ALFRED KAZIN CLUTCHES AT STRAUSS
Alfred Kazin Clutches at Strauss Alfred Kazin, who sometimes passes for America's most venerable literary critic, casually perpetrated a drive-by infamy last week. In an essay honoring Murray...
...Thernstrom vs...
...In a discussion of the sainted J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom Strauss opposed, Kazin remarked en passant that Strauss "pronounced his own name 'Straws' to make himself sound less Jewish...
...And the figure doesn't take into account the money labor unions devoted to 1997 races...
...Presented with this explanation, Kazin would have none of it, insisting that anyone saying "Straws" had to be trying to pass...
...In the summer of 1939, he was in Europe, attempting to rescue Jews from Germany...
...That's all, and even that isn't likely to happen again...
...Like, we don't have an actual Back to Business office," said employee Stacy Beck...
...One Kamber vice president said of Back to Business, "We rented them space...
...And until his death in 1974, he was in the forefront of Jewish philanthropy, donating large chunks of his fortune...
...For New York taxpayers wondering what their university system does with their money, The Scrapbook is proud to report that SUNY Press—with its new catalogue of deconstructive, postmodern screeds about race, class, and gender—is doing exactly what an academic publisher should: carefully preserving a cultural moment that would otherwise have faded entirely away...
...The five-to-one figure comes from 1997 races for governor of Virginia and New Jersey and for a House seat on Staten Island— but it doesn't refer to what the candidates raised and spent...
...It's there in Albany that the nostalgic reader may still find brave, new studies published with such marvelously dated titles as Transgressing Discourses, Gendering Classicism, Agonistics, or—beyond parody—From Hegel to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of Commodity Fetishism...
...and close readings of Hitchcock's films...
...If Strauss was out to disguise his faith, he could not have done a poorer job of it...
...Strauss was an honorable man— more than can be said of Kazin...
...For over 10 years, he was president of Temple Emanu-el in New York...
...Kazin's lame excuse for the libel is that he heard it from people, long ago...
...He once refused to eat a ham lunch that Queen Elizabeth served him...
...It's there at SUNY Press—in titles like Un/Popular Culture: Lesbian Writing After the Sex Wars or the essay on "Re(his)tor(iciz)ing Captivity and the Other" in Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women's Writing—that proud slash and those gallant parentheses still parade like doomed and dusty sentinels in the far-flung outposts of the decaying colonial empire of French intellectuals...
...Specifically, Weinstein mentioned a possible source of conflict-of-interest: that the Kamber Group had "housed" Back to Business, an organization set up to defend the Clintons from scandal allegations...
...The Pity Party The Democrats have been whining, disingenuously, about fund-raising—not the scandal, but the real thing...
...Democratic senator Dick Durbin of Illinois was even gloomier: "No matter what we do, the Republicans will still outspend us five to one," he said...
...Back to Business and the White House even had mutual friends, like Asiagate hero Johnny Chung, who gave Back to Business $25,000 and with Cutler's help set up a meeting with U.S...
...Five to one...
...For the record, The Scrapbook would welcome a letter from anyone in the White House familiar with the president's speaking career who can present a single instance of the president's giving a simple "yes or no" answer to any question asked anywhere in any venue in the entire course of his presidency...
...He was notoriously blunt, bold, and proud—even if he pronounced his name as a Virginian, rather than as a German...
...Kamber Group senior vice president Lynn Cutler was Back to Business's only officer...
...But the Post failed to note that the relationship was in fact more intimate than that, which Tucker Carlson reported in these pages in January 1996...
...Wrote Weinstein: "Congress should investigate to determine whether the Kamber Group's Department of Labor contract served, in effect, to subsidize Back to Business...
...Back to the Flack Business Last month, the Heritage Foundation issued a report, authored by analyst Kenneth Weinstein, cataloguing various relationships between the Clinton White House and powerful Washington lobbies...
...So had his father and grandfather...
...Two congressional committees are reportedly looking into Kamber's operations...
...Clinton The high point of the presidential town meeting on race in Akron came when the president tried to bully scholar Abigail Thernstrom on the subject of affirmative action...
...Laurel Davis's The Swimsuit Issue and Sport unsmilingly explains how Sports Illustrated "tramples women, gays, lesbians, people of color, and residents of the postcolonized world," using its swimsuit issue "to secure a large male audience by creating a climate of hegemonic masculinity...
...Included was a discussion of the lucrative federal contracts and intimate Clinton ties of liberal PR hack Victor Kamber...
...In New Jersey, for instance, public financing meant the candidates spent the same...
...To browse in SUNY Press's latest catalogue of literary and cultural studies is as affecting, in its way, as the end of Beau Geste: one last, lingering look back—in the failing, winter light of 1997—on that 1970s dawn in which it was academic bliss to be a handicapped Chicana lesbian, but to be the victim of incest was very heaven...
...In an essay honoring Murray Kempton in the New York Times Book Review, Kazin gratuitously smeared Adm...
...Strauss was as prominent a Jew as could be found in the United States for four decades...
...The truth is, Lewis Strauss had no interest in making himself appear other than as he was...
...The Kamber Group also "handled" all the operations of Back to Business, making Cutler—bizarrely—her own client...
...Yes or no...
...Yes or no...
...We look forward to more Kamber outrage, under oath this time...
...Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary, insisted the other day that President Clinton has to continue raising campaign funds like a madman because "Republicans are outspending Democrats five to one...
...Faced with giving a straight answer to a crooked question, Thernstrom gave an intelligent response, noting that "these preferences disguise the problem" and showing herself to be a good deal more rational on the subject than the president...
...It's a canard designed to promote Democrat-style campaign-finance reform...
...ambassador to China James Sasser...
...He was a member of numerous Jewish organizations, assuming a leading role in many of them...
...The Heritage Foundation has crossed the line into legally actionable territory with its knowingly false disparagements," Kamber said...
...This would be a hilarious allegation if it were not so contemptible...
...SUNY Buffaloed_ The avant-garde dies but never surrenders, and it seems to have taken its last, brave postmodern stand at the State University of New York...
...Abigail," he asked, "do you favor the United States Army abolishing affirmative-action programs that produced Colin Powell...
...In 1996, the DNC spent roughly the same amount as the RNC...
...The Washington Post's Bill McAllister quoted Kamber as expressing outrage...
...Nope, the basis for the claim is simply this: The Republican National Committee spent five times more than the Democratic National Committee in those contests, with much of the disparity resulting from $800,000 the national GOP spent on TV ads in the Staten Island race (where the DNC spent zero...
...Can this new Democratic talking point—already being repeated mantra-like by some journalists—be right...
...But it's unfair to single out particular volumes...
...The answer is no...
...Lewis L. Strauss, who in a long and controversial career was private secretary to Herbert Hoover, an investment banker on Wall Street, a wartime naval strategist, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and secretary of commerce...
...a discussion of recent theories of feminine subjectivity and queer textu-ality...
...Robert Samuels's Hitchcock's Bi-Textuality is promoted with the promise that it combines "an articulation of Lacan's theory of ethics...
...nearly the entire SUNY catalogue is beyond parody...
...The truth is that Strauss grew up in Richmond, Va., and, like other southerners, pronounced the name "Straws...
...Not to mention less rude...
...With Strauss's Jewish credentials, Kazin was irritably unimpressed...
Vol. 3 • December 1997 • No. 14
