Word: levenson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Have to Be in Who's Who to Know What's What, Levenson...
...Levenson's conscious choice of life as a Jew was essential to his ability to analyze any other choice. Other histories, other problems became important not because they all blended into one pseudo-historical stew, but because the people living them faced comparable, not identical, choices...
...Vietnam War era, Levenson turned to the question of provincialism and cosmopolitanism, what Frederic Wakeman has called "a key issue still in the People's Republic today: how much can be taken in bits and pieces without altering the basic system." In the lone volume of an uncompleted trilogy, and a few articles, Levenson concentrated on the dilemmas of a people in whom provincial and cosmopolitan tendences were then colliding in the massive outbreak of the Cultural Revolution...
...Levenson the political movements in China and in the United States were not separable from the struggles of people defining their relations to their pasts and the worlds around them. Levenson publicly stated his opposition to American involvement in Vietnam from 1965 on. But he was moved more by the larger question, which persists in China still as it did in his own choices to live as a Jew, an intellectual and an American: is there a happy medium between a feckless cosmopolitanism (hampered by the "fact that the cosmos was somebody else's"); and a terrifying isolation that...
...Levenson answered--his critics and his question--with a cry of hope found in the text of lectures that were never given...