Dear Editor
Dear Editor America Mihajlo Mihajlov's "Impressions of America" (NL, April 23) is one of the finest and most moving essays I have read in a long while. As an immigrant myself, I can attest to the...
...It is asuperstition," the Austrian Chancellor said, "that Jews are intelligent...
...the Treaty," NL, April 9...
...Workers in Southern mill towns are oppressed...
...often, they are well-educated Jewish men...
...The clear implication is that he does not consider himself smarter than anybody else simply because he is Jewish...
...Philadelphia Martin Agaz Austria In his article, "Austria's Socialists in Trouble" (NL, April 23), Alexander Motyl tells of Bruno Krei-sky's silly remarks about Jews...
...Americans, Eugene Ionesco has somewhere noted, are a masochistic people...
...Stevens is still not unionized...
...Mihajlov shows us just how much we have to be proud of...
...Pittsburgh D. Bullen Prisoner Gertrude Samuels is to be commended for takingon UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim ("The UN vs...
...I agree with Asahina that the film is more fantasy than reality...
...This man, presumably the world's representative for peace, is nothing but a prisoner of the automatic majority—and a very cowardly prisoner at that...
...But in fact, he contends, Norma Rae is "really a post-women's lib love story...
...often these workers are women...
...That's nonsense...
...Los Angeles Daniel Levin...
...they blame themselves for the world's problems, and they think badly of themselves for not being able to cure their social ills...
...One is indeed struck, on coming to this land, by how very different it is from every other nation on earth...
...If it happens in reality, it's certainly kosher for it to happen in a film...
...What Motyl did not mention in quoting this ostensibly anti-Semitic remark, however, is that Krei-sky himself is Jewish...
...The Socialist leader was not saying that Jews are stupid, but that there is no reason for believing them more intelligent than others...
...Keeping that in mind, I think it is possible to cast at least a slightly more favorable light on his comments...
...After all these years J.P...
...the struggle for unionization is much too easily won...
...They're as stupid as the others...
...Congratulations...
...According to him, director Martin Ritt "probably believes the movie concerns a heroic labor struggle in a Southern mill town and its effects on the eponymous mill hand...
...Chicago George Steinfeld Work Robert Asahina is one of the few critics who did not take Norma Rae at face value...
...As an immigrant myself, I can attest to the emotional and intellectual truth of the author's meditations...
...Nevertheless, I don't understand what, exactly, your critic means by "post-women's lib love story...
...A man representing a superior culture (political awareness, good literature) enlightens a down-trodden woman and then graciously refuses to take advantage of her: Cinderella, with a truly liberating ending (he frees her from her chains and from himself as well...
...Many organizers do come from the Northeast...
...And, for that matter, in what sense is it unrealistic, as Asahina seems to be implying...
...Sometimes, if they can resist the call of the libido, they even manage not to sleep with the people they are trying to organize...
...Since the relationship between Norma and Reuben, the New York Jewish organizer, has almost no sexual overtones in what sense is it love...
Vol. 62 • May 1979 • No. 10
