A new biography of the philosopher misses the shortcomings of the Marxist tradition.
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An essay from Joshua Cohen’s new collection, Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction.
Read Moreby Ralph Seliger BACK IN 1982, I witnessed the merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC — usually pronounced “dee-sock”) with the New American Movement to form the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Nearly ten years before, DSOC had split from the Social Democrats USA (SD), itself the main remnant of the old […]
Read Moreby Marty Roth I have since then learned to value them [Jews] better, and, if every kind of pride of birth were not a foolish contradiction in a champion of revolution and democratic principles, the writer of these pages might be proud that his ancestors belonged to the noble House of Israel, that he is […]
Read Moreby Michael Zweig From the Autumn 2017 issue of Jewish Currents To read Sam Friedman’s recent “Why I’m (Still) a Marxist” in Jewish Currents, click here. To read Lawrence Bush’s “Why I’m Not (Still) a Marxist,” click here. To read about Jewish Currents’ communist history, click here. UNTIL I RETIRED in 2016, I taught an undergraduate course […]
Read MoreIsaac Deutscher, biographer of both Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, was born near Cracow, Poland on this date in 1907. Raised in a khasidic milieu, he was a child prodigy in Torah and Talmud but at the age of 13 he “tested God” by eating treyf food at the grave of a holy man on […]
Read More“I regret very deeply that I had myself baptized,” wrote German poet, memoirist, and essayist Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) on this date in 1826. “I do not see that I have been the better for it since. On the contrary, I have known nothing but misfortunes and mischances.” Famous as a lyric poet (many of whose […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: The House of Twenty Thousand Books, by Sasha Abramsky. New York Review Books, 2015 (published in Great Britain in 2014), 336 pages, $27.95 CHIMEN ABRAMSKY was the scion of a long line of important East European rabbis. After following his rabbi father into exile from Soviet Russia and […]
Read MoreFerdinand Lassalle, a German socialist who was familiar with Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine and was also a proponent of Reform Judaism, died at 39 of wounds incurred in a duel on this date in 1864. “Because the family of his bride-to-be, Helene von Doenniges, [had] rejected him on account of his Jewish origin and […]
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