Correspondence
correspondence To the Editor: Mary Jo Doyle (June/July 1975 issue) has written a fairly good book review of Catch-22. Too bad the review is supposed to be about Heller's latest effort, Something...
...165...
...Congratulations...
...Again, my congratulations both to him for stating his views and to you for seeing they are important...
...But that is his style—and the style is the man...
...constructed' their teeming Lower East Side system...
...John A. Davenport Middletown, New Jersey To the Editor: I noticed that on April 5 the New Republic ran an article calling The Alternative one of the most exciting magazines around...
...Watergate no doubt explains Nixon's and Kissinger's irresolution but it scarcely justifies letting an aggressor nation reap the spoils of war...
...Fred Baumann University Center for Rational Alteratives New York, New York To the Editor: "Unsafe at any Metabolic Rate" (May editorial) is as clever and perceptive a piece as I can remember...
...shale and yeshivoth were built, Yiddish newspapers appeared" (p...
...It's from the jacket copy which, as it happens, I didn't write...
...Am I looking too hard for conspiracies and sell-outs because of the post-Watergate morality, or have you surreptitiously moved east...
...as evidence...
...Geltman: "something about `Jews and [sic] Blacks and the Cold War at the Top.' " The full title: "Jews, Blacks, and the Cold War at the Top: Malamud's The Tenants and the Status-Politics of Subcultures" (p...
...III • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • a • • • Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...If, finally, he thinks to identify his view of Marx simply as an "anti-philo-Semite" with what Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote on the subject, he is doing her—and your readers—a great disservice...
...Monetary changes have usually had pretty much an exogenous (i.e., political) cause and have not simply been a reflection of changes in economic activity as the ancient banking school fallacy, still repeated by Keynesians and other Fed apologists, would suggest...
...Marx is a debunker, an anti-philo-Semite primarily, not an anti-Semite simpliciter...
...we get...
...Witty, too...
...I can hardly do justice to such a complicated subject in this brief letter...
...But, hopefully, it has shown that in the monetary and ,business cycle theories of Hayek and Mises there lies a real alternative to the Keynesian-Monetarist debates that have generated more heat than light...
...Two weeks after the New Republic praised us they duly lost seventy-five percent of their subscribers and immediately went out of business...
...David J. Mandel New York, New York To the Editor: Max Geltman's slapdash and yes, if I may be solemn, irresponsible review (in the June/ July issue) of my Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity makes one ask: "Is this any way to review a book...
...Lewis on when Europe discovered fiction juxtaposed to David Patterson on when the modern Hebrew novel was created, and Alfred Kazin for the fact that East European Jews " 'have produced many stories, narratives, legends, but until our day, very little fiction.' " (p...
...correspondence To the Editor: Mary Jo Doyle (June/July 1975 issue) has written a fairly good book review of Catch-22...
...Ted D. Henry Brainerd, Minnesota To the Editor: Permit me to congratulate you for reprinting in your current issue (August/September 1975) Eugene Rostow's speech on American foreign policy which he delivered some months ago in Los Angeles...
...On page 166 I write: "The Irish Catholics...
...Lapsed Jews, I've found, are particularly attracted to it...
...Daniel G. Lute Philipsburg, Pennsylvania Changing Your Address...
...Geltman deliberately falsifies tone by misquotation...
...It's great...
...155, bottom...
...The full title: "A Tale of Two Hoff-mans: The Decorum Decision and the Bill of Rites" (p...
...The Jews...
...we are informed, that Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked deals 'with the [sic] ancient theme of Diaspora intellectuality...' " Cuddihy wrote (p...
...Churches and seminaries were built, diocesan weeklies printed...
...We all can't agree on everything, of course (that being the reason I enjoy reading your publication despite my less than conservative viewpoint), and if your reviewer found Bob Slocum's narrative "boring," that is her right...
...Name Address City State Zip Date of change • • • • • • • • • • • • • •• • • • • •• • • • • • • • • • • . .• There is • . • . • • • • • • • • • • •• .. •• •. .. opportunity •• .. .• .. .• •. .. •. .• •• .. •• •• • . • . in America...
...If he thinks to engage my serious attention after calling me "Slapsie Maxie Geltman" he is very much 38 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 mistaken...
...It is far and away the best statement that I have seen both on what our foreign policy should be and where and why we have failed recently as a nation...
...Hayek's point in Prices and Production and elsewhere is that a period of depression should not be counteracted by an inflation of the money supply, but rather the readjustment process, the liquidation of malinvestment, should be allowed to take its course...
...Read the book itself...
...But to pan the book because it doesn't "reassert (Heller's) faith in the power of man to overcome the mundane through affirmative action of the spirit" is absurd...
...Friedman's theoretical work, however, can hardly be considered to have "overtaken" Hayek's...
...Geltman writes: "Cuddihy tells us that it is `no accident' that Wilhelm Reich, the orgonist [sic...
...Gerrymandered quotation — Geltman writes: " 'It's not for nothing' (Cuddihy writes that way...
...Please renew my subscription for one year...
...a 'Tale of Two Hoffmans' (Judge Julius and Abbie), a parable so vulgar I spare the reader the details...
...in The Structure of Social Action analyses Marx as an idealist, and three pages later Geltman's Levi-Strauss passage appears (p...
...Mlsattribution—Geltman imputes to me, in my discussion of genres, what I cite from authorities (p...
...107) I pick up the "no accident" phrase with tweezers, distancing myself from it even as I use it...
...In the article by James Grant, however, there seems to me an unfair treatment of "Hayek as Economist...
...Always attach address label when writing to us about your subscription...
...Cuddihy wrote: Arendt's "otherwise 'perverse' attack" on the Supreme Court's decision (p...
...Please attach address label from the back cover of your Alternative is the space below...
...152): "It's not for nothing that Talcott Parsons...
...It would seem that his "ordeal" has finally unhinged him...
...integrally related to the rest of his thought...
...I have not had a good horse laugh since.—RET To the Editor: You are to be congratulated for publishing Harvey Mansfield's two essays on liberal democracy...
...Finally, and in larger context, Rostow has done a signal service in arguing that foreign policy must express the national interest and in defining that interest in specific and enduring terms that all of us can understand or should be able to understand...
...Bridget Flaherty Atlanta, Georgia The Editor-in-Chief replies: Indeed you are overly suspicious...
...Your analysis of issues Makes one's knowledge more complete...
...Rostow deserves special praise for pointing out that our commitment in Vietnam was based on solemn treaty commitments under the SEATO pact and not a will-o'-the-wisp adventure as the press has made out—however mistakenly we may have tried to honor those commitments in terms of a no-win strategy...
...Rather than recognizing the inflationary policies of Benjamin Strong of the New York Fed in the 1920s, Friedman laments the tight money policy (as the "cause" of the Depression) that ensued after Strong's death...
...Important: allow six weeks for address change...
...Louise Stewart Hot Springs, Arkansas To the Editor: I was delighted to see in the May issue of The Alternative two fine tributes to the greatest living advocate of freedom and free enterprise, Friedrich A. Hayek...
...Geltman writes of "the Professor's submergence into what he calls [my emphasis] `The Irish and the Jews.' " The full title reads: "Jews and Irish: Latecomers to Modernity" (p...
...came to almost identical conclusions...
...Too bad the review is supposed to be about Heller's latest effort, Something Happened...
...228): C.S...
...The great accomplishment of Friedman's work is showing empirically that monetary changes have often had an independent origin...
...Friedman's analysis, on the contrary, mistakes symptoms for causes and advocates reinflation which only aggravates the maladjustments...
...It is thus that I can quote Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who writes of Marx's "horrendous and odious" essay "On the Jewish Question," that it is, nevertheless, "a formidable argument...
...I have not read a better analysis of our present difficulties nor one that appears more useful in pointing to rhetorical approaches which might help improve our condition...
...He is also to be commended for pointing out that we in effect disregarded the Paris accord of 1973 when we did not respond with force to North Vietnam's open aggression against South Vietnam...
...Geltman "dismisses" as "absurd" my notion of a "Lower Side [sic] system...
...You realize, of course, that what you described is a new religion which we scholars have tentatively named Logophageia...
...He doesn't so inform his readers...
...Basta...
...Box 877 Bloomington, Indiana 47401 (Please attach address label here...
...The Alternative Circulation Department P.O...
...I am an assistant, not an associate, professor, as one glance at the jacket would have informed Slapsie Maxie Geltman...
...John Murray Cuddihy New York, New York Max Geltman replies: It is a sickly business trying to keep up with Cuddihy's sits...
...On the theory of the trade cycle, Grant writes, "New research, not surprisingly, has overtaken some of Hayek's work," citing Fried-man's and Schwartz's Monetary History of the U.S...
...Cuddihy wrote: "The analogy here to Reich's namesake and heir—Charles Reich—is `no accident.' " (p...
...Besides, his Ordeal of Incivility (sic) remains, on reperusal, an overbearing bore, containing the only original insight on the jacket which, he admits, he did not write...
...Though it is characteristic of religions to have special food regulations this new religion is unique: it is only food regulations...
...constructed their far-ranging parochial school system...
...Geltman writes that in the final chapter of my book, "Jewry, Modernity, Christianity," "we are exposed to more nonsense than should be allowed even an associate [sic] professor of sociology at one of New York's open-admission colleges (Hunter...
...To the Editor: Your humor is a tonic...
...189...
...The second "constructed" is in quotes...
...It seems to assuage our atavistic yearning for the laws of kashruth...
...27, n...
...136 of Ordeal...
...from the Supreme Court's desegregation decision of 1954...
...an intellectually impressive statement of his vision" (p...
...and Charles Reich...
...If she was expecting Catch-22—Part II perhaps she had better contact Francis Ford Coppola rather than Joseph Heller...
...After all, the publishers were not about to release his compendium of confusion without some clue as to what they thought the author was talking about...
...Finally, Geltmar misreads and coarsens what I write about Marx and the Jews...
...Enclosed' is my check for $8.00...
...Either choice would entail the acceptance of responsibilities for the maintenance of the regime...
...So here's to "Alternative" (with no cart before the horse) I'm delighted that some of our "young" Have our country's "good" at heart...
...Misquotation—Geltman's first quotation (column one of review) is not even from my book...
...That is, it ought to be possible to make the choice between egalitarianism and aristocracy clearer than it usually appears to be, and to make that choice appear as necessary as it in fact is...
...Since then there has been a conspicuous absence of "Current Wisdom" spoofing the New Republic, even though it used to be featured two or three times each issue...
...Norman Podhoretz, for example, wrote an essay on her Eichmann subtitled "A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance...
...Misquotations—Geltman writes: "He [Cuddihy] speaks in slurs, as when he says Hannah Arendt's " 'perverse' dissent...
...228...
...Bloomington, Indiana • • • • • • • • • • • The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 39...
...One begins to wonder here—but let it go...
...Print your new address and mail this form to The Alternative...
...And your salient wit a treat...
...Friedman's business cycle theory, insofar as he has one at all, is much more primitive than Hayek's, harkening back to the purely monetary theory of Fisher and Hawtrey in the 1910s and 1920s...
...I do not call Arendt perverse simply...
...203...
...166...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
