably France, taken a more positive stance toward the consolidation of free economies and democratic polities in East Central Europe by lowering their protectionist trade barriers, which have been stifling the new democracies’ exports.

Would a France unwilling to con- front its rambunctious and highly- subsidized farmers in order to put its own economic house in order be willing to do so to help the Poles? It seems rather unlikely. This is not to disparage the pos- sibility of EU membership for the East Central European democra- cies, which would probably be a very good thing (although one does have to wonder about the effects of the stultifying Euro- bureaucracy on the new democra- cies); it is simply to point out some of the difficulties inherent in the marriage. Moreover, the eagerness of countries like the Czech Repub- lic, Hungary, and Poland to join NATO as soon as possible suggests that, in these countries’ minds at least, NATO is the truly conse- quential alliance of Western demo- cratic states. On the assumption that these countries know their neighborhood and their interests a bit better than we do, perhaps we should take them more at their word in these matters. One does have to wonder, how- ever, what the last several months of Clintonian ineptitude in the Balkans have done to NATO. One thing seems certain: without Amer- ican leadership, NATO is ineffec- tual, even feckless. And without American leadership, the question of enlarging the sphere of demo- cratic stability in Europe by enlarg- ing the membership of NATO will remain largely moot. One of the lessons of the unhappy 60’s that Bill Clinton and Strobe Talbott seem to have brought with them to high office is a diffidence, at times bordering on insouciance, about the American political-military role in the world. Its grave dangers are now on full display, from Pyongyang to Baghdad to Sarajevo.

The Clintons & Whitewater To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Lynn Chu’s article [“What Did the Clintons Know & When Did They Know It?,” March] was a very good summary of the Whitewater scandal, but since its publication many more details have come out-enough to make it possible that Bill Clinton will not last out his term in office. The Clintons have always had a shallow core constituency. They have no reliable agenda. They have shown a pattern of betraying lifelong friends. Unlike Ronald Reagan or even Lyndon Johnson, who was a power before becoming President, the Clintons have no reservoir of good faith. They have no safety net. Clinton became President in a three-man race by running as a “New Democrat” and pulling un- usually strong support from the business community. Coming from Arkansas, he was never the darling of liberals. He did get liberal sup- port because he promised that, if he were elected, the country would get a “two-for”-Hillary would beLETTERS FROM READERS/13 his partner. Hillary was the great hope of the feminists, minorities, and gays. To further shore up lib- eral support while he was postur- ing as a moderate, Clinton chose Al Gore as a running mate. (Pick- ing a running mate who is more popular with the core of your party carries grave risks.) Hillary and Gore, in their re- spective ways, are key to President Clinton’s future demise-which will be carried out not by conser- vative Republicans but by liberal Democrats. Despite her skillful performance at her press con- ference in April, Hillary remains neck-deep in scandal. Her effec- tiveness as the spear-thrower for liberal causes has been de- stroyed. Gone are Foster, Nuss- baum, Hubbell-her personal ap- pointments …. Now liberals will see they have the chance of a lifetime to get a genuine liberal, unelectable through normal channels, to be- come President. Gore, the authen- tic liberal, is on deck. So the im- portant thing to watch from now on is not the Republicans: keep an eye on the liberal media and the Democratic leaders-that is where the action will be.

The following can be expected to make headlines over the next few months: Once the televised hearings be- gin, members of the Rose Law Firm, bitter about the Clintons destroying the firm’s image, will eagerly step forward to provide new evidence of wrongdoing.

Members of the White House staff, many of whom are young and ide- alistic, will be served subpoenas, resulting in their having to hire criminal lawyers and pay for them out of their own pockets. (Federal law prohibits pro-bono services to federal employees.) They, too, will be a ripe source of sordid details.

The friends of Bill and Hillary, many of whom benefited, partici- pated, and/or witnessed a pattern of corrupt practices over many years, . . . will become another source of leaks and information and, of course, be the subject of numerous subpoenas and grand- jury appearances.

Once the hearings get going, they will be difficult to stop, and all the questions raised by Lynn Chu will surface again, as the spe- cial prosecutor’s investigation moves forward. The Democrats will feel increasingly threatened facing this November’s elections.

You deserve a factual look at…

Peace in the Middle East (2) Is the peace with Egypt an encouraging example for Israel! In the on-again/off-again Mid-East Peace negotiations the Arabs expect that, in exchange for peace, the territories that they consider to be “occupied” by Israel be restored to them, specifically, the so-called “West Bank”, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.

What are the facts? become engaged with Israeli firms. Israeli firms are barred form submitting Peace with Egypt is the coldest tenders for local projects. For “security possible. For its agreement to make reasons” Israeli firms are not allowed to true peace with Israel, Egypt received participate in trade fairs. Although quite the huge Sinai Peninsula in which Israel a few Israelis visit Egypt, hardly any had invested over $10 billion. It had cre- Egyptians go to Israel since those who do ated flourishing cities, some of the most wish to visit are summoned to the securi- advanced military and naval installa- ty police for lengthy interrogation. tions in the world, and had developed Not forthcoming on diplomatic oil fields that would have made it ener- front. Many Israelis have been killed in gy independent for the foreseeable Egypt or on the Egyptian border. The future. Without firing a shot, Egypt Egyptian media, including the official and received all of this, plus generous grants semi-official press, are full of anti-Israel from the United States-$40 billion to and anti-Jewish venom, preaching hatred date. What and prejudice. Egypt gave in There have return was a “Israel’s present government must be corn- been numerous piece of paper. mended for proceeding with the greatest instances of And even that caution in the current peace negotiations.” “crazed” Egypt- was hedged. It ian soldiers would allow Egypt to join in an “Arab War” against Israel. The peace between Israel and Egypt, which the Israelis had envisioned to be like the peace between Germany and France, turned out, unfortunately, to be the “coldest peace” possible. It is, less of a peace than a de facto state of non-belligerence. The Israeli ambas- sador in Cairo is isolated and blacklisted and does not participate in any official functions of the Egyptian government. There is practically no trade between the two countries and no cultural exchange. The public sector of Egypt, which consti- tutes 80% of the total economy is forbid- den to do business with Israel. Private enterprises are actively discouraged and often threatened when they try to shooting up Israeli buses traveling along the border highways, to the general applause of the state-controlled media. On the diplomatic front, the Egyptians aren’t any more forthcoming. Egypt spearheaded the cam- paign to keeping the “Zionism is racism” resolution in the U.N., contrary to U.S. wishes. Egypt exerts much effort to pre- vent African countries from establishing or renewing diplomatic relations with Israel. Egyptian diplomats, including Butros-Butros Ghali, now secretary gen- eral of the United Nations, lobbied fer- vently against the loan guarantees that Israel needed to absorb and to settle the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who have already arrived or will still arrive form the former Soviet Union.

The saving grace for Israel in its very cold peace with Egypt is that the Sinai is very large, and serves as a buffer zone. But in the Golan Heights, which the Syrians wish to have returned in exchange for “peace”, and the “West Bank” and Gaza, which the Palestinians whish to have given to them as a “reward” for stopping the “intifada”, there is no room at all for buffer zones. Although autonomy for the native Arab population is definitely an Israeli policy goal and a commitment under the Camp David Accords, the “West Bank” and Gaza and the Golan cannot possibly be surrendered to another sovereignty for any foreseeable future. It would make Israel totally indefensible. If the peace with Egypt is an example of what peace with Syria or with the Palestinians would look like, Israel’s present government must be commended for proceeding with the greatest caution in the current negotiations and not to entrust its survival to empty promises. Only when the Arabs truly accept Israel as part of the Middle East should any further “land for peace” adjustments be considered.

This ad has been published and paid for by FLAME Facts and Logic about the Middle East PO. Box 590359 · San Fancisoo,CA 94159 FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit 501(c)(3)organiza- don. Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world. Your tax-deductible contributions are welcome. They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines. We have virtually no overhead. Aln rt all of our revenue pays for our educational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mai.

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My name is I live at In S tate __ Zip __ I Mail to FLAME P.O. Box 590359 San Francisco, CA 94159 I I14/COMMENTARYJUNE 1994 A Democrat has not won a major governor’s or mayor’s race since Clinton was elected….

Richard Nixon resigned when the Republican leadership walked into the White House and told him he had lost all credibility. The next day he was on a chopper-phlebi- tis and all.

Some day, sooner than Novem- ber 1996, the Democratic leader- ship will take the walk to the White House. The precedent has been set … HERBERT WATSON New York City Parents & Children To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: In “Are Parents Bad for Chil- dren?” [March], Dana Mack poses a question which is loaded with potential for misinterpretation. A more suitable title might have been, “Have You Stopped Beating Your Children?” Miss Mack gives the reader a grossly distorted critique of Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good. I have read this book repeatedly because of the strong words which Miller has for parents who beat their chil- dren to enforce obedience. Miller insists that parents have a right to discipline their children, but they have no right to punish them.

What is the difference between dis- cipline and punishment? Discipline, which comes from the Latin word disciplina, means “to teach.” Discipline does not mean to hit, to push, to shove, or to force. The parent who knows how to discipline a child teaches that child how to control his be- havior in an acceptable manner.

Discipline inspires love between the teacher and the child.

Punishment is the willful inflic- tion of pain to enforce obedience.

A parent who believes in punish- ing a child for disobedience be- lieves that his main task is to con- trol the behavior of that child. If the child resists, the parent be- lieves he has a right to break the will and the spirit of the child so that the child will learn to do ex- actly as he is told. An abusive par- ent will use fear, force, and pain to make certain that the child knows just who is boss. Punishment in- spires hatred between the parent and the child-hatred which the child must suppress at all costs.

Would any adult who is free to change his job continue to work for a boss who regularly beat him with a whip when he failed to meet his sales quota? Of course not! Yet a child cannot leave a parent who whips him, curses him, and tells him that he is a useless dreg who is unfit to live in the family.

My mother used to beat me with a razor strap whenever I displeased her or made a mistake. Those beat- ings were so painful that I eventu- ally shut down my body so that I could feel nothing. I grew up with a profound distrust of any person wielding authority and learned to avoid contact with people. Has Dana Mack ever felt the pain of a razor strap lashing across her back? . . .

I believe that Alice Miller’s por- trait of Adolf Hitler in For Your Own Good is the most profound analysis I have yet read of Hitler and offers the best explanation of why he had such power to per- suade the German people to fol- low him.

Hitler’s father beat him with a razor strap for the slightest infrac- tion of the rules. Adolf, who could not strike back at his father, en- dured those beatings with a stoic calm, yet burned with rage and anger toward his father. What hap- pened to those feelings? Did Adolf forget? Not on your life! Those feelings of rage and hatred toward his father, which he had to sup- press at all costs, emerged with full force when he became an adult.

Now he had the power to inflict pain and punishment on weaker persons. Now he could release his venom at a target which could not fight back-the Jewish people …

A person who has been beaten by a parent learns that the way to resolve a conflict is with a fist. The boy who is beaten grows up to be the man who beats his wife. There is no great mystery in :his matter.

A person who believes and prac- tices the principles of democracy will not beat his children in a dis- pute, because such a man believes that every person has a right to express his opinion-including his own children. A person who believes in the principles of fascism will beat his children in an argument to settle the matter because the core of fas- cist belief is that “might makes right.” Or to put in the vernacular, “We’ll just see who’s boss!” From that premise, such a person will lash out with a razor strap, a stick, an ax handle, or anything he can get his hands on to smash and break the will and spirit of some- one smaller and weaker-includ- ing his own children.

I take exception to the ideas of Dana Mack and her distorted criti- cism of Alice Miller. I suggest that Miss Mack stay in her ivory tower at the Institute for American Val- ues. HAROLD THEISEN Brooklyn, New York To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Dana Mack castigates Dr. Ben- jamin Spock for undermining tra- ditional disciplinary methods that relied on anger and reprobation.

To drive home her point, she cites the following example of Spock’s permissiveness: In Baby and Child Care, he [Spock] suggested that parents might re- spond to school-age stealing by “thinking over” whether their child might “need more … approval at home,” and even a raise in allow- ance! After reading this passage, I de- cided to look up what Spock had actually said in my well-worn and yellowing copy of Baby and Child Care (1962). In the section on stealing, I could find no evidence that Spock advised raising a young thief’s allowance, but I did read the following: It is essential that a child know clearly that his parents disapprove of any stealing and insist on imme- diate restitution…. If you are pretty sure that your child (or pu- pil) has stolen something, tell him so, be firm about knowing where he got it, insist on restitution. In other words, don’t make it easy for him to lie. (If a parent accepts lies too easily, it’s as if he were condon- ing the theft.) It seems to me, then, that Miss Mack’s assertion that Spock “turned the ideal of good parenthood on its head” is not a fair one. On the contrary-he advised parents to be firm and forthright in their disap- proval of stealing. JOHN P. BOZZONE Ithaca, New York DANA MACK WRITES: John P. Bozzone seems to have missed Dr. Benjamin Spock’s ad- vice to parents on childhood steal- ing: “It is time to think over whether the child needs more af- fection and approval at home, and help in making closer friendships outside. This is the time to give him, if possible, an allowance ofThe Report that Shocked America…

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_—————————— — “‘-16/COMMENTARYJUNE 1994 about the same size as that of the other children he knows.” This sentence, which appears later in the section from which Mr. Boz- zone quotes, is characteristic of Spock’s predilection for viewing childhood transgressions as indi- cations of deprivation and psychic suffering. Yes, Spock does advise parents to insist on restitution of stolen objects, but he also advises them to sympathize with the child who steals, and even to make amends for the alleged need which provoked the stealing. The prob- lem with this approach, of course, is that to offer children amends for stealing is to justify the act.

Notwithstanding my sympathy for Harold Theisen’s difficult childhood, I am immediately struck by his assertion that punishment “is the willful infliction of pain to enforce obedience.” That, of course, is not at all a definition of punish- ment; that is more accurately a definition of abuse. But then, these very separate things are today of- ten confused.

Few parents teach obedience out of willfulness, and few parents teach obedience to themselves, per se. Rather, most parents teach obe- dience to the moral injunctions, rules of personal safety, and social forms by which they live, and which they know are best for their children. And they see occasional punishment as an important, if unpleasant, aspect of their paren- tal duty to cultivate children into responsible members of family and community. The idea behind “punishment,” I should think, is to impress upon a child, by means of some slight sacrifice on his part, the pain he may have inflicted on others by a wayward action. Moreover, when a parent punishes, he demonstrates to his children his own unwavering regard for good character and con- duct.

Mr. Theisen reiterates one of Alice Miller’s most popular ideas: that traditional family life, in as- serting the absolute authority of mothers and fathers over children, is a training ground for fascism and social violence. Miller’s po- lemical depiction of 19th-century German child-rearing conventions is, of course, designed to convince the uncritical reader that there is something to this idea. But her theories, unfortunately, do not hold up to the scrutiny of social science. Not even the subtle minds of the Frankfurt School for Social Re- search got very far with the thesis that Nazism emanated from an old-world, “authoritarian” German family structure. And today, in studying the steady surge of juve- nile crime and violence, social sci- entists find that it is not at all asso- ciated with “authoritarian” meth- ods of child-rearing. Rather, they find that juvenile delinquents are overwhelmingly children who come from families where there is no consistent authority figure present.

“Talking to the Enemy” To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Thank you for publishing Avner Mandelman’s story, “Talking to the Enemy” [February]. Besides being a superb “thriller,” it says a lot about the subtle connections be- tween private and public morality.

JOSEPH SHATTAN Silver Spring, Maryland China Today TO THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Cultures are always evolving, and it may be difficult or even im- possible to determine to what ex- tent developments are influenced by contact with other societies.

Charles Horner, in “China on Our Minds” [January], contrasts the analyses of 30 years ago, when “it seemed that the great tradition of China would prove no match for an all-conquering Westernism,” with current observations that tell us about “the spirit of capitalism and Confucianism.” Mr. Horner is less than optimis- tic about the future of political lib- erty in China: “For imagining a democratized China in our age of Western confusion involves convic- tion and commitment to principle as great as the one which envi- sioned a Christianized China in an earlier age of Western certitude.” My own experience as a teacher at Hebei Univesity in Baoding, Chi- na, during the spring semesters of 1984 and 1989 leads me to believe that China is extremely open to Western ideas, for better or worse. Marxism is ignored but never- theless honored in China. I spoke to students and colleagues who dismissed socialism as a failure, but grew defensive when I suggested that the cruelty and violence of Mao’s China and Stalin’s USSR had a common ideological ances- tor. Marx teaches only kindness, they said. The Cultural Revolution was an expression of a flaw in the Chinese character, they added, finding it easier to blame their own people than Marx. Indeed, I be- lieve that China’s current love af- fair with capitalism is merely nega- tive Marxism-a reversal rather than a rejection of the faith China once had in Communism. Paradoxically, while claiming that economic systems hold the answer to all questions, many Chi- nese people I spoke to expressed great admiration for Christianity. I would not be surprised if Christi- anity were one day to become as powerful in China as it is now in South Korea.

GEORGE JOCHNOWITZ College of Staten Island Staten Island, New York To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Charles Horner again shows a well-focused ability to assess trends … in Asia. As in his previous ar- ticle, “China on the Rise” [Decem- ber 1992], he is essentially correct in his analysis…. Anyone with any experience of current develop- ments in “Greater China” can, like Mr. Horner, perceive the inevitable writing on the wall of history. In the spring of 1992, I visited China under the auspices of the International Center for Criminal Justice and the Pacific Rim Insti- tute of the American Jewish Com- mittee. As a MeiGuo You Tai (American Jew), I was given ex- traordinary access to persons and institutions that allowed me a pro- found . . . look at the rise of neo- Confucianism in China…. Perhaps most relevant in this connection . . .is the Chinese ac- ceptance of business and “capital- ism,” going back 5,000 years, which was interrupted for only a single generation under Mao. The Chi- nese economy is currently experi- encing an almost exponential growth, fueled by a basically hard- working, ambitious, and compe- tent workforce. There is an enor- mous reserve of natural resources that is beginning to be tapped to further this growth (with possible ecological ramifications and ac- companying problems)…. Let me also point out the rel- evance to Israel and worldJewry of the rise of China. …. There is a positive regard for OccidentalJews in China. Young Chinese are taught in Junior Middle School that they are part of 5,000 years ofLETTERS FROM READERS/17 continuity and tradition that is matched only by the You-Tairen who are socially and historically the most like them. Chinese tradi- tionally regard Jews as kindred spirits in the “Custodianship of Ancient Traditions and Continu- ity.” Thus, the disclosure of secret diplomatic and even military ties between Israel and China dating back to the 1950’s should not have come as a surprise. Beijing and Shanghai currently abound with Israelis who are more than tourists and actually the vanguard of ma- jor economic ties between the two nations and peoples. In Shanghai I was even a guest of the Judaic Studies Association and the Cen- ter of Israel Studies….

The development of China has reflected the success of the Han ethnic group (94 percent of the current Chinese population) in absorbing and assimilating even their conquerors as well as the tri- umph of benevolent authoritarian leaders and elites in productively managing titanic . . . populations.

The concept of benevolent elites that efficiently manage society is correctly perceived by Mr. Horner as a tempting model for Western intelligentsia, often with their own vision of how they themselves might play such a role. The neo- Confucianism that now permeates Asia has little connection with, or ideological commitment to, the now-defunct Soviet model that China followed in the 1950’s. The current … model for China is the popular authoritarian state suc- cessfully achieved by Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore. By American stan- dards, Singapore is an often op- pressive state which administers swift retribution for perceived criminal violations such as litter- ing, improper hygiene, and drug trafficking. It is also a society that has the support of the majority of its citizens who have essentially traded democratic freedoms and individual prerogatives for safe and clean streets and economic comforts. But it would be a serious mis- take to judge these uniquely Asian manifestations through Americo- centric perceptions…. During a visit to Shanghai I had the great fortune to meet and discuss the criminal-justice system with the Chief Judge of Shanghai, Li Hai- Qing…. His . . . view is that the most basic human right is the right not to have one’s freedom in- fringed by criminals…. He also WE CAN RECEIVE LIVE RADIO FEEDS FROM AROUND THE WORLD INTRODUCTORY CHARTER RATES ALSO AVAILABLE FOR ADVERTISERS AllU Jewlsh ANU The TlmeUl. A Te.u.d -d CoPr.ti.n Satio ROCKLAND COUNTY- WESTCHESTER BERGEN & ORANGE COUNTIES FRESH MEADOWS CABLEVISION CHANNEL 16 & MANHATTAN CABLE RADIO 93. FM ACUOSS THE US, CAi, MEXICO & THE CARIUEAN VIA SATEIUTE ON SATCOM FR TRANSFONER 22, 7A MEGN.

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and proportionally has the largest Orthodox and Hassidic community in the nation accounting for approximately 30% of Rockland’s total Jewish population.18/COMMENTARYJUNE 1994 said that the American system of condemning people to death and then subjecting them to ten or more years of expensive appeals before carrying out the sentence is both barbarically cruel and waste- ful. I submit that while this view is essentially Chinese and Asian, it attracts much sympathy and even envy in an America that is sub- jected to the excesses of crime and social dysfunction. We should also face the objective fact that while we might have strong reservations about the conduct of the Chinese vis-a-vis “human rights,” we are still the nation with the highest num- ber of incarcerated persons on the planet. I was able to view the reality of prison labor at Shanghai prison, where I toured the prison work- shop and observed inmates mak- ing cheap sneakers for discount shoe stores in the U.S. and massive rolls of counterfeit worsted wool and Scottish tweed for the British and Irish markets. The reply of the prison staff to a question about the use of prisoners to compete in the world market was that prisoners needed to pay for their own incar- ceration rather than having it paid for by law-abiding citizens…. Transgressions or violations of pe- nal discipline are swiftly and bru- tally punished. But good behavior, “progress,” and the development of a “good attitude” are just as quickly rewarded….

It would be obtuse and irrespon- sible to claim that these methods would be worthwhile and practical in an American setting, despite being obviously attractive to many Americans. But does this not also compel us to recognize that many American values and views may be inappropriate and impractical for China and Asia? . . .

The real power one nation has over another is that of making available ideas, values, and con- cepts that can be productively used by the other society, thereby in- creasing its susceptibility to further influence. The drawing back of the U.S. after the Tiananmen tragedy, therefore, was a likely error in that it prevented this country from us- ing social, academic, political, and, most effectively, economic means to bolster alternatives to the brutal direction taken by China in 1989. There is an enormous wealth of ideas, values, technology, and re- sources … that beg to be released through the open interaction of the Chinese and American people.

The rise of China in the 21st cen- tury could easily be linked to a re- newal and rise of the U.S. The pri- mary question is, do we have the will and strength of commitment to take advantage of what is readily available? MAX WINKLER Denver, Colorado CHARLES HORNER WRITES: GeorgeJochnowitz’s experience as a visiting teacher in China, re- peated many times by others, and reinforced by the experiences of the tens of thousands of Chinese who have studied, and who are studying, in the United States would seem to provide the best corrective to my own circumspec- tion. These exchanges can only help in creating a climate in China more open to modern ideas about political liberty and human rights.

Whatever else happens in Sino- American relations, one hopes that they will be multiplied. On the other hand, if there are Chinese who profess, by Mr. Jochnowitz’s own testimony, a high regard for both Marxism and Christianity, that is another reminder of the obstacles to real cross-cultural un- derstanding that still remain. Of the many points raised by Max Winkler, I would offer a spe- cial caution about two. The first is his characterization of the Chinese penal system, based on his brief and controlled access to it. There is, in fact, substantial evidence that the Chinese gulag is as tough and as brutal as its Soviet inspiration. So Mr. Winkler should not believe that he saw anything like the “real- ity of prison labor” during his visit to Shanghai. As for the relation- ship between China and Israel, China has indeed had military re- lations with the Jewish state. It has also exported weapons to Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. These practices do not reflect high re- gard for Israelis, Arabs, or Iranians as such, but rather longstanding and characteristically supple Chi- nese diplomacy.

German Jews To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: I am grateful to Ron Chernow for writing The Warburgs, and to Jonathan D. Sarna for reviewing it in your February issue. There is a personal motive for my gratitude toward Felix and Frieda Schiff Warburg in particular, because in 1908 Felix built his French Renaissance chateau at 1109 Fifth Avenue, and in 1944 his widow donated it to the Jewish Theologi- cal Seminary to house its Judaica collection-so the splendid Jewish Museum is on my block.

For those whose interest in Ger- man Jewry has been stirred, I com- mend Marvin Lowenthal’s classic The Jews of Germany: A Story of Sixteen Centuries (Longmans, 1936). Lowenthal also wrote ar- ticles on the subject in the Men- orah Journal, as did others….

Most poignant for me is the mem- oir, “The Emigr6s” (Spring-Sum- mer 1956), by my mother, Ruth Sapin Hurwitz. She tells of the years our apartment on Riverside Drive became a virtual salon fre- quented by German (and later French) Jews who managed to es- cape in the mid-30’s (I was in high school then); she helped orient them, tutoring them in English and American history and govern- ment.

Among the guests in our home, she relates, were Rabbi Hugo Hahn from Essen and his wife, Anna; he was “tall, sturdily built, blue-eyed, and fair.” A grim epi- sode provides a footnote to the observations of Chernow and Mr.

Sarna regarding the advanced assimilation of Jews in Germany, which made Nazi persecution all the more ironic. On Black Thurs- day, November 10, 1938, the Hahns were to see their beau- tiful new synagogue in Essen, and their home with their library containing many old and irreplace- able treasures, deliberately set afire and completely destroyed… A Nazi party official and a storm trooper had arrived … While wait- ing for the rest of their gang, one of these Nazis, a dark sinister man, grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl on the buffet and began to devour it. Just then the two new Nazis rushed in. Mistaking Rabbi Hahn for a member of their own party, one of them sneered, point- ing at the greedy apple-eater: “Just look at the dirty Jew! We’re going to burn down his house and his synagogue and he stands there eat- ing fruit.” The aptly named synagogue Habonim [“The Builders”], on West 66th Street in New York City, serves as a living memorial to the vanished Jewish community of Essen … DAVID LYON HURWITZ New York CityLETTERS FROM READERS/19 The Homeless To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY: Ronald Reagan’s callousness to- ward the mentally ill is mainly re- sponsible for the large numbers of them who live on the streets in California. That is a fact which I have rarely seen mentioned by any writers on the subject of home- lessness. Thus, although Susan Wiviott, in her review of A Nation in Denial by Alice S. Baum and Donald W. Burnes [Books in Re- view, February], points out that great numbers of homeless are not just ordinary folk who lack hous- ing but sick people, she does not mention Reagan’s role in creating that situation. Many, if not most, of the homeless may indeed be people who need professional help, and they make the streets of our cities unpleasant, even danger- ous, because they are not getting either professional help or housing. Prior to the summer of 1967, when then-Governor Ronald Rea- gan used his line-item veto to de- stroy California’s mental hospitals, the mentally ill, and many alcohol- ics, were getting help within the state hospitals. Those institutions were not idyllic places prior to 1967, but under Pat Brown’s De- mocratic administration, as well under the preceding Republican administrations, the state mental hospitals were being upgraded into effective and humane treat- ment facilities….

Furthermore, plans were well under way to establish community- based mental-health facilities with adequate budgets so that patients could be closer to their families and friends. The key to the success of that program was to be the transferring of funds from the state hospitals to the community- based facilities. I saw all this as a state employee who often had occasion to visit state hospitals on official business, and later as a union representa- tive. Frequently, I was panhandled by patients who wanted a little change to buy some item at the hospital canteen. I learned to dis- tinguish a patient from a staff member a block away.

One of the first things I noticed in 1967, after Reagan had used his line-item veto to destroy the men- tal-health system, was the number of former state-hospital patients on the streets of San Francisco. As before, I could recognize them a block away. As before, they pan- handled me for spare change. The big difference was that they did not have a regular place to eat or sleep, and they were not getting much, if any, treatment. The mon- ey Reagan took from the state hos- pitals did not go to community- based facilities; it went somewhere else.

We cannot go back to the old mental-hospital system, but for their sakes and ours, let us do something to help the mentally ill (including drug addicts and alco- holics) who are making our city streets such unpleasant places. Af- ter we care for the mentally ill, the ordinary folk who are homeless because they are down on their luck will become more visible.

HUGH SHEEHAN Fremont, California SUSAN WIVIOTT WRITES: I agree with Hugh Sheehan that we need to provide long-term resi- dential care-be it in larger facili- ties or small community-based set- tings-for the severely mentally ill who are homeless. Although I am not familiar with the specific his- tory of deinstitutionalization in California, the process described by Mr. Sheehan has been going on, in roughly similar fashion, through- out the country for the last 35 years.

As the authors of A Nation in Denial point out in their book, 442,000 beds available nationwide in state institutions for the men- tally ill-80 percent of the total- were eliminated between 1955 and 1985. New York State, for example, had about 93,000 inpatient psychi- atric beds in 1955. By 1980, the number was down to approxi- mately 22,700; and by 1992, the number had been further reduced to about 11,500 beds. Plans call for cutting the number of remaining beds by almost half by the end of the century. Thus, even after it became apparent that there were not enough community-based fa- cilities to meet the needs of the mentally ill, and that without a place to go, many of these people would become homeless, the cuts continued. These cuts have taken place under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The reason for this wave of deinstitutionalization was neither primarily political nor fiscal. Ra- ther, it resulted, in good part, from the discovery of psychotropic drugs, which have made it possible for large numbers of the mentally ill to live outside highly structured hospital settings, and from court rulings, which made it legally diffi- cult to institutionalize even the very ill against their wishes. In other words, large institutions for the mentally ill became both medi- cally and legally obsolete.

Unfortunately, in many parts of the country, including New York and, according to Mr. Sheehan, California, the less-restrictive com- munity facilities meant to replace the state hospitals have never ma- terialized in numbers sufficient to meet the needs of the homeless mentally ill. As a result, as Mr.

Sheehan rightly points out, large numbers of people, many also abusing drugs and alcohol, have been left to fend for themselves.