Dear Editor

...In it he says, in effect, you pretend to emancipate the Jews, but you have not emancipated yourselves from the materialistic faith which you impute to the Jews...

...And after supporting his fiscal endowment to the poor by legislative fiat, Kristol frankly admits that he is not concerned with the wisdom with which its recipients choose to disburse it...

...Certainly it is the most vivid and deeply felt...

...Today he would say something similar about the Negroes: you cannot emancipate the Negroes without emancipating all classes...

...But there is also much scope for further stimuli to private initiatives such as (Western) government guarantees of, say, minimum levels of returns (perhaps over a fixed period, after which the activity would be nationalized or sold indigenously, thus avoiding the greatly exaggerated take-over incidents...

...London Arthur W. Wright...

...sources, excluding defense) by one recent estimate...

...To conclude on a note of personal respect for Kristol, allow me to say that although he is a humane, gentle, and cultivated man, he has one signal fault...

...Could those who are now enjoying the emotional bath of indignation not have kept in mind that Kristol was writing for the incontestably liberal and sophisticated New Leader, not the Reader's Digest where, as he would doubtless be the first to admit, the column would have been misplaced...

...New York City Abraham G. Duker Director of Libraries, Yeshiva University PRIVATE INVESTMENT N. Pattabbi Raman's conclusion in his article "Private Investment vs...

...I, for one, should require a more realistic consideration of the problem...

...This is the unforgivable thing about Kristol, for it is Polonius, not Pecksniff, who advises the Establishment...

...Brooklyn, N. Y Sidney Goldstein I have read with some interest and much despair the replies to Irving Kristol's article on poverty, "The Lower Fifth" (NL, February 17...

...DEAR EDITOR POVERTY IN AMERICA Of the five articles in the admirable survey of "Poverty in America" in your March 30 issue, Paul Jacobs' article, "Our Permanent Paupers," seems to me at once the most interesting and (perhaps more important) moving...

...He did this years ago on the question of God and Psychoanalysis, he did it in the next decade on foreign aid—at a time when the now conveniently forgotten book by Rostow and Milliken was the last word in realism—and now he has dared to do it again on poverty...

...Since anti-Semitism was the older protest movement and Socialism was the challenger, the sentence which Geltman quotes cannot be read as an admission that the two movements are related...

...The overwhelming fact about the capital requirements of the underdeveloped countries is the huge size of the sums needed...

...For the fact is that ever since poverty went off the main line of American sociological interest, about a quarter of a century ago, our approach to it has been almost wholly statistical or journalistic...

...Raman rightly pointed out the importance of governmental aid in enticing cautious private investors by creating stable and favorable social and political conditions...

...May I make the following comments about one of the pictures: The explanation of the picture on the extreme right top of page 5 fails to indicate that the book being held by the Jew is a luach, or calendar...

...Riverside, Calif...

...Congress...

...What is really impressive about the article, what makes it rise above so much that is written on the subject, is its concretion of detail and its author's difficult attempt to achieve total honesty in describing his own personal reactions to poverty...

...We not only do not know the real extent and location of hard-core poverty in this country, we very probably do not know what the right questions are to ask—scientific questions, that is, not political ones...

...Of course there is poverty in this country and, at its lower extremes, as in Appalachia, it is horrifying in the cultural and psychological toll it is exacting...

...on the contrary, it must be read, as it was meant, as a denigration of the anti-Semites...

...Kristol knows this, and nothing I read in his original column belies this knowledge...

...Such a state of affairs, however, is not likely to become the acceptable, for it is my money that he would take from me and give to others in a philosophical form of usurpation...

...The use of Streichertype cartoons in the Soviet press can be traced back a number of years...

...Flushing, N. Y. Meyer Cohen SOVIET JEWS Your correspondent ("Dear Editor," April 13), Max Geltman, is mistaken...

...Irving Kristol epitomizes this in his article, "Poverty and Pecksniff," with his assertion that to do away with a good deal of contemporary poverty "One need only pass a law...

...This has happened, Lord knows, with respect to cancer, alcohol, narcotics, and unemployment, and we may be forgiven for supposing that it could happen to poverty...

...He too often gets there first with the right questions...

...It is to be hoped that your supplement will be an eyeopener for many people...

...Robert A. Nisbet Dept...

...His use of "replace" (and also of "versus" in the title of the article), however, leaves one with the impression that the complementary relationship of equity and government investment funds was insufficiently stressed...

...Yet a third approach would be to encourage mixed companies formed of private and public initiative, with perhaps an eye to selling the public a share after the project had gained its "own" momentum...

...Foreign Aid" (NL, March 16) is quite sound: " it is unrealistic to expect foreign private investments effectively to replace foreign public assistance...

...I do not think it is going too far to say that "Our Permanent Paupers" is in the tradition of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, which is saying a good deal indeed...

...Currently available supplies of capital are grossly insufficient, although they include almost $5 billion annually of foreign capital (all The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...

...This is most significant, since for the first time in many years the Soviet government gave permission to publish a Jewish calendar...

...Within the developing countries themselves, incentives—and in extreme cases restrictions —for attracting domestic capital away from Swiss banks would also be desirable...

...They make plain that among your readers, as in the human race generally, the antennae of piety become frequently so long and thick as to be, like over-bushy eyebrows, barriers to perception...

...This august and ponderous body is once more failing to put its money where its mouth is, whether the refrain be helping poorer nations (in the tradition of Morsean liberalism), building markets for American goods or "fighting Communism...

...of Sociology University of California It is always interesting to note the ease with which writers would allocate the money of others to simplify difficult problems...

...Kristol was, in short, addressing himself to those in whom some knowledge both of and about poverty could be taken for granted...

...The one major inference I drew from Kristol's article is that the present emotionality and precariousness of political interest in poverty are more than likely to interfere with its badly needed study...

...Otherwise he might notice that Marx here polemicizes in the characteristic Hegelian style of irony...

...It was not August Bebel (whom incidentally he spells "Babel") who said "Anti-Semitism is the Socialism of the imbeciles," but Friedrich Engels, Marx's closest friend and collaborator...

...Detroit, Mich Morris Loman After reading the discussion of "Poverty in America," I have concluded that the one substantive idea really relevant to the "war en poverty" was submitted by Irving Kristol in his article "Poverty and Pecksniff," I refer to his suggestion that what the poor basically need is money, and the corollary implication that one ought not to give it to them with one hand while simultaneously taking it away with the other...

...Geltman also does not seem to have read Marx's pamphlet on the "Jewish Question," except for the seemingly anti-Semitic quotation...

...It will unless a de-fanging of shrillness takes place among those who write as though they alone know what it's like...

...This quasiinsurance scheme would pool risks for private firms at low tax-revenue cost to the guarantor...

...New York City Henry M. Pachter Thank you for reproducing some of the pictures from Trofim Korneyevich Kichko's book, Judaism Without Embellishment, in your March 16 issue...

...And the questions which were raised in my mind at least by his column are all legitimate and important questions...

...Marx and Engels together wrote the textbook of Marxism, Anti-Duehring, to refute one Professor Eugene Duehring who tried to mix Socialism and anti-Semitism...

...This is not to argue for a reduced commitment on the government-to-government level, such as is again threatened by the U.S...

...Thus emphasis should properly be on raising the total of investment funds, not on whether private can replace public, or vice-versa...

...Evidently, the inscription under the picture, "Opium for some, pocket money for others," is intended to denigrate the users and discourage the purchase of the calendar...