Agnon’s Last Word

by Robert Alter

Anyone for whom novels have mattered must surely at times be troubled by the sort of doubt Mary McCarthy raised…

Civilisation, by Kenneth Clark

by Theodore K. Rabb

The word "civilization" seems to have made its first appearance almost two hundred years ago, in 1772 to be precise,…

Doing History

by J.H. Hexter

Some years ago, Ved Mehta wrote for the New Yorker magazine a series of articles on the practice of history.…

Jewish Radicalism in America

by Our Readers

Khrushchev Remembers, translated and edited by Strobe Talbot

by Theodore Frankel

When the young Karl Marx first extolled the dictatorship of the proletariat in the heady days of the pre-revolutionary 1840's,…

Military Justice Is to Justice as Military Music Is to Music, by Robert Sherrill

by Joseph W. Bishop

The uproar about the court-martial of Lieutenant Calley--an uncomplicated conviction of premeditated murder on evidence which fully supported the verdict--shows…

Preventive Detention in Israel

by Our Readers

Rio Lobotomy

by William S. Pechter

Andre Hodeir, the French music critic, once wrote an essay entitled "Why Do They Age So Badly?" on the all…

Seducer of the Innocent

by Norman Podhoretz

"The distinction Samuel McCracken (p. 43) draws between the drugs of habit (tobacco, alcohol, heroin) and the drugs of belief…

Sensibility in the 60’s

by Daniel Bell

Each decade--we think now of decades or generations as the units of social time--has its hallmarks. That of the 1960's…

The Drugs of Habit & the Drugs of Belief

by Samuel McCracken

If any man doubt the question of drugs* to be increasingly confused, even bizarre, let him recall that between January…

The Goy, by Mark Harris

by Cynthia Ozick

When a book by a writer with a large following drops into the void, one wonders why.

The Young Weizmann

by Chaim Raphael

What kind of book tells us most about history--the straight "objective" story from A to Z, or the book with…

To Be Sure

by Our Readers