Political Booknotes
Mayo, Sandra McElwaine,Jon Meacham,Murray Polner,Chalmers Roberts,Greig M. O'Brien,Michael K.
Political Booknotes Dry-With a Twist by Sandra McElwaine READERS WILL BE RELIEVED TO learn that "no animals were harmed in the making of" Wry Martinis-a delicious compilation...
...On other issues, “clarify for them the worries and concerns of Jews...
...Charles: Well, I suppose it’s better than what they’ve got me “inspecting” tomorrow, at sevenbloodyfifteen in the bloody a.m...
...How did DeBlois get it started...
...Peter Jennings aired the story, and the Russians went ballistic...
...By warming to the ardently pro-Israel Christian Right, and abandoning many of its old allies in separation of church and state and school prayer issues...
...Political Booknotes Dry-With a Twist by Sandra McElwaine READERS WILL BE RELIEVED TO learn that "no animals were harmed in the making of" Wry Martinis-a delicious compilation of Christopher Buckley's writings in such magazines as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Forbes FYI...
...GREIG M. O'BRIEN is a Washington, D.C.-based writer...
...As time goes on, and more families join and stay, these renewing neighborhoods could become what they once were-prosperous, middleclass, and full of young families...
...My Own Private Sunday School” describes a conversation between Buckley and his 6-year-old daughter, Caitlin...
...Therefore, before we test this new frontier, we must settle our own pressing contradictions...
...His interest, however, lies in creating an eclectic Judaism open to all who wish to enter...
...Whatever the future holds, there is much in Judaism and Jewish life which conforms to the best this country and its ideals offer, and whose spiritual and moral values are not only appealing but worth preserving...
...Then why so much anxiety about whether Jewish women and men can be moved enough to remain Jewlsh, and agree to marry other Jews, and pass on the faith to their children and they to theirs...
...And it was 35 years ago that James Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi, a seemingly simple act that forced Eisenhower’s successor...
...Dershowitz, reared and educated as Orthodox, is now a secular Jew but just as concerned about keeping the faith...
...The crime problem in Brentwood persuades him that it is time to look elsewhere, to New York, with the children where they can have a “normal” upbringing...
...The fact is, however, that the overwhelming number of American Jews are dedicated to pluralism and tolerance and keeping government’s hand far from religion...
...We have to make a choice...
...If you lie, they’ll pick up on it and never trust you again...
...asks one teacher...
...Loyola is small, intense, and Jesuit...
...Success keeps the bureaucrats at bay: Of the Urban Collaborative’s 450 graduates, 80 percent go on to finish high school...
...Though publicly funded, the Urban Collaborative is run entirely by the teachers...
...How old, for instance, are these kids...
...Are we (as Dershowitz’s title says) “vanishing...
...Yet less “hope from the ashes” and more concrete analysis would have countered the implication that the Urban Collaborative is a lucky aberration, rather than a universal possibility...
...Any student can move up a grade as soon as he or she has mastered the material for that level...
...And who can doubt him...
...Redefining Judaism by Murray Polner THERE IS A PERFECT HOVERING over mainstream American Jewish groups...
...But making our inner cities more hospitable again doesn’t seem to require more law enforcement...
...The dropout rate in Providence is nearly 50 percent...
...The United States-and certainly not Ismel-has become our goldene nzedzna, our golden, promised 13nd...
...And at this school here, she’s the one writing the curriculum...
...In a traditional, big, sink-or-swim high school, these kids would be sunk...
...Should this unlikely entente come to pass, let us pray that some basic biblical precepts such as “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” and “DO Unto Others as You Would Have Others Do Unto You” will he conveyed to them as well...
...One School's Success by Michael K. Mayo A FEW MONTHS AGO, GEORGE Will devoted a column to praising one of my brother schools, St...
...We are everything from anarchists to Zionists, liberals, conservatives and radicals, neo-and paleo-conservatives, an all-inclusive tent which, I would hope, accepts that Noam Chomsky is as much a Jew as Irving Kristol and that a female Reform rabbi is as Jewish as an ultra-Orthodox rabbi...
...With only 105 students, the school can give the attention they demand and the sense of community they don’t get at home...
...But Lawrence E. Samuel, a teacherbusinessmanSmithsonian fellow, has turned the whole business into something of far greater scale...
...The thing is, they don’t sink in...
...Unlike nuclear families of decades past, even when they begin to prosper, they stay put...
...How so...
...John Kennedy, to order US...
...But there will be one major difference from 50 years ago: This time the communities almost definitely will not be white...
...Above all, the “American Jewish community must conceive of itself as a religiozu community’’ or else begin to “decline” since “continuity programs cannot work unless they are centered on faith in God,” warns Abrams...
...question...
...Cohodas adds: “‘Racial respect’ was a striking term, careful, even modesta phrase that implied limits and boundaries and one that aimed for something less grand than ‘colorblind society’ and more pragmatic than ‘race neutral.’ ‘Racial respect’ is not an attempt to blur or erase differences but to acknowledge and accept them so that a working whole can come out of separate parts...
...President Roosevelt is also credited with welcoming African Aniericans into the national fold...
...For a demonstration of the ineffectiveness of this approach, residents of the nation’s capital need only recall how President Bush‘s Drug Czar, William Bennett, pledged to “clean up” the Washington drug scene with an “emergency” $80 million dollar policy-$ 79 million of it spent on increased law enforcement...
...In his new book, The Othei*An?el-icnnsM, illman suggests that immigrants could be the most effective source for two of this country’s most basic needs: hope and prosperity...
...it is highly successful...
...He’d just finished smoking pot a few seats ahead of her...
...Both milestones are prompting journalists to ask the inevitable How Far Have We Come...
...If the Urban Collahorative was next to impossible to start and operate, why exactly was that...
...I suspect that they are ninth and tenth graders, since it’s a two-year program leading into high school halfway through, but Brosnan also says that they recruit mainly from the 6th and 7th grades...
...Th at kind of Judaism depends on the power of Jewish ideas to educate, influence, and repair the world”-the mainspring of Jewish attachment to liberalism...
...what’s your favorite part in “The Rescuers Down Under...
...NRA executive Wayne LaPierre said that if Britain did not have such stringent gun-control laws, “they’d have been able to nip this problem at the start...
...I come from Tennessee, and am married to a Mississippian) rushing into lines of helmeted infantrymen in Oxford...
...Caitlin: But what happens after you die...
...We don't need school boards, goes the subtext...
...As Cohodas tells it, reporters asked Meredith whether he was happy once he enrolled...
...Just me and my Wellies...
...Brosnan describes each politician’s budgetary dilemma, and how each level of government passed the problem off to the next...
...This is not a happy day,” Meredith replied...
...And as for academics, teachers are free to pursue the program that best suits the bodies sitting in front of them...
...To him, that means among other things accepting any non-Jewish wife or husband “who wants to be part of our heritage” and acknowledging the legitimacy of cultural and secular Judaism...
...Through their collective diligence and perspiration, their families prosper just as they had predicted...
...And he gives hints of how it canand cannot-happen elsewhere...
...Indeed, never before have so many Jews been so secure, accepted, and successful...
...And the most accessible, and most eager, to fill this role are immigrants...
...Brosnan’s blueprint is nearly complete, and even the triumphant child stories are fun to read and, indeed, awesome...
...All this seemed to me nothing more than simple acts of patriotism to which neighbors and friends alike contributed...
...The presence of immigrants is especially beneficial when immigrant groups reach “critical mass”-when the influx into specific neighborhoods grows large enough for a cohesive ethnic community to develop...
...Public antiSemitism is by and large a thing of the past...
...One year later, the effort was declared a miserable failure...
...He “pointed to the ideals of the American enlightenment, contrasting them with the racist philosophies embedded in Axis fascism and totalitarianism.’’ Samuel also discusses the work of that truly great black leader, A. Philip Randolph, and of Walter White and Roy Wilkins, who skillfully parlayed wartime racial advances into the leaps forward of post-war America...
...the recalcitrant Governor Barnett ducking the Kennedys’ calls...
...If the school sounds like " a faint, quaint echo from another century," he writes, " so much the worse for ours...
...The Lost Cause symbols that are even now causing trouble in the South-the Confederate battle flag, team nicknames like the “Rebels,” playing “Dixie” as a school’s fight song-were not traditions cultivated by men just off their horses from Appornattox...
...Referring to popular trends in naturalistic, “whole language” writing instruction, English teacher Lynne Abbott says, “I know a lot of people think [grammar is] a waste of time, that kids are supposed to pick up grammar through osmosis or something...
...That’s the problem with the flood of Triumphant Schools books out there-accounts of embattled, heroic children get tossed up like tennis balls, which can be whacked into any ideological corner if untethered to a hard analysis of the facts...
...they built “a religiously authenticated Jewish American ethnic identity around philanthropy, Israelism, political liberalism and the search for social justice as well as around antiantiSemitism.’’ In their new books, the conservative Elliott Abrams, once a key player in the Reagan administration’s Central American policy and now head of an ethics think tank, and Alan Dershowitii, the liberal appellate lawyer of Claus von Bulow and O.J...
...That kind of Judaism does not depend on numbers, or on religious definitions of who is a Jew...
...For anyone familiar with the movement, these are familiar touchstones: the tear gas at Oxford...
...From Robert Kardashian: I have known Mr...
...The days of a produceroriented economy, when the reverse was true-more jobs meant more spending-have been gone since the ’SOs, and possibly as long ago as the Roaring Twenties...
...Motivated kids catch up in no time...
...History, Robert Penn Warren once said, knows no leaps-except the leap backward, maybe...
...You might have some explaining to do to the lady of the home, but the item is fairly compact and could be accommodated to fit most large dens...
...Or that: “All too many Jewish groups act not as Jewish entities hut rather as liberal political bodies, taking on the evangelicals on such matters as gun control or gay rights...
...While the idea intrigues me, it conveniently leaves the rest of us out of the picture...
...In prose that is too often turgid, Samuel goes on to explain that whereas in the first war, bond drives centered on lining everybody up behind the dominant white idea, during the second war the bond sellers reflected the fact that the country had changed and so the selling was less nativist and more inclusive of the population, most notably of black Americans...
...Even so, he is far more realistic than Abrams, especially in reflecting the lives of Jews in so diverse a religion and society...
...although that remains the favorite prescription of politicians looking to “make a stand...
...Is it possible that Israel and the collective inemorialization of the Holocaust can no longer hold us together...
...This is a journey, after all, that began with James Meredith and the might of JFKs government forcing their way into a registrar’s office...
...It's called ‘7ewish continuity,” an overheated reaction referring to the dread that the number of American Jews may sharply decline in the next century...
...166 marshals and 40 soldiers were injured...
...How do we get there from here...
...It comes when he describes, painfully quickly, the political landscape when the Urban Collaborative “was taxiing down the runway, waiting for takeoff...
...From A.C...
...At that, a friend whacks him over the head with a baseball cap and says, “That’s because she works, dickhead...
...Without them all the court decisions and all the battles could never have sustained a gradually improving South...
...Sadly,” Brosnan writes, “many school reformers are beginning to talk pessimistically about it all, wondering how often the message has to be repeated before it sinks in...
...This interaction within the United States will also serve as a dress rehearsal for the larger, international interaction that is bound to develop in coming decades...
...Powerful and impersonal economic forces have robbed us of our sense of economic mobility and individual stability...
...Charles and Camilla on the phone...
...not because our well-being depends on it, but because Judaism does I’ If that’s “liberalismn” and “social justice,” it stands a far better chance of keeping Jews Jewish than does genuflecting before the Christian Right and its handful of Jewish allies...
...Yet this is the way we choose to fund public schools...
...Discipline is always a problem, but it’s handled better here because DeBlois knows each child and his or her parents...
...With the renewal of enough of these neighborhoods, America will finally be forced to confront a large and prosperous (thus influential) non-white class...
...soldiers into Oxford to prevent anarchy...
...This time she meant business...
...From Alan Dershowitz: Another of my clients, Clam Von Bulow, lived on Fifth Avenue, and my visits to his apartment brought considerable social stature to his co-tenants...
...When Jennings retracted the story, he told journalists he had believed the report because it had come from Forbes, which he regarded “up to now as a responsible news organization!’ Other news organizations expressed outrage and bemusement...
...Charles: Oh no, with a soup ladle...
...The phrases, “international incident,” “brazen lie,” and “serious provocation” were tossed around...
...I mean, it’s part of...
...Reunited, they begin to work as a unit-working and spending together...
...But even more to the point, as conservatives never fail to remind us, the Christian Right is a crucial and undeviating friencl of Israel...
...Just as important as size, DeBlois has also carved out independence from the public school board...
...Common Bond by Chalmers Roberts DURING WORLD WAR I, WHEN I was a kid of six and seven, I grew radishes in my backyard victory garden,” Mom knitted wool socks for the doughboys, and Dad bought Liberty bonds...
...What seems to be a more effective solution to our crumbling inner cities, if we listen to Millman, is the renewal of these “lost” neighborhoods by immigrant influxes...
...Citing figures from the 1990 census, Millman notes, “Immigrant families earn like the poor but spend like the middle class...
...The Judaism I am trying to defend and enhance is a Judaism of ideas, of attitudes, of skepticism, of justice, of compassion, of argumentation and of inclusiveness...
...Historical anniversaries have a kind of liturgical significance: they force us to review the drama of our past and figure out what lessons we ought to draw from what has gone before...
...During World War 11, my wife and I put all the savings we could manage into war bonds, an act which eventually helped build us a home...
...Can these explanations give us direction on how to change the system we have now...
...As DeBlois puts it, “Our philosophy in an eloquent nutshell...
...True, many send a sizable portion of their earnings back home (to be spent in foreign markets, as many nativists charge...
...Washington-Mayor Marion Barry today offered to use Britain’s mad cows to fill District of Columbia potholes...
...asks one noble soul...
...there is still dejizcto segregation, of course, but it’s even worse outside the old Confederacy...
...How do you get a kid to work on English when he has had a few bottles of beer before class...
...The board felt rather strongly that nocturnal golfing is inappropriate in a Fifth Avenue duplex, and therefore decided to pass on your application with the keenest regret...
...Teachers spend hours and hours cheerleading kids, trying to convince them why school matters...
...We just need Jesuits...
...Kids call their teachers by their first names (“I feel that we are on the same level or something”-blecch), kids talk through assembly (“Getting them here is half the battle”)-but if it works, who cares...
...As Millman points out, at least in the case of New York, “throughout the peak years of immigration, arrests for rape, robbery, murder, and theft kept trending, stubbornly, down,” while in periods of low immigration, crime rates rose...
...Young, nonwhite vitality or elderly, white nativism...
...The land of milk and honey" or "the streets of guns and poverty...
...On television, get ready for the old black- and -white images of Tohn Chancellor reporting from Arkansas and of mobs of crew-cut crackers (I can say that...
...Here in the U.S...
...After rummaging through the archives of the two wars and their fiscal underpinnings-and through much of the NAACP’s records from the period-he announces that: “War bonds both reflected and helped shape a new version of Americanism, steeped in the enduring paradox of ‘e plwibiis zini~wi,’ out of many, one...
...The Intelligent Guideline to Jewish Affairs...
...it feels so empty without you...
...Simpson was contemplating a move to NYC, includes excerpts from letters of recommendation the Juice submitted to a pricey New York cooperative...
...This “more than half” figure was a bombshell, especially since as late as the mid-’60s the rate was less than 10 percent...
...Jonathan Kozol describes this situation-we write these satisfying stories of “hope in the ashes,” and then keep piling on more ashes...
...It is the lively, if not always lucid, tale of the Urban Collaborative Accelerated Program, a new two-year school which serves Providence’s most “at-risk” children...
...The facts are old...
...Charles: Then she announced she was going to kill herselfCamilla: What again...
...Tkt if true, and only if true, it IS a predicament born of living in an open society which fosters freedom of choice...
...Postscript: Six months later there was a story in The Wnshingro?~P ost saying the Kremlin had been “inundated with bids” ranging from $10,000 to $27 million for the corpse...
...Michael Brosnan almost over comes this slipperiness in Against the Cumpnt: How One School Struggled and Succeeded with At-Risk Teens...
...Apartment Hunter,” written after the New Yark Post reported that O.J...
...JON MEACHAM is Newsweek's national affairs editor...
...Rhode Island was, at the time, infusing tens of millions of dollars to save its credit unions...
...You better let him conic live in your building...
...The rcsponse from the Coopcwtive :\ssociation: ‘I’he board, recalling your statements regartling your activities on the night of June 12, 1994, took note of your predilection for nocturnal golfing on the premises...
...These are the Urban Collaborative’s successes...
...That task is to redeem the world through justice...
...In fact, their books are so provocative-and illuminating-that they are sure to touch off a good deal of furious debate...
...To speak of a global village and the barring of immigration in the same breath is hypocritical...
...The development of these prosperous non-white communities, integrated with other similar communities in what resembles a realization of Randolph Bourne’s “trans-national” vision for America, could force resolutions for problems of race that no group has had the power to do in the past...
...To Abrams and his fellow neoconservatives, liberalism is now spent, having long since run out of ideas...
...Half that amount would fund 20,000 Urban Collaboratives (or 67,000 Nativity Preps)-a far worthier investment in our national defense...
...Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, Alger’s optimistic legacy has withered...
...In the wise words of my late friend Henry Schwarzschild: “Jews are defined by neither doctrine nor credo...
...Hope has vanished from the landscape of the American mind But revitalization is just beyond our border, says Joel Millman...
...The first is a bit of largely forgotten history...
...So, it’s hardly an eye-opener when Abrams informs readers that ‘Xmerican Jews believe simply as an article of faith that a more religious society threatens them-and this had been a much more powerful credo for the American Jew than any of the laws of Moses...
...Caitlin (sweetly): Dad...
...MICHAEL K. MAYO is a teacher at Nativity Preparatory School in Raxburry, Massachusetts...
...Bennett retracting the program and claimed “a limited success” for the federal government...
...In America, immigrants see opportunity-the spirit of Horatio Alger that our country has been exporting for a 150 years but doesn’t truly believe in itself...
...Fairfax, Va.-The National Rifle Association today announced that it has offered to send its entire 3.3 million membership over to England to assist with its massive cowculling effort...
...This is a very difficult question, and Cohodas’s choice of venue-the internal history of Ole Miss, the largest university in what is, next to Alabama, the most racially fraught state in the country-sheds only a little light on the answer...
...Camilla: But it’s so lonely here...
...Some of the highlights (with chapter titles in quotes): “Royal Eavesdropping...
...He does, in fact, place the school within broader contexts and offers the usual solutions...
...But Jim Crow had finally lost a skirmish, and would never really recover...
...he also includes plenty of stories of kids who, finally given the chance most suburban Americans have had, sweat out their circumstances and succeed...
...I hope the country uses this anniversary year to remind ourselves what we have to do to stay on the road that leads us away from our worst instincts, and toward our better ones...
...But more often the money is saved so that the rest of the family can join their pioneering kin in America...
...These two contentious and tendentious books by writers not known to be diffident about speaking their minds might never have appeared had not the National Jewish Population Study announced in 1990 that between 1985-1990,52 percent of Jews were intermarried (though the actual figure may be six to 12 percentage points less...
...Russian officials finally regained their sense of humor and told the Post everyone who submitted a bid would receive a polite letter declining the offer, but thanking them for their interest...
...William Pickens, field director of the NAACP, became a key player in countering that attitude...
...Ultimately, the important thing is to remain true to your convictions...
...Knock, knock, is anyone bloody home...
...Millman argues that spending is crucial to economic revitalization...
...The land of milk and honey” draws immigrants in search of wealth and a new life...
...Charles: I’ll tell you what empty is...
...The patriotic boiin fides they displayed during the war were cashed in later on...
...And spending a lot...
...East Greenwich, R.I., has $405,547 worth of taxable property per child, while Providence has only $143,643...
...The first is that despite its current standing in the polls, the federal government was, once upon a time, a force for enormous good, and it is only the unthinking Southerner who unreservedly joins in the shrill anti-Washington mood of the moment...
...Having already spent the effort to bring to the country not only their spouses and children, but also parents and cousins as well, why would they leave...
...Change Comes Slowly by Jon Meacham FOR SOUTHERNERS, HISTORY IS as much a pastime as bourbondrinking and football: even all these years distant, we can still wreck dinner parties with passionate arguments about whether Bragg or Forrest could have turned the tide...
...She chooses Ole Miss and Meredith, and sets a high bar for herself: “The legal apparatus of segregation has been dismantled and replaced by laws with noble goals and the mechanisms to enforce them, and although minorities had integrated all facets of life, most visibly the political world, the reality of the 1990s, with rising resegregation in schools and neighborhoods and continued racial hostility, was not the one many of us envisioned ...Wh at had gotten in the way...
...MURRAY POLNER is co-editor (with Adam Simms) of the independent biweekly newsletter PS...
...Through historical context and individual narratives, Millman constructs a powerful answer to the anti-immigrant ravings of the right...
...Simpson for many years, I would describe him as a devoted family man...
...And closer to home, the Rhode Island state training school costs $92,000 per year per inmateand the vast majority are, of course, high school dropouts...
...Berlin, N.H.-Patrick J. Buchanan today proposed that the United States import the 4.7 million British cows affected by mad cow disease and deploy them across the US-Mexican border to deter illegal immigrants...
...Immigrants or dilapidated inner cities...
...CHALMERS ROBERTS, a retired Washington Post reporter, lives in Betbesda, Maryland...
...Camilla: I’m lying here in my Wellies and not a stitch else...
...Bloody poultry plant...
...ignatius Academy in the inner city of Baltimore...
...Oak Brook, 111.-The McDonald’s Corporation announced today its plans to introduce a new line of sandwiches next month called Mad Macs...
...This country’s track-record in the area of race relations is subpar, to say the least, and has far to go...
...Which is why, as an agnostic Dad-difficult as it was-I looked her right in the eye and said, “You go straight to heaven...
...While he makes sure not to attribute this statistic purely to the presence of new Americans, it is a coincidence that should be investigated further and pointed out to our policy-makers whenever they feel the need to boost their profile by attacking the ever-present "alien" problem An important characteristic of this “critical mass” community is a growing immigrant middle-class that stays put...
...That’s a thousand new schools every morning...
...From Johnie Cochran: His only desire right now, apart from seeing that the Colombian drug dealers who slew his ex-wife and her companion are brought to justice, is to raise his children in an atmosphere of serenity and security...
...The sucker punch, though, is as obvious as the by-line...
...He would probably feel much better if his fellow Jews voted their economic and political interest and engaged and enlightened the Christian Right, which, once it understands our concerns, can be allies...
...This independence also means the school can offer a radical and brilliant idea that they call “acceleration...
...The book implicitly (too implicitly) supports the idea that we could do much better with a system of public, independent, inner-city schools, each with its own philosophy and success stories...
...It was 40 years ago this fall that President Eisenhower had to send federal troops to integrate Central High in Little Rock, a conflict that marked the emergence of the power of network television by bringing the spectacle of white riots against black children to a nation just beginning, really, to understand the scope of the Southern problem...
...One went so far as to demand Buckley be “drummed out of the international press corps...
...You can postpone this moment, but you can’t avoid it...
...The best explanation may be that generations of segregation and entrenched attitudes take generations to undo-and we don’t know yet if they can ever be coinpletely undone...
...Even worse, the book gets confusing at the most fundamental level...
...As the movement grew after the Brown decisions in 1954 and 195S, states like Georgia would also cotton on to Old South imagery, especially the battle flag, as sy~nbolso f defiance and resistance to federal integration orders...
...Brosnan has one answer, lurking in the back of the book behind too many Triumphant Kid stories...
...Caitlin: Does everyone die...
...Even the unbelievers among us are never so Jewish as when they reject social apathy and confront the desperate needs of their brothers and sisters...
...Amidst the author’s maddening semantics and too many facts and figures we don’t need to know, there are some interesting observationsmost notably on the role of African Americans in the second world war...
...As you might expect, given the extent of racial segregation in America at the beginning of World War 11, ‘African Americans were ambivalent toward the war effort...
...Dad: Yeah, honey...
...American Jews have neither converted in any significant number nor assimilated...
...The inside of her skull...
...The winning bidder will be contacted within three days...
...In the case of civil rights and the South, there are two overarching Doints that come out of the domestic passion play of the ’50s and ’60s...
...If so many Jews were marrying out, and their children only half-Jews, the reasoning went, might not the bulk of nonOrthodox Jews gradually fade away and “assimilate,” abandoning a priceless 5,000-year-old heritage to a provincial and sectarian Orthodox remnant...
...At Ole Miss the flag and “Dixie” were added to football pageantry in 1948, the year ThurInond and his “Dixiecrats” bolted the Democratic Party in Philadelphia when the convention that nominated President Truman adopted a procivilrights plank...
...Of course...
...Only a teacher could tell you that...
...Brosnan has a few of his own...
...That more positive, moreJudaic values are required...
...It wasn’t...
...In a 1943 photo op FDR appeared with a black messenger who had once been his chauffeur, the president presenting him and others as “just a small cross section of the White House staff” subscribing to bonds...
...Still, skeptics abound...
...They don’t see “the streets of guns and poverty” until they touch down...
...As a conversation piece it would have no equal...
...The biggest drain on our nation’s cities since World War I1 has been the middle-class relocation to the suburbsa trend that began in the ’50s and has since intensified...
...They would reject Abrams’s views, preferring instead to view the Christian Right as the Anti-Defamation League did in 1994 when it published its critical “The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America...
...Be cool irith this...
...She quotes two professors who recently wrote that Ole Miss, like the state, has something unique to offer: “a tragic history and the experience of attempting to transcend that tragic past into a triumphant present, to transform ourselves from a symbol of racism to a symbol of racial respect...
...Respect implies deference, and the exercise of manners...
...Cowlings: He’s got a gun to his head...
...Caitlin: But Dad, am I going to die...
...Siinpson fame, both accept the Chicken Little hypothesis while offering quite different solutions...
...Nevertheless, by showcasing the success of various immigrant groups across the United States, he shows how large groupings of immigrants not only thrive, but benefit their surrounding communities and cities as well...
...Like so much legislative procedure, it’s absurd, destructive, and apparently no one’s fault...
...Unfortunately Millman never directly confronts his nativist opposition-and this weakens his argument...
...But immigrant families give a community yet another advantage...
...The second is equally important: race relations only improve when there is a change of heart as well as of law...
...Fresh Blood by Greig O'Brien HORATIO ALGER, THAT CULural icon of the 19th century, was the definitive chronicler of the American dream-a dream based on the celebration of rugged inividualism and the promise of upward mobility...
...Another one: the Gulf War cost $1 billion every day...
...With the lemon peeler...
...DeBlois’s answer: Make that kid’s school small...
...Here Brosnan makes his most insightful revelation: “Our layered system of government, regardless of its other successes and shortcomings, is simply not conducive to educational reform-even when it is clear that reform is necessary...
...It has come to our attention through private channels that the Soviet Union is preparing to make a very unusual, indeed unprecedented, offering, the embalmed remains of VI...
...in a global marketplace, America will not have the luxury to reign supreme and dictate our whims to the rest of the world...
...And the South is slowly, by fits and starts, getting better...
...Alger's heroes were invariably outsiders, brave men and women who traveled to the infant metropolises of the 1800s and, through toil and determination, rose through the ranks of the social hierarchy...
...War bonds,” says Samuel, “acted as a catalyst in the shift from New Deal populism to a nationalism predicated on the common pursuit of affluence, linking pluralism to the universally shared desire for the good life...
...Abrams, a self-described religiously “somewhat observant Conservative Jew,” offers his vision of what American Jewish life could be if only Jews turn their backs on liberal causes...
...After all, that’s what wealthy private schools have been doing for centuries...
...In a strange twist, it comes down between funding the Urban Collaborative and funding all school sports in Providence...
...however, he never convincingly gives an answer to the question Abrams and others have asked: how an approach which draws in those who do not believe in the divine interpretation of the torah or in some spiritual aspect will preserve Judaism in future generations...
...Hey, why is she accelerating, and I’m not a quarter of the way through my work and I’ve been here longer than she has...
...Soon after, Abrams and 74 fellow travelers condemned the ADL in a New I5rk Times ad, complaining: “It ill behooves an organization dedicated to fighting against defamation to engage in defamation of its own...
...Assimilation, Sori n reminds us, means essentially the extinction of ethnic or religious singularity, whereas the bulk of American Jews have and may continue to undergo acculturation: “accotninodation to the larger society without total loss of traditional cultural traits...
...Historian Gerald Sori,, in his new book Fadition Tmnfomted: TheJfewish Experience in Avtelerica, makes an excellent case that we have instead acculturated...
...SANDRA McELWAINE is a Washington-based journalist...
...The one problem, he said, is that there are only 4.7 million cows and the District has 7.8 million potholes...
...Dershowitz’s liberalisin also recognizes the elementary truth that Jews are not and have never been monolithic...
...To be sure, Cohodas shows that blacks have made once-unimagined progress at the school...
...Camilla: Oh, darling, how frustrating for you...
...Cohodas makes two original points worth considering...
...And given their “shrinking” numbers, Abrams advises: Jews should “work closely with Christian groups whose size and influence are growing, and which are strongly pro-Israel...
...Some of DeBlois’s philosophies are hard to swallow...
...Remember, that bizarre story of the black principal who kept order with his baseball bat...
...DeBlois doesn’t have to wait long to find the facts, make a decision with his faculty, and get the kid expelled...
...Lenin For Sale” created an international contretemps...
...Was a “demographic disaster” (as Elliot Abrams puts it) really awaiting us...
...And other than that brief political analysis, he offers no history of the school before the doors opened...
...We live in a consumer economy: The more money spent in a certain community, the more jobs will be created with that money...
...In interviews with teachers, students, and the endlessly energetic founder and principal, Rob DeBlois, Brosnan pulls together a realistic story of a school with its head on straight...
...His excuse...
...What is needed, he insists, is intensive, positive, quality schooling about Jewish history, literature, culture, and religion that also respects and welcomes a secular, humanistic Judaism...
...it has high expectations and tells children how to meet thwm...
...In the face of this political conclusion, what relevance can a hundred stories of heroic kids have beyond sentimentality...
...Lenin,” wrote Buckley...
...Cohodas’s reporting turns up a second insight: The country may not have achieved King’s vision of racial equality, but all is not bleak...
...Undaunted, most of these new Americans manage to make a decent living...
...This sounds obvious, but in a way the real story of race in the contemporary South is what happened &e?* the high-water inark of the mid- to late’60s-after the March on Washington, and after the Lorraine Motel...
...The reserve is set at $15 million...
...Thus, the most effective way to renew our dilapidated inner cities would be an influx of fluidly spending individuals...
...In one encounter, a student appears to have raped a girl in the back seat of a school bus...
...Modest Proposals,” deals with the complications of mad cow disease...
...lazy kids quickly learn where their laziness gets them...
...What weird message lurks there...
...He’s honest enough to profile the average, non-angelic kids who don’t seem to deserve their school...
...Nadine Cohodas, the author of a strong 1993 biography of Strom Thurniond, explores the tricky terrain of the post-Movement South in this new book...
...He called on Congress to immediately repeal the ban on some type of assault rifles, including the .SO-caliber Elsie Eliminator, so that the membership can “do the job right...
...Dad: Say, how ’bout a Flintstones pop-up ice cream bar...
...So this is an especially interesting moment in the old Confederacy, a year of two important anniversaries in our second civil war-the struggle against Jim Crow...
...But the thing is, kids don’t get it...
...We are defined by tusk...
...Brosnan easily picks up the school’s energy...
...Dad: Well, uh, I guess everyone dies...
...Two men-a reporter and a maintenance manwere dead of bullet wounds...
...There are more of these familiar, teeth-grinding facts: Last year, for instance, the Pentagon spent $40 billion on unnecessary items...
...We’ve heard these stories ad nauseam, and the fascinating question is why nothing seems to happen...
...Burke Marshall, one of RFKs “band of brothers” at the Justice Department, furiously negotiating on the ground...
Vol. 29 • June 1997 • No. 6
