Letters

As we go to press, Sheik Yamani has just announced his bargain with the United States: a modest increase in oif prices in return for American "appreciation," specifically with respect to the...

...the issues tumble out one after the other, and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of what belongs where...
...But that pictures can be read as carefully, and as profitably, as words, I no longer doubt...
...As we go to press, Sheik Yamani has just announced his bargain with the United States: a modest increase in oif prices in return for American "appreciation," specifically with respect to the Arab-Israel conflict...
...Our inability to behave in anything other than a reactive manner, and with anything approximating a coherent strategy, is a misfortune that could give birth to a tragedy...
...As a reader of magazines, I often flip through the pages of photographs, pausing only briefly to appreciate the extraordinary...
...Saudi Arabia, over the past several years, the more so in recent months, has emerged as a major power not only in the Middle East, but, in a peculiar way, in world affairs, and some of the panic many of us felt back during the oil embargo of 1973 has now been stirred anew...
...But even primitives can learn, and what I have learned as an editor is that there are meanings to art that are not less significant than the meanings of words...
...two hours ago, the last galley for this issue was corrected and sent along to our designers...
...If we are lucky, the events that are now about to unfold will be determined at such rarefied levels of statesmanship that our own behavior will be of little consequence...
...It is enriching to learn that words are not the only, or even always the most compelling, form of communication...
...Accordingly, the Saudi linkage is an event of potentially profound significance...
...We have recently changed the weight of the paper on which the magazine is printed, in an effort to control both printing and mailing costs...
...We bounce back and forth from politics to sex to theology to fiction, each issue an effort to create balance, both in style and in substance...
...Art, in its diverse forms, had until recently seemed to me not very different from decoration...
...In one door, out the other...
...On pages 63-64, you'll find the first moment Poll, an effort on our part to sample our readers' opinions on a variety of subjects of Jewish interest...
...Phew...
...In this issue, we depart from our tradition in a way that I have found not only interesting, but also enlightening...
...Three hours ago, we finished editing the major components of our February issue...
...America's dependence on oil imports has not lessened—indeed, has increased—since 1973, and even a vigorous development of a now long-overdue energy policy for this nation will not have demonstrable effects for some years to come...
...I am among those whose visual instincts are quite underdeveloped...
...Important: We're trying something new in this issue which we very much hope will become a staple feature of this magazine...
...We retain the same number of pages, but we have finally found a lighter paper which is of sufficiently high quality to accommodate our standards...
...This, in turn, will permit us to proceed with our plans to increase the number of pages over the course of the next several months...
...These next months, what with a new administration in this country, preparation for elections in an uncertain Israel, and a continuation of the impressively successful Arab campaign to present the Arab world as newly moderate, would have been unsettled enough without this new and bold maneuver...
...Such a period will require a level of sophistication and coordination in American Jewish political activity that we have little reason to believe likely...
...and an hour ago, the December issue arrived in our office...
...It is too early to know what this explicit linkage will mean, or how much effect it will have on American foreign policy...
...But if we are wise, we will now seek to affect those events as a community that has as its description, and not merely as its slogan, the statement "We are one...
...With it, we can look forward to a period of extraordinary stress and threat...
...We present, in the pages that follow, a collection of photographs under the general heading, "Our Faces, Our Ways...
...The entire experiment depends, of course, on our readers' cooperation...
...moment may be feeling a mite thinner to you these days...
...Having helped to cull the photographs we here present from a stack ten times as large, having debated their meaning, their clarity, their beauty, in much the same ways in which we more commonly debate the words we select, I commend to those of you whose normal instinct might be as mine was, that you read the photographs...
...We think it will be of considerable interest to know what "our" segment of America's Jews is thinking, and I urge you to take the few minutes to fill out and return the form...
...Whether one picture is worth a thousand words or not depends, obviously, on the picture and on the words...
...I suppose that I appreciate a special sunset as much as the next person does, but I have been so much a prisoner of verbal communication that I feel lost in most museums, and do not seem to see what my friends the art collectors see in works of art...
...We plan—if the results warrant—to print a one page poll in each issue, and to prepare a summary of the results that will appear two issues later...

Vol. 2 • September 1981 • No. 4


 
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