Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR OISTRAKH I welcome your new biweekly column on music, especially if Albert Goldman continues with such interesting topics as his first one on "Oistrakh and the Objective Performance"...
...I would like to see his analysis of why and how Western expansion has caused the revolution of which he speaks...
...However, is Heifetz the proper personality to be compared with Oistrakh...
...It is also quite possible that reforms in the prisons he mentions have improved the temper of the inmates and made them less dangerous...
...New York City NOAH L. MCDOWELL ISRAEL AND JORDAN In applying to my book review ("On the Middle East," NL, August 3-10) your otherwise skillful editorial scissors, you eliminated a short phrase which might mislead some pedants into accusing me of inaccuracy...
...A remarkable statement...
...DEAR EDITOR OISTRAKH I welcome your new biweekly column on music, especially if Albert Goldman continues with such interesting topics as his first one on "Oistrakh and the Objective Performance" (NL, September 7...
...Murders would increase and so would lynchings...
...The point I tried to make in my essay was that the same economic union that was envisaged for the two states west of the Jordan would work just as well—in a rational world—for the two states now existing on both sides of the Jordan...
...My thanks to Pipes for having so lucidly analyzed this new trend of American opinion and warned us against its consequences...
...I therefore offer a correction: The United Nations resolution on Palestine of November 29, 1947 provided for an economic union between a Jewish and an Arab state, both to be set up west of the Jordan River...
...Peoria, Iff...
...JOHN A. HORNBERGER Does Edith P. Myers really believe that "capital punishment is far kinder . . . than a long term imprisonment in a cell...
...In the ensuing fighting, about one-third of the proposed Arab state came under the control of Israel, while the remaining two-thirds became part of the Kingdom of Jordan...
...Monterrey, Mexico FREDERICK E. LOWELL...
...This means nothing unless he can show that other social conditions in these states are the same...
...ALAN WINSLOW It would take many pages to refute all the arguments in Hugo Adam Bedau's article, "The Case Against the Death Penalty" (NL, August 17-24), but some of them should not go unchallenged...
...Washington, D.C...
...Has she asked any of the "guilty" which they would choose...
...I may not disagree with her euthanasiac point of view, but I would like a lot more information first...
...No doubt some capital offenders could become harmless or even useful members of society, but releasing them on parole would be a green light for a large number of potential killers...
...Santayana's comment seems apropos: "Those who don't understand history are condemned to repeat it...
...JAN WSZELAKI VULNERABILITY Bertram D. Wolfe's article, "U.S...
...Some states have comparatively stable populations and are consequently in less need of the death penalty...
...When kidnappers, murderers and rapists get off too easily, people are likely to take the law into their own hands, and Bedau would certainly be the last to sanction "illegal vengeance...
...Goldman notes Oistrakh's almost "divine impersonality," and he points out that the spiritual qualities of the music seem strangely absent in his renditions...
...Can it be that she really does not know...
...Forest Hills, N.Y...
...Bedau talks almost hysterically of "legal vengeance," when the law's real purpose is to act as a strong deterrent...
...The uncritical admiration of Russian technical proficiency by many members of our business and professional circles, with no counterpart of it in the Soviet Union, must sooner or later result in a bitter deception...
...Alexandria, Va...
...Policy and Communist Vulnerability" (NL, September 7), is most interesting and stimulating...
...In 1951 such a union was being discussed between the representatives of Israel and the late King Abdullah, who paid with his life for his attempt to approach the problem rationally...
...Miss Myers apparently would prefer to destroy the complex labyrinth of a murderer's mind than to explore it for the promise of the answers that it holds...
...This is a terrible comment on our law enforcement but not a sound argument against capital punishment...
...Hmmm...
...If the law were ! enforced as it should be, states without the penalty would become dumping grounds for murder victims...
...He says that murders occur more frequently in states which have the penalty than in those which do not...
...The grim picture of gangsters whisking their victims across state lines to avoid the penalty doesn't seem to worry Bedau, for, according to him, professional killers are seldom caught and executed...
...For, unfortunately, not all of us are able to view the brutal killing of our loved ones with Anatol Holt's sympathetic detachment...
...It seems to me that Heifetz is admired, in the first place, for his fabulous technique, rather than for any warm and inspired interpretation...
...New York City M. Z. FRANK DEATH PENALTY A quotation from Edith H. Myers' letter (NL, September 7): "Poisonous snakes, rabid dogs, men who murder, in what way do they differ...
...Should he not rather have mentioned Milstein and Francescatti (let alone the not yet forgotten stars of an earlier generation—Ysaye, Huberman, Fritz Kreisler) as representatives of personal, poetic and warm interpretation...
...RICHARD GIBIAN SOVIET IMAGE Let me congratulate you for publishing Richard Pipes' forceful article, "America's New Image of Russia" (NL, August 31...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 34
