Woodrow Wilson

When I was a kid, my parents had an expression, WASPy Jews. It was based in part on our one German-Jewish relative: Trudy (a pseudonym). Trudy was cold, straightforward, and wealthy. German Jews and Eastern-European Jews used to be the Sunnis and Shi'ites of American Jewish life. Having lately visited Trudy, I wanted to record some impressions.

Trudy grew up in the 1930s in Westchester, in a big house with a 40-foot living room. Her father was a German who emigrated at the turn of the century to open a branch of a family business. He was worldly. He went skiing in Switzerland in natty attire, he flew airplanes, and his attitudes were typical of assimilating Jews of his generation. He told his daughter that Judaism was a religion, it was not a nation. So he was anti-Zionist. Once Trudy asked her father who the two pretty blonde girls were in the photograph in the living room. "Those are your cousins; they died in the war," he said. Along with many other relatives or hers, in concentration camps. But the word Holocaust was not used.  read more »

Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America , by Ted Morgan. Random House, 685 pages, $35.  read more »

George W. Bush is no Woodrow Wilson, let alone Winston Churchill.  read more »

If for nothing else, Bush II should find a place in history as the guy who dropped the bunker-buster  read more »

Avarice and conspiracy invariably smell most foul when they seep into scenes of sacrifice and hope.  read more »

Only those with a valid claim to geezerhood are old enough to remember a pre-Miranda-warning America  read more »

Did you ever think that in this last quarter of the lastyear of the last century of the second mille  read more »

I got a phone call the other day from a rollicking-voiced person at National Public Radio who wanted  read more »