Dear Editor
Dear Editor Speculation Please send me six reprints of George P. Brockway's "Why Speculation Will Undo Reaganomics" in your issue of September 7. I would like lo send copies to my senators and...
...Unfortunately, in his explanation of why Jews lett Russia lor America, Zipperstein veers into implausibilily...
...Shame on those naughty liberals...
...Using phrases that could be recycled verbatim into supply-sider tracts...
...Indeed, Brockway is not hard enough on the speculative spirit and the greed it encourages...
...Law painted such glowing pictures of the region's abundance and the wealth to be won that an orgy of trading ensued...
...Dear Editor Speculation Please send me six reprints of George P. Brockway's "Why Speculation Will Undo Reaganomics" in your issue of September 7. I would like lo send copies to my senators and representative in the Congress, as well as to some other persons...
...His nostrum was a financial system aimed at encouraging the settlement and exploration of the Mississippi territory...
...In thus discounting the influence of pervasive anti-Semitism, Zipperstein reminds me of the gangster in a Damon Runyon story who speaks of a recently gunned-down acquaintance's death as cardiac arrest because his heart stopped healing when seven bullets passed through it...
...September 21...
...Certainly it is an inadequate response to kitman's own warning earlier in the same paragraph: " The Moral Majority is ,i very sinister and dangerous movement...
...Puffing on the pedant's meerschaum, Zipperstein assures us that the immediate impact of the pogroms "tends to be overemphasized in the major sources of Russian Jewish history-Simon Dubnow's three-volume classic in particular— which were written by politically engage liberals and Jewish nationalists who freely introduced a strident anti-Tsarist polemic into their writings...
...Prospective victims of the Reagan Bubble ought to take heed...
...Even more implausibly...
...I think Brockway'san-alysis is extraordinarily important...
...Baltimoire Ruth Griffin...
...Zipperstein claims that "the pogroms were not what prompted {Davidl to depart," because during the time he lived in the Pale there were no pogroms actually under way...
...Zipperstein's argument finally collapses ignobly when he tells us that the "factors that ultimately persuaded Toback and more than 2 million other Jews to head for America...
...Chicago Elizabeth Bennett George Brockway's timely observations on speculation reminded me of a crisis that connoisseurs of financial disaster are fond of citing-the Mississippi Bubble of 1720...
...If, as Napoleon said, England is a nation of grocers, America is a land of stockbrokers-much to our detriment...
...New York City J. Ritledge Apathy I applaud Marvin Kitman's uneasiness over the Moral Majority ("The Dangerous Majority," Nl , September 7), but 1 am surprised by the lesson he appears io draw from the television industry's reaction lo the organization's pressure, kit man seems to be urging us to simply ignore the fundamentalists and rest content that "The positive power ol apathy is freedom's strongest weapon in the electronic age...
...A healthy desire to avoid a deterministic account of Jewish behavior seems to explain his lapses...
...racist policies...
...The Kemp-Roth man of yore was a notorious rake and gambler named John Law, who had fled from Scotland to Paris and eventually became the Finance Minister of France...
...Such a cynical tra-la in the lace of a concerted effort by fanatics to undermine our freedom of expression begs the issue...
...But the dwelling on ethnic differences that the book encourages does more than merely offer a pretext for the hardhearted— it gives weapons outright lo those who are already too powerful...
...When the Bubble burst, the economy of France was devastated, millions were ruined and a governmental crisis soon followed...
...As if Toback-an intelligent man, judging from Zipperstein's account-had to be the direct victim of a pogrom to want to avoid the average Russian's vile anti-Semitism...
...This instance from our colonial history has many instructive parallels with (he supply-siding and freemarketeering that we hear so much of these days...
...New York City Jerome List Stereotypes It seems to me that Barry Gewen is not hard enough on Thomas Sow-ell's Ethnic America ("Muggers, Ethnics and Stereotypes," NL...
...Having done time in business school and on Wall Street, I can vouch for Brockway's accuracy when he says, "The shocking fact is that a great number of the best and best educated brains in the country are caught up in speculation of one k ind or anot her...
...Gewen is careful to note that "Injustice remains injustice whatever a group's success" in overcoming the barriers of prejudice and intolerance, and that the great danger of a work like Sow ell's is (he excuse it prov ides for being complacent and hardhearted...
...It is infuriating to have to point out that the decay ol the Pale was not unrelated to the Tsar's oppressive...
...New York City Paul McCunton Diaspora There is nothing intrinsically wrong with debunking sentimentalized histories of Jewish life in Tsarist Russia, as Steve Zipperstein tries to do in his appreciative review of the unsentimental The Journeys of David Toback ("The Pale As It Was," NL, September 21...
...Rockville, Maryland Anthony M. Schwartz It was with rueful recognition that 1 read George P. Brockway's excellent discussion of one major element of our current economic problems...
...And some of the Haws he mentions about other autobiographies of late 19th- and early 20th-century Jews arc indeed valid: The Holocaust has tended to skew memories of daily existence back then...
...He raises the crucial issue of the regrettable effect such a book is likely to have too gingerly...
...He says, for example, that "there was nothing inevitable" about Toback's choice to emigrate, that there was a large internal migration within Russia itself, and David could have gone south...
...were the Pale's social and economic decay...
...and most of the memoirists have been public figures with sundry axes to grind...
...secularists who have gotten religion in their old age have surely fostered cloying nostalgia to compensate tor guilt over their previous atheism...
...As director of the newly formed Royal Bank of France, he bailed out the French company that had been responsible lor Mississippi colonization and exploration up to that time and unleashed the speculators...
Vol. 64 • October 1981 • No. 19
