Word: mosaical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Several months ago, when I last reviewed Mosaic, there was really no magazine to review. A near-random collection of unrelated articles, poems, tomes, and stories, the issue was nothing more than the arithmetic sum of its disparate parts, some interesting, many...
Things have changed. Summer apparently reinvigorated the editorial board, for the fall issue once again allows one to call Mosaic the "little Harvard Commentary," an epithet used frequently around the University not too many years...
...third article is authored by the publisher of Mosaic, Richard Zigmond. That must be the reason it was included. Zigmond tackles a fascinating subject, "Problems of the White Civil Rights Worker," but his handling of it approaches the simple-minded. After a summer with the Student Woodlawn Area Project of Chicago, he might have written a detailed reminiscence, providing through suggestion and implication a profound understanding of the subject. Instead, beyond a few anecdotes, he draws less on his personal experience than on the rhetoric of various chiefs and braves in the Movement...
...symposium on Jewish identity," Mosaic borrows a technique of magazine organization that has contributed greatly to Commentary's brilliance. It is simple: Propose a controversial topic and allow several bright and informed minds to bat it about. Jewish identity is about as original a topic as negritude, but David Levey and Yoran Ben-Porath manage to say original things about it. The other contributor, Andrew Grey-stoke, wanders aimlessly about the subject, finally admitting that he really has no firm position. Levey and Ben-Porath, conversely, attack the problem with the rigor and hard-nosedness of their chosen discipline, economics...
Incidentally, Maher now seems disillusioned with pamphleteering, fearing that it doesn't satisfy the Maoist dictum to "swim in the sea of people." He should learn from the editors of Mosaic, who realize that the best way to swim in a sea of Harvard people is to fill paper with clear and interesting argument...