Before the border of East Berlin was sealed, the citizens of that beleaguered place, in increasing number, were making up their minds to escape. In the brave, candid statements that follow, we understand why.
In this, the Bar Mitzvah year, signaling the coming of age of Israel, it seems fitting to make an assessment of the young and enterprising democracy. We turn first to its elder statesman, David Ben-Gurion, who has been Prime Minister of the republic of Israel during eleven of its thirteen years of existence.
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Before the border of East Berlin was sealed, the citizens of that beleaguered place, in increasing number, were making up their minds to escape. In the brave, candid statements that follow, we understand why.
KARL KATZ, Curator of the Bezalel National Museum in Jerusalem, is an art historian and archaeologist who received his training at Columbia University and who was first employed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Bezalel collection over which he presides was begun fifty-five years ago and is soon to be moved into new quarters; its recent acquisitions include the lifework of sculptors Jacques Lipchitz and Jacob Epstein. In the pages which follow, Dr. Katz discusses the work of some contemporary Israeli artists.
Editor of the JEWISH OBSERVER AND MIDDLE EAST REVIEW, JON KIMCHEhas his headquarters in London but makes periodic trips to Israel and the neighboring Arab states.
Author, dramatist, and editor of the literary supplement of a leading Israeli newspaper, AHARON MEGGEDwas born in Poland, came to Palestine when he was very young, and was for many years a member of a kibbutz.
An American authority on soil conservation whose dulies have carried him to China, Africa, Yugoslavia, and Japan, DR. WALTER C. LOWDERMILK has served the United Nations on two extended missions to help solve the land and water problems in Israel.
Educated at Baylor University, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Princeton Theological Seminary, DWIGHT L. BAKER has been in charge of the Baptist activities in Nazareth for more than a decade, serving as principal of the Baptist schools, as pastor of the Baptist Church, and for the past six years as executive secretary of the Baptist Convention in Israel.
Chief of Operations during the Israel War of Independence in 1948, and later Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, YIGAEL is today the ranking archaeologist on the staff of the Hebrew University. He has made many important discoveries in the Judean Desert and cares. His latest report has been edited and abridged for us by Dr. Carl C. Seltzer of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
Professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and chief of surgery at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, DR. JACOB FINE is a corresponding member, formerly an active member, of the medical advisory board of the Hadassah Hebrew University Hospital and Medical School.
Born in 1915, S. YIZHAR has concentrated in his stories on life in Israel, in the kibbutz, and during the war of 1948-1949. He has published several volumes of short stories, including CHIRBET CHIZEH,a collection of powerful tales of the War of Independence, and SHISHAH SIPUREI KAYITZ (“Six Summer Stories”).
An outstanding performer on the harpsichord and on the piano, FRANK PELLEGwas born and educated in Prague,settled in Palestine in 1936, and is now musical director of the Municipal Theater in Haifa. He here describes some trends in Israeli music and cites the most characteristic composers.
ANNE KELLEY lives in Evanston, Illinois, and is a frequent contributor to the pages of Accent on Living, where she first made an appearance in October, 1958.
Brought up in Colorado, a Harvard graduate and a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, PETER DAVISON joined the staff of the Atlantic Monthly Press in 1956, after several years in New York publishing. In his leisure time Mr. Davison writes poetry, which has appeared in the ATLANTIC and other magazines. He here appraises some of the books of verse that have been published during the past year.
CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN was a musician before she became a biographer, and her violin is as dear to her as any of her books. Among her early books are BELOVED FRIEND: THE STORY OF TCHAIKOWSKY AND NADEJDA VON MECK,and her biography of the brothers Rubinstein, FREE ARTIST,both of which have just been reprinted: then she turned her attention to three great lawyers, Justice Holmes, young John Adams, and Sir Edward Coke, Queen Elizabeth’s great advocate. Mrs. Bowen is note in England in search of source material about Francis Bacon.
In 1958 FREDERICK S. FRANCKset up a dental clinic in the hospital of Dr. Schweitzer in Lambaréné. Equatorial Africa. He went as an artist and dentist, and having found that there were hardly any dentists on the continent, he returned in 1959 and 1960 to give short courses on dental emergencies in Ghana, the Congo, the Gabon Republic, Ethiopia, and the Sudan, as well as at Lambaréné. This article and the drawing for the headpiece are from his AFRICAN SKETCHBOOK, to be published try Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Lawyer, teacher, and civic leader whose initiative is greatly valued in Pittsburgh, LELAND HAZARD here takes a searching look at the Sherman Antitrust Act and at the penalties which it has been recently imposing upon big business.
Southern-born and a graduate of Radcliffe, class of 1958, SALLIE BINGHAMstarted the writing of fiction while she was in college. One of her short stories won the Dana Reed Prize for 1957 and was reprinted in THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 1959. Her first novel, AFTER SUCH KNOWLEDGE, was published by Houghton Mifflin in the spring of 1960.
One of our most distinguished living diplomats, WILLIAM PHILLIPS began his career in foreign service as a private secretary to Ambassador Joseph H. Choate in London in 1903. He returned to the Court of St. James’s again in October, 1909, as first secretary of the American Embassy, and it was then that he had the opportunity of serving under Ambassador and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid. Later Mr. Phillips was to be put to the test as assistant secretary of state, 1917 to 1920; as ambassador to Mussolini’s Italy, 1936 to 1941; and as the President’s representative in India, 1942. But here he is writing about a happy time.
Author of a well-remembered novel, NOW IN NOVEMBER,and an essayist of grave and perception, JOSEPHINE W. JOHNSON lives in a century-old house on the outskirts of Cincinnati, where she shares with her children the discovery of a secret world.
A native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard Medical School, DR. C. LAWRENCE HOLTserved as a captain in the Army during World War II, in charge of the neurological division of a hospital in the British Isles. A specialist in internal medicine, he is now engaged in private practice in Portland, where he helped to set up the first medical radioisotope department at the Maine Medical Center.
MAURO SENESI is a young Florentine journalist who was horn in Vollerra, Tuscany, thirty years ago. His first novel, I PIENI PETERI (”Emergency Powers”), was recently published in his native country. Here for the first time he turns to the short story form in English.
Ambassador of Israel in Washington from 1950 to 1959 and in the United Nations from 1949 to 1959, ABBA EBAN became Israel’s Minister of Education and Culture in 1960, He is also President of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
S. L. A. MARSHALL,who served for forty years in the United States Army, is one of this country’s foremost military specialists. He was the youngest second lieutenant during World War I, became a combat, historian with the rank of colonel in World War II, and, as a brigadier general, was infantry operations analyst in Korea. In 1956 he went to Israel to cover the Sinai war for the Detroit NEWS and has since returned there four times.
The great “convergence” of the mid-20th century may have been an anomaly.
It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”
Stores are stocked with copycat designs. It’s a nightmare.
As best as I can tell, the puff-sleeve onslaught began in 2018. The clothing designer Batsheva Hay’s eponymous brand was barely two years old, but her high-necked, ruffle-trimmed, elbow-covering dresses in dense florals and upholstery prints—bizarro-world reimaginings of the conservative frocks favored by Hasidic Jewish women and the Amish—had developed a cult following among weird New York fashion-and-art girls. Almost all of her early designs featured some kind of huge, puffy sleeve; according to a lengthy profile in TheNew Yorker published that September, the custom-made dress that inspired Hay’s line had enough space in the shoulders to store a few tennis balls.
Batsheva dresses aren’t for everyone. They can cost more than $400, first of all, and more important, they’re weird: When paired with Jordans and decontextualized on a 20-something Instagram babe, the clothes of religious fundamentalism become purposefully unsettling. But as described in that cerulean-sweater scene from The Devil Wears Prada, what happens at the tip-top of the fashion hierarchy rains down on the rest of us. So it went with the puff sleeve. Batsheva and a handful of other influential indie designers adopted the puff around the same time, and the J.Crews and ASOSes and Old Navys of the world took notice. Puff sleeves filtered down the price tiers, in one form or another, just like a zillion trends have before—streamlined for industrial-grade reproduction and attached to a litany of dresses and shirts that don’t require a model’s body or an heiress’s bank account. And then, unlike most trends, it stuck around.
Everything seems to be falling apart. The Russians are occupying a neighboring state. A foreign crisis is causing spikes in the price of oil. Inflation is the worst it’s been in some 40 years. A Democratic president is facing the lowest approval ratings of his term and has openly admitted that he knows the public is in a foul mood. A virus is on the loose and making a lot of people sick.
Even the music charts are a mess, a horrid stew of disco and wimp-rock hits.
Wait. Disco?
I’m sorry, did you think I was talking about 2022? I was actually reminiscing about 1979, the year I turned 19, when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution led to another round of oil shocks, inflation reached its worst levels since World War II, President Jimmy Carter was at 30 percent approval, and, yes, an influenza epidemic broke out.
The Supreme Court majority’s undead constitutionalism is transforming right-wing media tropes into law.
The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, allowing state governments to force women to give birth, is the result of decades of right-wing political advocacy, organizing, and electoral victory. It is also just the beginning of the Court’s mission to reshape all of American society according to conservative demands, without fear of public opposition.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson contains a classic Alito disclaimer—an explicit denial of the logical implications of his stated position. In this case, Alito declares that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” even as he argues that when it comes to rights “not mentioned in the Constitution,” only those “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” are protected. If you’re asking yourself who decides which rights can be so described, you’re on the right track.
Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, never had the abortion she was seeking. She gave her baby girl up for adoption, and now that baby is an adult. After decades of keeping her identity a secret, Jane Roe’s child has chosen to talk about her life.
Nearly half a century ago, Roe v. Wade secured a woman’s legal right to obtain an abortion. The ruling has been contested with ever-increasing intensity, dividing and reshaping American politics. And yet for all its prominence, the person most profoundly connected to it has remained unknown: the child whose conception occasioned the lawsuit.
Roe’s pseudonymous plaintiff, Jane Roe, was a Dallas waitress named Norma McCorvey. Wishing to terminate her pregnancy, she filed suit in March 1970 against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, challenging the Texas laws that prohibited abortion. Norma won her case. But she never had the abortion. On January 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court finally handed down its decision, she had long since given birth—and relinquished her child for adoption.