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Righteous Among The Editors
Dear Sir:
A close reading of "Righteous Among The Editors," leads me to believe there are two "The Radoshes." First, the historian Radoshes who do a pretty good job describing Freda Kirchwey and The Nation's important role in the establishment of the state of Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust; and second, the polemical Radoshes, who forget that the policies pursued by Israel today are not what its founders and supporters envisioned, and ignore the changing historical context in their comments on today's Nation.
As the historian Radoshes must know, The Nation, then as now, has always represented a multiplicity of voices. The polemical Radoshes cherrypick and present only one side of the story.
As the historian Radoshes must know, context matters. When Kirchwey was writing, Israel was fighting for its survival; it was not engaging in a self-destructive occupation that even Israeli conservatives believe will eventually undermine its character and security.
Like many people who care about the future of Israel, The Nation is concerned that short-sighted policies are destroying the possibility of a two-state solution from being realized.
Finally, the Radoshes piece is emblematic of a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, then you're anti-Israel. But for true friends, that should not be the measure of our relationship with Israel.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor, The Nation
New York, NY
Switching SidesDear Sir:
Like others who stage or watch debates more to entertain than to clarify our darkening horizons, Jacob Heilbrunn’s “anatomy of an industry” (“Rank-Breakers,” Spring 2008) parades before us intellectuals who “slug it out,” “resurrect acrimony,” and drown in the “ginned-up psychodrama that infused rank-breaking”—all because they’d rather be judged by “the noise they make” than by “their output.” Perhaps World Affairs would rather be the New York Observer.
I wouldn’t comment had not Heilbrunn pawed me so clumsily as part of his “imposing list” of people “who switched positions with no more trauma than changing clothes” and so became “mere pikers” compared to “heavyweights” who “broke the chains” of past commitments after September 11. He tells us that “Jim Sleeper, a former fellow traveler of the neoconservative movement ... has now reinvented himself as a man of the left, bashing away at ... Sam Tanenhaus.”
We do not learn, despite a feint at “full disclosure,” that Heilbrunn, one of Tanenhaus’s regular and grateful book reviewers at the New York Times, is leaping to defend his benefactor by talking about me and other writers the way editors do when they haven’t time to think but can “do lunch,” where they learn what to think. Heilbrunn missed my Talking Points Memo posts of April 1 and 3, “Obama’s Racial Wisdom vs. Holdouts Left and Right,” and “Why Obama’s Critics on the Left are Sputtering.” He hadn’t seen my Los Angeles Times review of April 14, whose first sentence reads, “It would be too easy to read Martin Amis’ slim book on 9/11 in a day and dismiss it with a politically correct glare.”
Anyone who visits my Web site will know that I haven’t much altered the civic-republican clothing I’ve worn in “bashing” leftists and rightists alike since the early 1970s. I commend to Heilbrunn the sections “Looking for America,” “Folly on the Left,” and “Conservative Contradictions.” Heilbrunn needs to break-ranks with the binary, left. vs. right, “Slam! Bang! Poof! Oomph!” crowd he’s joined as he struggles to find a post-neocon balance.
Jim Sleeper
New Haven, CT
Exit Ethics
Dear Sir:
Jean Bethke Elshtain’s essay (“The Ethics of Fleeing,” Spring 2008) is an interesting intellectual exercise in just war theory, and she is correct that too little attention has been given to the ethics of disengagement. But while she is focused on areas neglected in any meaningful discussion of just war theory, she might have brought our attention to one other, woefully neglected, area. This has to do with the issue of making certain that the populace shares the burdens of war equally, and one of the most amazing aspects of the war in Iraq is the extent to which the burdens have not been shared equally. We don’t have a draft and we don’t truly have a volunteer army. That is, economic constraints leading to reduced employment opportunities, “stop/loss,” reduced standards for those without other options in society all conspire to make the military significantly less “volunteer” than the Department of Defense wants to claim. And, as long as this is the case, any argument for an extended stay in Iraq in relation to claims about a morally justified disengagement is hollow and irrelevant.
Mark Sheldon
Evanston, IL
Shrunken Sovereign
Dear Sir:
Hostility toward the free market oozes from Benjamin Barber’s article (“Shrunken Sovereign,” Spring 2008), which is but a rehash of John Kenneth Galbraith’s almost identical indictment of the same target in his Affluent Society, written half a century ago. But there is hardly any free market left in America, which is now a highly regulated, even regimented, society. Also, Barber’s wide abstractions lack any serious content—for example, when he says “the market, indeed, does not tell us what to do; it gives us what we want.” Yet markets are not talking, not doing; they are spheres wherein a great variety of people say and do things. Finally, all his blind faith in “the public” is unsubstantiated and has been used by all manner of dictators to subjugate millions to their higher truths.
What Benjamin Barber seems to be nostalgic for is Benito Mussolini.
Tibor Machan
Silverado, CA
