What Marx Got Wrong
A new biography of the philosopher misses the shortcomings of the Marxist tradition.
Read MoreTag Archives: Karl Marx
Writing About the Present: Mirror, Body, Shadow
An essay from Joshua Cohen’s new collection, Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction.
Read MoreQuick Takes: Whither the Democratic Socialists of America?
by 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 MoreHeinrich Heine and His Cousin, Karl Marx
by 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 MoreIn Defense of Marxism
by 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 MoreThe Non-Jewish Jew
Isaac 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 MoreJanuary 9: Heine’s Baptism
“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 MoreThe Uncivil Servant: A Failed Paean to a Kosher Communist
by 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 MoreAugust 31: The Socialist Duelist
Ferdinand 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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