BOOKS

...Conformist psychologists, on the other hand, may utter all the showily radical statements they like-their sur-face audacity cannot disguise the fact that their concepts, the content and core of their work, excludes a critical dimension quite systematically...

...Television is like that...

...Jacoby attributes the social amnesia of Western industrialized societies, in part, to our "unshakable belief in prog-ress," an imperative which pertains in the realm of ideas as well as products...

...His presentation does include an interesting sketch of American Jew-ry, but many of its facts seem slightly out of place in an intellectual history, and especially in light of the almost total absence of any discussion of the impact of the Holocaust upon contem-porary Jewish thought...

...Some readers may be expected to appreciate the earlier part of the book more than the latter, finding in it an analysis of the present and immediate past that speaks to their condition...

...Nothing much happened...

...the first volume also includes a glossary of Hebrew terms and several appendices describing the major canons of Jewish literature and law...

...But what of the central custodians of such teaching who, it may be hoped, will wish to be Catholic on just such a principle as this...

...He asks only for acknowledgment of the ways in which our thinking and acting are healthily governed by it as a preface to dealing with the symbols by which God mediates himself to us...

...and the way God is to be addressed in faith (through sacraments that are words-enlivened and authenticated by personal pres-ence...

...But, as Cater and Strickland point out, relatively few behavioral scientists have bothered to do any systematic work in the field...

...unfortunately, he occasionally displays an annoying tendency to sprinkle his narrative with jargon bor-rowed from pop sociology and philoso-phy-phrases like "open society" and "either/or age"-which mean little, and probably nothing, when applied to an-cient and medieval culture...

...When they level attacks on bourgeois, capi-talist society for its dehumanization or its alienation, it is with the bite of toothless gums...

...Or he may hold that it will respond to history as it has so often done before...

...By the second grade...

...For the broadcasters, as Cater and Strickland shrewdly ob-serve, want it both ways...

...Both volumes of A History of Judaism contain several pages of well-chos-en photographs as well as a very use-ful general bibliography for further reading...

...The seven essays of the book make a case for the terms of a good theology but abstain from engaging in one on specific points except by in-direction...

...Silver's volume is, I think, the more successful one, largely because he is acutely sensitive to the paradoxes which informed the emergence of the Jewish religion and its formation in the hala-cha, and is able to convey them to his audience without diminishing their in-herent contradictions...

...Not all will be up to the author's theorizing or the program that it leads to, in his view...

...Readers looked in vain for the bottom line...

...Or, perhaps, he can be vilified out of existence...

...The audience is often inattentive, distracted and skeptical of what it sees and hears...

...NAT RUTSTEIN Sheed and Ward, $6.95 EDWIN DIAMOND It was in 1970-so long ago and far away-that Jerry Rubin wrote Do It!, the, Yippie manifesto...

...Joseph Klapper of CBS found that the overwhelming majority of the children regarded the Globetrot-ters as basketball players (81 percent) who act "crazy" and "make you laugh" (61 percent...

...One only wishes that the two men had collaborated more closely in writing their separate volumes...

...The final "document" consisted of five volumes of research papers and a 300-page summary...

...it bucks the planned obsolescence of thought," a process Jacoby calls "social amnesia...

...Walter Cronkite is SDS's best organizer," Rubin de-clared...

...By repressing the human and social activi-ties which might make and remake a society*, the process of social amnesia serves as a buttress for all those il-lusions, nurtured by society, that "work to preserve the status quo...

...Although both men collaborated in its planning, Silver wrote the first volume, which extends from the pre-Biblical origins of Israel to the medieval splendor of the Span-ish Golden Age, while Martin com-posed the second volume, which brings the history of Judaism down to its most recent developments following the Yom Kippur War...

...The author's view, ex-pressed on many pages after well quali-fied cautions, is that, "more than Protestantism, Catholicism may be able to bring Christianity alive and well through the turmoil of the modern world...

...It is a thoughtful ex-hortation to Catholics to return to the work of theology on the best terms...

...But common sense tells us that the viewers aren't seated in front of the TV, like students in a class, intently taking notes...

...After a time the pos-sibilities for a critical working through, and out of, the recent American past will have succumbed to the pablum of forgetfulness...

...The treat-ment is hard-headed, not soft...

...But Freud is there...

...Finally, those who debate the issue of TV violence and children's behavior assume that television does in fact ex-ert "influence...

...The weaknesses of an apolitical theology, eschatological in the manner of Moltmann and Metz, are high-lighted against a background provided by the trio of "renegade" Marxists Bloch, Marcuse, and Habermas...

...This history is intended primarily for a popular audience and neither promises new ideas nor offers any...

...In-stead he pursues a dialectical logic which eschews reductionisms of any kind-psychologistic as well as econo-mistic...

...Part of Martin's dif-ficulties no doubt stem from his subject: since its acme with Maimonides in the 12th Century, Jewish thought has been both more diffuse and fragmentary...

...If there is any "sick joke" in the whole sorry process, it is the disarticulation of the critical faculties which leads people to feed such mindless sloganeer-ing-a charge from which Jacoby exempts no one, including the women's movement and the left...

...His book should be read by all who may have grown weary of half-truths sold as wisdom and com-fort sold as cure...

...there was Keystone Kops confusion, inter-disciplinary infighting, bureaucratic bumbling and eventually a compromise, written-by-committee Report...

...The best that could be teased out was the conclusion that "for some children, under some condi-tions, some television is harmful"- which was what Wilbur Schramm and his colleagues had concluded way back , in 1961...

...Only about a fifth of the children ever mentioned that the Globe-trotters were black...

...Still, Silver and Mar-tin fare passably well, even if their work as a whole possesses something of a split personality...

...The University of Chicago theologian (Professor Gilkey's faculty for the past twelve years) proposes a synthesis "of the data from everyday life with religious life as Catholic theology's sole way out of the dilemma...

...We have been led to believe that "what comes later is necessarily better than what came before...

...This his-tory will undoubtedly serve an import-ant need in providing a textbook for college survey courses in Jewish intel-lectual history and an introduction for general readers, but one still hopes for something better...

...Others remain engaged in the Catholic venture but in an in-dividualist spirit of irrational fideism or secular naturalism that accords ill with the tradition, which is at once ra-tional, religious and corporate...

...Secondly, there is the myth that the young audience is an inert, tranquilized mass being worked over by the hidden persuaders of kidvid pro-grams...

...In short, seeing is disbelieving (not such a bad attitude, it seems, post-Water-gate...

...These include repression, the un-conscious, infantile sexuality, and the Oedipal complex...

...While his discussions of the various religious movements-Kabbalah, Chas-sidism, and the formation of the Re-form, Conservative, and Neo-Orthodox movements in the last century-are cer-tainly competent, they are never quite as exciting as they should be...

...Professor Pelikan's re-cent second volume dealing with East-ern Christendom between 600 and 1700 specifies the development of such a self-consciousness in East and West...

...Jacoby himself refuses to take refuge in the "ruthless pragmatic logic of either/or," a logic which feeds the anti-theoretical bent of American life and thought...

...The study grew like The Blob, eventually taking three years and almost $2 million to complete...

...While he understandably concentrates on the main-stream of this development, he also includes valuable chapters on the apo-cryphal and pseudo-epigraphic litera-tures of the Hellenistic period and on superstitions and popular lore among medieval Jewry-the underbelly, as it were, of the Jewish intellectual tradi-tion...

...Most of the mayhem that Cater and Strickland discuss, how-ever, is the violence that has been done to TV research...

...What it does provide is a competent and clear account of the major trends of Jewish intellectual his-tory as they have consistently centered upon the development of one major theme: the halacha, the corpus of Jew-ish law...

...So he is explained away by calling him a "great thinker" or a "genius" unfortunately cramped and confined by the prejudices of his own historic epoch...

...Similarly, while he provides a useful history of Zionism, Martin's comments on the relationship between the Diaspora and the State of Israel are limited to some curiously preachy, and uncalled-for, warnings that "the leaders of the Jewish State will venture to play the role of God in determining the fate of Diaspora com-munities only at their and its own peril...

...The author does not propose coping with modernity by capitulating to it...

...Jacoby, a critical theorist indebted to the Frankfurt school whose best known American exponent is Herbert Mar-cuse, argues convincingly that most im-portant neo-and post-Freudians (in-cluding, among others, Fromm, Homey, Thompson, Sullivan, Maslow, Allport and Rogers) lost the critical cutting edge of Freud's theory...

...Social amnesia is a willful forgetting of the past, a repression, in this in-stance, of those Freudian concepts which, if kept alive, would threaten to break open the carefully circumscribed dimensions of bourgeois thought in which the "positivist schema that neatly severs facts from values, observation from thought," continues to reign in all its smug if tarnished supremacy...

...I wanna see my campus on that map . . ." Pure put-on...

...Within the cloying grip of conformist psychology, in all its guises, the values and norms of society are "traded and exchanged at face value" rather then "examined as the coin of a repressive society...

...A chapter of sixty pages bearing that title is followed by a shorter one on "The Priesthood in the Modern World View...

...We don't know much about television's effects-still, after twenty-five years...

...A few seasons back, in 1972, the networks began casting black performers, such as Bill Cosby and the Harlem Globetrotters, in children's television programs-and then waited worriedly for a "backlash" from the white audience...

...We must not, for example, heed President Ford's advice to put Vietnam behind us- "forget it, it's in the past...

...The author is clear on what its theologians and pastors must do, namely produce theologies and engage in teaching that trust in the Holy Spirit to guarantee divine truth through their efforts...

...one wonders, for ex-ample, why he does not use or discuss Gershom Scholem's fascinating theses that the Reform movement arose as a product of the dissipated energy of the late Sabbatian rebellion against the ra-tionalist orthodoxy of the halachic tra-dition...

...As one recent book on the women's movement would have it: "One is tempted to dis-miss Freud and his theories as a sick joke...

...For all those willful or unwitting participants in social amnesia, "healing up the na-tion's wounds" is little more than per-forming a frontal lobotomy on the col-lective memory...

...How does it conduct itself with respect to its own tradition of incapacity to lead astray, which it has traditionally under-stood as a unique capacity to lead in a right path...

...Like any intellectual history, this one suffers to a certain extent from the problem of divorcing idea from the matrix of history...

...The industry, of course, is not about to share these print-outs with its critics...

...Two final chapters deal with a "grammar of assent" in theology (how is the truth in theological understanding known to be true...

...the industry wants to play down the role of television in affecting social behavior-while touting advertisers that TV is the most powerful medium in the history of mankind for shaping buying behavior...

...Actually, the same kind of skepticism and distrust of television that shows up in polls of adult viewers appears in young viewers, too...

...Freud, as usual, is out of synch...

...Jacoby illustrates powerfully the terrible truth of Freud's recognition...

...Social am-nesia is a dogged and shallow insistence that what is past should be forgotten...

...About the same time that Jerry Rubin was running loose on the evening news, Richard Nixon's Surgeon General appointed a "blue ribbon" committee to look into television violence and its effects on children...

...with circles around the campuses that blew up today...

...The debate about TV vio-lence and children's behavior has been going on since there was TV-much longer if you connect it to the earlier alarms and excursions about violence in comic books, in movies, in dime novels, in nickelodeons, etc., etc., etc...

...This is not a socio-logical question about a leopard chang-ing its spots but a doctrinal one about a patriarch or a papacy which, ex hypothesi, is totally alert to the ques-tions raised by modernity...

...In a senseless time common sense becomes the ideology of senselessness, an ideology which reflects but cannot transcend the oppressive and repressive features of everyday life...

...My own experience suggests that this belief rests more on popular myth-ology than on any scientific or moral reality...

...The book's theory can be faulted in no particular except perhaps in its attention to the problem of a church (Orthodox or Catholic) with a tradi-tion of infallible teaching...

...Subsequent chapters are more general in scope, although one on sym-bols and another on sources and tradi-tion in theology say more to churches with an emphasis on matter and his-tory than to those committed to salvation by the preached word and faith alone...

...The task of critical theory is not to pour oil over troubled waters but to articulate contradictions and in-coherencies quite clearly...

...A rejection of that self-knowledge which necessitates recogni-tion of the deep damage done to the "self by the socio-economic institu-tions of capitalist society, found par-ticularly fertile soil in America...

...Why the long and arduous route to the attain-ment of self-knowledge when the Maharishi tells me two minutes of TM a day will change my life...

...There exist miles of computer print-outs from the television stations' own research show-ing that no clear straight-line cause-and-effect relations occur...

...They are more concerned with the way the U.S...

...Instead of forgetting the past, Jacoby urges, we must first remember it and then transcend it...

...Priesthood is not the only state at issue here since the treatment is concerned with celibate ministries generally...

...It is friendly to liturgies rather than preaching as the bearer of the burden of worship and Christian formation...

...And there is a veritable smorgasbord of pop-psych in-stant cures to choose from: one can scream, interact, transact, weep, touch, and be wired up to machines...

...Much of the "stock criticism" of a thinker as diffi-cult and uncompromising as Freud, for example, can often be traced to a need to have him out of the way and done with-then one can "move on" to something au courant...

...It is not easily modified on terms quite other than those on which it came into being...

...Critics naturally wanted to know which children, under what con-ditions and what kind of content...

...As its title suggests, A History of Judaism focuses on the spiritual odyssey of the Jewish people and is predicated upon its two authors' conviction that "despite all the changes, there has been no age which has not listened reverently to the divine voice of Sinai, no genera-tion without a gripping tension between the word of God and the palpable reali-ties of the present day...

...It attempts to out-line a Catholic theology for this age, largely doctrinal but with a chapter-long look at political theology...

...Martin's volume, in contrast, is more traditional in its approach, more academic in its style, and less successful in capturing the unity and internal dynam-ism of its subject...

...Still, it is clear that Cater, once a White House assistant to Lyndon Johnson and author of an excellent study of the Washington press (The Fourth Branch of Government), and Strickland, a political science Ph.D., have their hearts in the right place...

...Liberal revisions traded the revolu-tionary core of psychoanalysis for common sense," Jacoby writes...

...Uncle Walter brings out the map of the U.S...

...It is rather an essay in reformed catholicity, thoroughly sympathetic to the problems and prospects of the Roman Church...

...They are so evanescent that they defy serious at-tempts to measure them...

...In a neatly executed bit of research, Dr...

...In brief, he defines modernity as secularity, a spirit of inquiry that relies on empirical evidence and historical fact and finds the world and life to be of value in themselves...

...Profes-sor Scott Ward, a marketing specialist at the Harvard Business School, has found that there is an important "break point" in the attitudes of chil-den at around age seven or eight...

...Not a small irony of Jewish his-tory itself is the fact that, at one time or another, a convincing argument has been made for each definition's claims, but the truth is that Jewish history has contained all these aspects, and more...

...Every kid is out there thinking, 'Wow...

...The scholar who penned these words, by the way, relies exclusively on secondary sources and on the read-ing of one excerpt from a single Freudian paper...

...Silver's presentation is consider-ably aided as well by his narrative style, which is alternately journalistic and impressionistic yet consistently lively and readable...

...They believe that television is important in the education-or miseducation -of the nation's youth...

...The book is not a simple-minded plea for "honesty...

...this day and age has rejected me and all I had to give...

...That, by the way, is television's dirty little secret...

...But the images that television broadcasts-violent or posi-tive-are very fleeting...

...Most people, ob-viously, don't want to take a hard, un-pitying look at themselves...

...Only in this way, Jacoby argues, is it possible to see the damage done by those neo-and post-Freudian practitioners of "con-formist psychology" to the truly radical dimensions of Freudian thought...

...Martin would probably have done better if he had been able to organize his themes more closely and vigorously around their relationship to the halachic core of the tradition...

...That, by the way, is television's dirty little secret.ing behavior...

...But Nat Rutstein, a former TV newsman turned educator, appears to swallow it whole...

...Freud stated in 1934, with that forthrightness which was his trademark: "Let us make no mistake...

...A false dich-otomy between the natural and the supernatural, as well as between phi-losophy and theology as the means to examine them or the value-doubtful and the value-laden as ways to describe them, has led a generation of Catholics into disillusion and disengagement...

...While Silver and Martin do not accept the notion that Judaism or the halacha has ever existed as a mono-lithic, unchanging system, they are able to demonstrate both the different forces which contributed to its formation and the various ways in which Jewish thought subsequent to its crystallization has inevitably revolved about it, in in-terpretation as well as in protest...

...Jacoby is adamant- and absolutely correct-in his insistence that Freud's subversiveness "is derived from his concepts" and not from any "political statements" he may have made...

...Jacoby's theory of negative psycho-analysis remains true to those key Freudian concepts Freud himself in-sisted had to be preserved through be-ing reworked, not repeated mechani-cally...

...It is unfriendly to eschatologies that defer attention to the present...

...For their part, Douglass Cater and Stephen Strickland don't deal specifically with Rubin's zany fantasy of television as a commercial for the revolution...

...For example, when asked if commercials on television "always tell the truth," most children say "no" or "sometimes...

...The early focus of the book is on the nature of the crisis (in modern Catholicism), which the author chooses to date from 1963...

...Catholicism Confronts Modernity: A Protestant View LANGDON GILKEY Seabury, $8.95 GERARD S. SLOYAN This book is tightly packed despite its relative brevity...

...Many of Freud's successors set about offer-ing cheap consolation and bargain base-ment "cures" rather than an honesty painstakingly come by...

...Finding little support in a church of authority, super-nature, and heteronomy in religious judgments, many have separated them-selves from ministry or church life or faith-elections by no means synon-omous-as a way of handling their new discoveries about the actualities of human life...

...By ex-tension it can be read to refer to the offices of teacher and church worker, married or single, in the Roman com-munion...

...As these children get older, they tune out even more...

...That is perhaps why the con-cluding two pages cap the whole work, with their quiet demand for seven sacraments that address stages and tasks in life and not in the covenant community only...

...Jacoby, like Freud, refuses to harmon-ize the unharmonizable, to resolve the contradictory, or to compromise the uncompromisable...

...This may be a paradigm case of "double amnesia" at work...

...He offers Rubin's words as another horrible example of how watching television affects "impressionable" youth...

...The Gilkey response may be that a papacy sensitized to the challenge of modernity will simply know how to act in the spirit of his proposal, and contribute its prestigious theology and pastoral care to that sum, the con-sensus of which defines the Roman Church as Catholic...

...a great many chil-dren have begun to develop a certain skepticism about what they see on television...

...First of all, precious little solid research exists about the effects of television...

...While written by a Protestant, its view is not Protestant in any recognizable sense...

...They have come to discover lately (within a decade, Professor Gilkey thinks) the attraction of human and earthy realities and autonomous judg-ments upon their worth...

...There cannot be a reliance on elevators, psy-chiatric aid, and the sociology of religion with one part of the mind and on the data of revelation, an (unex-perienced) superiority of ascetical modes of service, and a teaching office which thinks authoritatively for all, with the other...

...That work is the reinterpretation of religious symbols, of which after hu-man life generally the life of the people Israel and the person of Jesus Christ are the chief, with the aid of an on-tology suitable for our time...

...A History of Judaism Volume One: From Abraham to Maimonides DANIEL JEREMY SILVER Volume Two: Europe and the New World BERNARD MARTIN Basic Books, $37 DAVID STERN While the past decade has witnessed the coming-of-age of Judaic studies in the American academic establishment, the crucial question of its subject's iden-tity has still not been resolved: is Juda-ism a people, civilization, religion, or idea...

...government organized itself to deal with the enormously complex re-lationships between television and be-havior, in particular violent, youthful behavior...

...TV Violence and the Child DOUGLASS CATER AND STEPHEN STRICKLAND Russell Sage Foundation, $5.95 "Co Watch TV...

...One wonders...

...There wasn't even a "frontlash...

...The TV industry blackballed some committee scientists and logrolled for others...

...This book," Jacoby writes, "is an effort to remember what is perpetually lost un-der the pressure of society...

...Social Amnesia RUSSELL JACOBY Beacon Press, $8.95 JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Russell Jacoby's brilliant critique is a forceful polemic aimed at restoring the critical dimension to psychoanalysis by taking it seriously as a theory...