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by Ralph Seliger IT FRUSTRATES me when politicians, including Democrats, feel obliged to intone how the U.S. is the “greatest country in the world.” The one notable exception on the 2016 campaign trail was Bernie Sanders, who looked toward Western social democracies — explicitly mentioning Denmark but clearly implying most countries in Western and Central […]
Read Moreby Maya Haber AT THE END of almost every lecture I give, someone in the audience describes the miserable state of the Israeli left — the Labor Party’s failure to offer a progressive alternative to Netanyahu, the rightwing attacks on human and civil rights organizations, and the increasing racism against Arabs and Ethiopians — and […]
Read MoreLOOKING AT AMERICA FROM SIX HOURS LATER by Lawrence Bush To read earlier installments search “Bopping” in the search engine at right. THE PATHETIC FALLACY is a term usually applied to literature that means the attribution of human feelings or intentions to inanimate things like the weather. It might be better known as “The Snoopy Fallacy,” after Charlie […]
Read Moreby Lawrence Bush To read part 1, click here. WE’RE NOW IN VELENJE, an old Slovenian mining town rebuilt as “a socialist miracle, a town in a park” by Marshal Tito’s government between 1959 and 1964. I listened here yesterday morning to my wife’s keynote talk at the International Dance Pedagogy Conference. Susan spoke slowly and passionately to these English-as-second-language Slovenians about […]
Read MoreBruno Kreisky, chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983, was born in Vienna on this date in 1911. Kreisky joined the socialist movement at the age of 15, and when Austria’s Socialist Party was banned by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in 1934, Kreisky became active in underground political work. He escaped from Austria after the Nazi […]
Read Moreby Ralph Seliger I’M AWED that Michael Moore foresaw in July that Donald Trump would break through among blue-collar Rust Belt voters. Sadly, for a variety of reasons we need not discuss in detail here (and are not entirely her fault), Hillary Clinton was the wrong candidate to blunt Trump’s charge. His small but decisive […]
Read MoreTHE NEW DEAL AND THE GREAT SOCIETY IN RETROSPECT by Marc Jampole from the Summer 2016 issue of Jewish Currents Discussed in this essay: The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, by Jefferson Cowie. Princeton University Press, 2016, 438 pages. HISTORIAN JEFFERSON Cowie’s The Great Exception: The New Deal and […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor MICHAEL MOORE’S latest film, Where to Invade Next, is amazingly timely. Moore travels the world, a one-man invasion team searching for social programs other countries have that we don’t, so he can bring them back to the U.S. The film is, for most of its length, a virtual Bernie Sanders campaign ad, […]
Read MoreEduard Bernstein, author of Evolutionary Socialism (1899), whose faith in the nonviolent reform of capitalism through labor union activity and parliamentary politics posed a powerful challenge to Karl Marx’s predictions about the coming proletarian revolution, was born in Berlin on this date in 1850. In exile from Germany during the late 1870s, and expelled a […]
Read MoreLouis Waldman, a leader of the Socialist Party of America and a founder of the American Labor Party who worked for decades as a leading labor lawyer in New York, died at 90 on this date in 1982. Born in the Ukraine near Kiev in 1891, he came to the U.S. at 17, participated in […]
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