Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR KATZNER'S IMPACT It's my guess that Kenneth Katzner's striking article ("Vietnam Through the Looking Glass," NL, January 29) would send the chill of responsibility down the spines of...
...These first two exemplars make The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...This likelihood, that we may never grow up, provides uneasy moments for an ordered society and its functionary, the university, since it means that we are somehow grown up already...
...Dallas, Texas Jack D. Croui...
...Pitrkershurg...
...from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time...
...The problem for the student is not the cities, Vietnam or even the draft, but the question of having (and taking) political power in order to alter these secondary problems...
...What is his worldly God...
...Every society has this operator and will continue to have it...
...We do not accept an inferior status, only a different one...
...Furthermore, competent scholars and economists have suggested that the problem of slavery could have been solved, profitably, by money: this not in terms of the cost of the Civil War but in terms of the productivity and revenues that the slaves, purchased by the government from their owners and freed, could have provided...
...By never facing, or only half-facing, their problems, young people fail to realize their identity...
...Even so...
...Chicago, 111...
...Thus we seek to "bring politics in," to make it participatory, to make government responsive and reflective of our own humanity...
...Very well then...
...The common visceral evaluation of money as the root of all...
...The fact that within two decades our money will simply be a certain number of bits of information in the guts of a digital computer will not alter the game and there will still be operators (human) who will try to corner as much of the operator (abstract) as they can...
...poor dear, worries that his mommy and daddy will close off the future for him when in fact the future will come despite anything anyone can do...
...At the very least we should be provided with a sliver of thought wrapped in whatever passes for American English these decrepit days...
...It is in fact preferable to have the operator overt and visible rather than partially covert as among the Soviets, who use quite privilege as a partial substitute...
...wrote in 1843: "What is the Jew's foundation in our world...
...He sheds tears about "'the loss of America's reputation...
...Our activism for self-determination bespeaks a faith in ourselves which, it may be argued...
...They envy us our radicalism and muse regretfully upon th^ir own apathetic generation...
...Viewing themselves as meliorating transients in the halls of education rather than as students, it is understandable that Kyper and Abrams should deal with sideshow issues...
...It is comforting for established society when the bright youngsters worry about national government and foreign policy...
...Liberalism, in the long run, is its only true friend...
...He prefers to refute, pick, carp, point out defects without speaking of the picture's essential quality...
...Since politics deals with a common property, society, we approach it communally...
...What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world...
...Material necessity, private advantage...
...How long will it take for Jews to learn that the Left is no friend of Judaism...
...and the more reactionary slave holders combined to prevent the experiment so things had to be done the hard way...
...The Capacity of Today's Jews & Christians To Become Free...
...I for one am even prepared to forego the language to some extent if some thought is displayed...
...And you, as editors, are wasting time on static and ignoring more important things going on in the world when you flatter them with attention...
...Though it m true that we may not be students forever, it is also true that we may never be conventional "adults" either...
...SIMON John Simon writes some fine movie criticism, sometimes...
...and the rest of the cliche, is simply stupid...
...Why else would we awaken out of season and axe the hypnopaedia machine...
...The Abrams' mentality appears to be Abolitionist in nature...
...This was brought to mind by the statement made by Elliott Abrams in "The Sky is Falling": "Jews in this country . . . are increasingly accepting the cult of the dollar...
...Abolitionists, who thought it immoral to buy a slave to free him...
...Intellectually we may not be as conventionally qualified as the faculty or the administration, but, realistically speaking, politics does not depend upon intellectualism...
...Kyper has obviously not had an original thought in his life while Abrams may have, although the evidence does not appear in his article overtly...
...Money is what the mathematicians call an operator, a formalism tor transforming one thing into another, for changing the frame of reference...
...my university generation, that of the late '50s and early '60s, seem almost Socratically wise by comparison, and goodness knows we neither were nor are...
...We seek self-determination and a voice in society in the same way they do...
...Money...
...The roots of anti-Semitism on the Left can largely be traced to Marxian writings such as the above...
...A good reputation and a quarter might still buy you a glass of beer—at least if you live in a state where the laws are not designed to favor bootleggers—or in Russia half a liter of vodka...
...His review of The Graduate ("On Screen," NL, February 26) is an example of one of his bad columns...
...Our politics, therefore, is not anarchistic...
...Instead of pointing out that this picture is a fine one, brilliant and funny, Simon prefers to play Guildenstern to the other critics' Rosencrantz (or is it the reverse...
...The line is of the kind that is amusing the first time around but becomes boring if reiterated...
...I keep asking why The New Leader has taken it upon itself to entice these well-intentioned, silly, and inexperienced young men into making such asses of themselves...
...It is comforting because the huge energies of youth are diverted from their own unique problems...
...Valdis A. Aikjptkai.ns "The more things change the less they change" is apropos to a comparison of the New Left with the old...
...But ihey are too timid to do much more...
...This ignorance of an actual situation is why "Old soldiers never die—only the young ones do...
...He also shares in the ignorance common among the mewling and puking activists of all ages as to what economics is all about...
...My question on this subject is, I think, a fairly serious one...
...earlier generations of students did not feel...
...after all, education is personal and the person is unique...
...Louis, Mo...
...The faculty, dependent upon the state or upon a private board for their livelihood, know where their interests lie...
...Just as we have created our own free university in the midst of the conventional one, we are creating our own politics...
...Hal D. Sears Senior, University of Missouri...
...We also displayed some interest in facts and the limits of the possible...
...I am tempted to ascribe the difference to superiority of the Massachusetts educational system, but since I am a product of it this may be mere chauvinism...
...Many members of the New Left, especially Jewish students, consider this a characteristic Jewish trait...
...I submit that the issues of greatest concern, even to the two Eastern platitudinizers who appeared on your pages, are not national or international problems, but unique student problems: the problems of realizing a relevant education and of securing a strong, recognizable and viable student power structure We are segments of society in the same sense as labor, management, blacks and whites...
...the dollar is quite popular among the Moscow intelligentsia because it is a stable, real, and powerful operator...
...Just as we challenge the relevancy of the education prescription handed down from above, we challenge the in loco parentis concept of the overgrown bunch of clerics known mythically as "the administration...
...a quality that has recently been used to label us heartless, and at least we pretended that thinking things through and considering issues from various perspectives was a good idea...
...New York City David Grossberg VIEW FROM THE CAMPUS The first two attempts by John Kyper ("Vietnam and Beyond," NL, January 1) and Elliott Abrams ("The Sky Is Falling," NL, February 12) "to present at first hand the thoughts of college students around the country on the issues of greatest concern to them" are flops...
...emancipation from usury and money, that is...
...Politics depends upon awareness, and we are aware (though I doubt that we learned this awareness in the conventional classroom...
...DEAR EDITOR KATZNER'S IMPACT It's my guess that Kenneth Katzner's striking article ("Vietnam Through the Looking Glass," NL, January 29) would send the chill of responsibility down the spines of Spock, Lynd and Fulbright...
...Mort Sahl had a very funny monologue in which a Time subscriber is reading about the betrayals of the pre-McCarthy the First period (he was about as important and dangerous as McCarthy the Second, or a nullity), finds his emotions aroused, and exclaims: 'They've sold out my birthright...
...W, Va...
...We realize that education fails if it becomes dehumanized...
...From his review one might think it was a Hollywood potboiler he was talking about, instead of a film that has been mightily acclaimed by so many other critics...
...Director, Experimental University The second in your series of student written articles, by Chicken Little of Harvard, was a slight improvement over the first by that chap from Vermont Aggie...
...But at least we could l.uigh...
...If one reads reviews to glean an idea of a picture's qualities, as I do, more is expected from a critic than detective work pointing up inconsistencies...
...John J. McCartney Jr...
...Really...
...While we as readers have no right to expect in every issue such delights as Ralph Ellison's artistic and justified skewering of Irving Howe a few years ago, or as General Marshall's stylish and professional evaluations of minor unpleasantnesses around the globe, we do have the right to expect competence by authors who know what they are talking about...
...I a^.k you to consider the word-, of Abrams as professional editors...
...Karl Marx in one of his major essays on Jews...
...Usury...
...And then, ". . . you deprive us of our birthright...
...Our tendency is toward anarchy in our education...
...and when our viscera churned we felt it smart to lake bicarbonate of soda rather than stage a demonstration against the unfairness of the universe to our stomachs...
...We are energetic, more realistic than most people believe, and are entirely capable of improving our bargaining power vis-a-vis the established segments of society...
...My points are not inclusive but representative...
...What I am trying to show is that these activists who litter the landscape are attempting to resuscitate and preach obsolete, dead and useless heresies...
...So too with politics...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 6
