Word: decter
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Long-time Commentary contributor Midge Decter has done it again. We didn't think she could still surprise us, but in a surprisingly silly article in this month's issue (kindly reprinted for non-subscribers by The Boston Globe), Decter argues that the liberal reaction to the blackout looting in New York was essentially racist...
...Decter's evidence for her thesis seems to be a car ride through Harlem and Bedford-Styvesant. Certainly she doesn't seem to have talked to any of the people to whom she so glibly ascribes motives...
...tempted to ask whether ghetto blacks and hispanics--who live in a world of burnt-out buildings, dismal employment prospects, and a welfare system that breaks up families and degrades recipients--really owe much allegiance to the moral system espoused by white intellectuals like Decter who live on the West Side by the river. How can she argue the looters are not angry at, not frustrated by the society that keeps them in the ghetto--particularly when she's never talked to them...
...them out of the Soviet Union." Remarked Author Irving Howe: "We didn't campaign to 'let our people go' only to Israel. The central moral and humanitarian issue has been to get Jews out of the Soviet pesthole, regardless of where they want to settle." Moshe Decter, a Zionist and a leading U.S. specialist on Soviet Jewish affairs, characterized Israeli pressure to deny help to U.S.-bound refugees as "stonyhearted and un-Jewish." Decter added, "Why don't these officials run after the 250,000 Israeli citizens who are living in the U.S., instead of picking...
...judgments about their characters. Limiting their own role to descriptions and an occasional musing, they allow the people they present to speak for themselves and about each other, using excerpts from interviews. The reader's view is manipulated subtly, by juxtaposition and choice of adjectives--a pleasant change from Decter's brand of opinionated aggressiveness. The subtlety isn't constant, though; every once in a while they throw in a summing-it-all-up pronouncement that detracts from their overall accomplishment. In the profile of Lisa Menzies, whose high school reputation as fast seems well-deserved, and who lives...