Beginnings
This month, some innovations: ... Alan Dershowitz joins us as a contributing editor; his reactions to public events will appear bimonthly in our Tav column; ... a new department, Family Matters,...
...Is it an exaggeration to say, "Last year slaves, this year free men and women" of the Russian Jews...
...But how in the world are we supposed to take seriously a nation whose state-owned television network broadcasts documentaries on Israel which are, by any measure, a fabric of absolute lies...
...Evgeny Abezgauz, whose painting is on our cover this month, as well as his wife and the Reines family, are, on the eve of Pesach, free...
...I am among those who came to political consciousness during the McCarthy era, therefore among those who detested the Cold War and the distortions it wrought in our own society...
...Sensible and sophisticated, rather than crude and neanderthal, as were, say, the demonstrators for Latvian freedom...
...How does one sit in a room with them and pretend to take them seriously...
...That's what they said in 1936, when Hitler was host to the Olympic Games...
...Choose instead, we thought, the enlightened path: awareness and criticism of Soviet excesses, but a readiness to accept the Soviet Union as the other great power of our time, a nation whose ultimate internal reform would surely be hastened by the development of elaborate relationships with the West...
...the Olympics are not political, they are a celebration of the familyness of man...
...in that context, Dr...
...And to those (very many) of our readers who took the time to add some comments regarding the magazine to their polls, many thanks...
...We have been swamped by responses, which, properly counted and cataloged, will be presented in a special feature next month...
...We're happy with these changes, and hope you are, too...
...More mundanely, we inadvertently omitted last month to credit Research Reports, a delightful New York agency which was responsible for assembling the photographic collection featured in our January issue...
...not quite an innovation, but newish, we print the second moment poll, this time on energy problems...
...The Soviet authorities systematically employ the technique of the Big Lie, and with frightening success...
...Consider the letter from Israel Zalmanson which appears later in these pages...
...Wrong then, wrong now...
...Or consider the current Soviet harassment of dissidents...
...Readers will recall that last month's poll dealt with intermarriage...
...We are happy to repair the omission, the more so as they have again contributed to our magazine, this time by providing the photographs which accompany Stephen Birmingham's article in these pages...
...Peaceful coexistence, to be followed, inevitably, by peaceful and progressive change...
...A hearty endorsement, therefore, to Pugwash—the scientific meetings where enlightened scientists from both nations could work together—and three cheers for cultural exchange, and disdain for the unwashed masses who still thought of the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics as the Red Menace...
...So much kindness that the brutal winter warmed...
...Hence, "This year slaves, next year free men and women," with special emphasis and with full knowledge of where it is that slavery is still real...
...My instinct, during the 1960's, was to regard much of the anti-Soviet sentiment as a vestige of earlier days, to place my own hopes with the advocates of what later came to be known as detente...
...Weren't they mostly closet Birchers...
...I know, I know...
...Happy spring...
...No celebrating in the shadow of the Gulag...
...They are technological giants and moral pygmies...
...Strangelove was as great a threat as his Soviet counterpart...
...happy, happy Pesach...
...How do we accept, as a matter of course, that the Olympic Games of 1980 shall be held in a nation so vulgar...
...By and large, I and many others were persuaded that the most urgent problem was the avoidance of nuclear war...
...Or consider the savage propaganda which the Soviet government sponsors on its radio and television broadcasts and in its press...
...And as to NBC—which has paid $80 million for the rights to cover the Olympics—let them know that we shall be watching their news broadcasts carefully, to determine whether there is now a disposition to emphasize the Kremlin's architectural wonders and the stirring music of the Red Army Chorus and all the rest of the accomplishments of Mother Russia at the expense of the whole and uglier truth, the truth not of 1980 but of 1984...
...Hence, praise for the early emphasis on human rights of the Carter administration...
...a new department, Family Matters, which deals with problems of parenting, of aging, of adult coping, focuses this month on kids who steal...
...But we're happier still to inform you that two of the Russian families that Blu Greenberg describes in her moving memoir have just been released by the Soviet Union...
...our own compilation of current curiosities appears under the title Moments of Truth...
...Danny Siegel becomes a contributing editor...
...moment's size increases by 12 percent...
...How can one mask the contempt, the disgust that their daily actions call forth...
Vol. 2 • February 1977 • No. 5
