Jews From The United States

"Hitler's triumph made terribly clear the danger of our earlier notions, as well as the very stark differences between a fascist regime and "bourgeois democracy" as represented by someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By the mid-1930s the issue of anti-fascism permeated all our mass work. In countries like France and Spain where big socialist movements existed, Communists sought to unite the Left into antifascist united fronts. In the United States we sought to work with the socialists, and we also began to reevaluate our earlier, highly critical assessment of the New Deal."

"The great irony of the McCarthy period is that we did almost as much damage to ourselves, in the name of purifying our ranks, as Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and all the other witch-hunters combined were able to do. One of the most catastrophically stupid things we ever did was to choose this moment to launch an internal campaign against white chauvinism. (In the Party we tended to use the term "white chauvinism" instead of racism.) The campaign was initiated by Pettis Perry and Betty Gannett in 1949. [...] However, with the white chauvinism campaign of 1949-1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. [...] In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner. (pp.125ff)"

"The late Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a longtime CPUSA official, once remarked that Healey was a good leader in her District but was afflicted with a psychosis when she attended national meetings, because she insisted on challenging the leadership. FBI memorandum, August 6, 1969. I had seen many women in the Party who worked very hard and were intelligent and developed theoretically and politically, but I hadn't seen anyone with quite Dorothy's energy and charisma. I do remember very clearly certain Party conventions that I was at in the sixties where I saw her as the "embattled female." It was like this sea of cigar smoke, and she smoked these little cigarillos, and there was something about that, her being little, and she'd barge into these circles of men conversing on something or other, whatever caucus it was, she'd barge in there, and I just loved it. I thought that was great, just great. I didn't care what she said."

"As she explained to Joel Gardner a few months after she had resigned from the Communist Party: “If I were to write a book, I'd make the title of the book... a phrase out of the Communist song "The International." . . . The phrase goes, "No more tradition's chains shall bind us." Well, I would make the title of my book "Tradition's Chains Have Bound Us," because my argument would be that just as... capitalism operates through the false consciousness that it gives the majority of people who aren't able to perceive the reality of their own lives..., so the same thing happens with Marxists. . . . They, too, substitute a false consciousness for a real consciousness . . . . A real revolutionary party [has] to be able to constantly keep alive that challenging, questioning and probing of the real scene around it. . . . Our theory never will quite match the reality, but at least one strives to approximate it, to see what is the substance, and not just the form. (p 13)"

"My concept of what it meant to be a revolutionary was based on a montage of the organizers from the Sinclair novels, along with my childhood memories from Denver. I also began to read an enormous amount of history around this time. I was very taken with Charles Beard-at that point his writings seemed to me to represent great Marxist truths because he talked about the things that high school history never talked about, the underlying economic motives of history makers. I read everything he and his wife Mary Beard wrote. I had started reading Marx and Lenin, but at that point I think Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had more effect on me. What I responded to in my readings were emotional rather than theoretical questions. I was developing a hatred of the brutality of the existing economic system, a hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. That's what moved me as a teenager, and stayed with me."

"To sit and wring my hands in agony may have been the first emotion with which I met this great sorrow. But I pulled myself together and applied my whole thought to the working out of the great duty that had fallen to my lot."

"It seems to be that Lincoln's definition of democracy, "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people," is as good a summary as any of an essential element of the kind of socialism I would like to see established in the United States. Socialist democracy means democracy in the economic as well as in the political sphere."

"Above all, I am looking for a new idea or finding that scientists in the relevant community think is important. Even if it’s something really abstruse that doesn’t seem like it would have broad appeal and doesn’t have any buzzwords to speak of, if actual experts think something is a big deal, then there’s a reason for that, and it’s up to me to figure out what the story is and how to tell it. Everything else that makes a compelling story — interesting historical background, strong characters, controversy, vivid scenes — is incidental. I’m thrilled when it’s there (and it almost always is), but I’m first and foremost going after groundbreaking new developments, as judged by experts. Now to find out about those developments before everybody else does, I have to be tapped in and talk to a lot of scientists. Building and maintaining those relationships takes time and is tough to balance with all of one’s other duties as a reporter, but it’s the springboard for everything else."

"WHY WRITE? Reasons to do : • Societal progress • Scientific progress • Enrich people's intellectual lives • Enrich your own intellectual life"

"Among the brilliant theorists cloistered in the quiet woodside campus of the in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Witten stands out as a kind of high priest."

"Astronomers mapped the motions of hundreds of stars in the in order to deduce the amount of that must be tugging on them from the vicinity of our sun. Their surprising conclusion? There's no dark matter around here. As the researchers write in a forthcoming paper in the ', the stellar motion implies that the stars, all within 13,000 light-years of Earth, are gravitationally attracted by the visible material in our solar system — the sun, planets and surrounding gas and dust — and not by any unseen matter. "Our calculations show that [dark matter] should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!" said lead study author Christian Moni-Bidin, an astronomer at the in Chile."

"I decided to become a physicist when I read ' ... age thirteen. I think it was the tenth anniversary edition of the book ... So I went to Tufts University (for undergrad) ... majored in physics. ... from there I went to grad school at Berkeley — which is where I had always wanted to go. ... And I really liked it there. But then something kind of remarkable happened that I don't really understand very well. ... in the course of one sleepless night during my first year at Berkeley, I had a complete crisis — and realized that I didn't want to be a physicist. I wanted to be a physics writer."

"We live in a world where you could go for the rest of your life never reading a book — after school. And that to me is a sad fate ... because books hold so much."

"... when I was a child, I used to tell myself ... serial novels in my head. I had a novel that I told myself, on the way to school, about the two heirs to the Kraft cheese fortune. ... I think it's because ... my mother, busy writing, gave us a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese."

"... I shouldn't write a novel to keep up with every event."

"Winston Churchill remains the implacable enemy of India’s independence He has never disguised his views Many members of his party differ with him ‘on the question of Indian Freedom, but Churchill’s imperialistic policy dominates “Mohamed Alt Jinnah has not in recent years given any proof of a devotion to the cause of India’s liberation from foreign rule Nor has the Muslim League over which he presides Landlords, who bulk large in the counsels of the League, stand to lose by the establishment of a new India, which would certainly alter the present land tenure to the disadvantage of landlords, Muslims as well as Hindus, and to the advantage of all peasants “What could be more natural, therefore, than that Churchill and Jiinnah should have been in correspondence, in recent months, over the fate of India ? They have quietly exchanged letters and messages It was shortly after the receipt of one such secret communication from Churchill that the Muslim League reconsidered its acceptance of the British Cabinet Misston’s long-term proposals and decided instead to boycott the coming Assembly which 1s to draw up a constitution for a new free India “The Cabinet Misston laboured hard and on the whole successfully to prepare the way for the transfer of political power from British to Indian hands Churchill and Jinnah are now attempting to undermine the effort”"

"... I was interested in the different ways that the world has treated men and women. And I wanted to look at that in the context of a marriage."

"And one of the keys in what we do is we get to feel like we are extending beyond that human body, that human limitation, and we are touching something divine in what we do, if we’re lucky—or at least we’re reaching for it. But then what goes up must come down, and we have to honor the human body as well, so it’s a constant process."

"I love learning about other artists’ processes so much; I don’t know why. It’s like a magpie-collecting hobby of mine. I find it incredibly inspiring, and just as a human being, I’m like, God, I love people. I love it when people devote themselves to something that is greater than themselves, and they work at it."

"There’s lots of practices I have, but the other problem is that I love what I do so much, but it can take me over. And that’s a great thing, and it’s a gift, but there’s a wound in that as well, as you’re kind of alluding to."

"If you have the sun sign that’s the same as the moon sign of someone else … that’s good."

"We all die with an unfinished song, and that’s the setup. None of us complete. None of us finish the symphony. There’s a few notes left to be done, if we’re lucky."

"So to be in line with and to join in that creativity is, I think, maybe the highest calling. I think it’s all of our callings, to whatever degree or in whatever context, in whatever corner of the garden we’re meant to tend. And we know it. We know when we’re in the right corner, you know what I mean? We can feel it. We can feel it in our bones. Our blood starts to flow, our cheeks flush, we get that feeling of spring in our bodies, and we come alive. We can feel it when we’re close to the shoreline of ourselves, and then it’s harder to identify when we don’t feel it. It’s a strange thing."

"There’s no getting there in terms of finding that balance. It’s always a practice and a process. And one thing will work for a while and then it won’t work anymore; you have to find another practice to keep you centered. I think the trickiest part is just coming back to a level of real relaxation and ease in between working."

"I’ve been mentored by the human beings in my life. I’m so lucky that I’ve had the opportunities I’ve had. And the friendships I’ve had, and the mentors and the teachers. But I’m also pretty intent. Like, I’m not a nice person to be around if I’m not able to follow the thing that I feel I’m supposed to follow."

"But in terms of legacy, it’s not something that really interests me. I think I’ve developed a pretty healthy awareness of how small I am. Honestly, I think it’s because I’ve had to, because I have a pretty healthy ego and it can be boring. It’s a practice to be constantly remembering the perspective of the moon. You know what I mean? Like looking down on all my little problems and going, Dude, shush."

"Life seems to be a perpetual practice of letting shit go. Letting go of an idea of how a thing should look, or be, or feel. And that one’s a big one [to let go of], because of course I would’ve loved my mum to have met my kids, if I’m going to have kids. And she will. In spirit. She’ll be there for it. I know she’s there, for all the big ones."

"You let it drown you sometimes. You ride it sometimes. You give thanks, that’s the point. And it’s so trite and so cliché, but that’s it. Whatever that unnamable thing is, that we try to call “love,” that’s what we’re meant to experience here, somehow."

"And honestly, I hadn't watched the Harry Potters until recently. [...] [Daniel Radcliffe]s really good in those Harry Potter movies. Those Harry Potter movies are really good. [...] I know it's like controversial, and like we shouldn't be, you know, putting money in the pocket of inhumane legislation right now through she that she'll remain nameless, but the soul and the spirit of a lot of the essence of the themes of those films and the kids are so.. and all the artisans and the craft people... [...] There are so many beatiful artists who worked on those films. Anyway, I have a newfound appreciation for all of the artists."

"But there’s also a learned behavior there as well. Distinguishing between those two feels important because there’s times when all of us burn out. My mother, she would burn out; my father, my brother, me. We all have a similar drive, which is maybe inexplicable, where we want to offer ourselves fully to what we’re doing."

"I’m in a real period of not-doing. The usual aggressive, ambitious, driven heartbeat, rapping at the door has subsided for a while."

"I didn’t have to force my way into letting myself rest. It was interesting. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, the reason for this weird peace I’ve been experiencing. I think the loss of my mum was a big thing. That cataclysm is a forever-reverberating shift into a deeper awareness of reality. Existence. The shortness of this window we have. I think that’s working on me in profound ways that I’m probably not even aware of."

"It’s that eternal struggle between being devoted to the invisible world, the world of spirit, the world of imagination, creativity, what we know we’re meant to do. But if we were purely devoted to that, it would be much harder for us to put a roof over our heads. So how do we balance that? We’re living through a capitalistic period in the history of humanity. And it’s deeply disgusting and horrific and ugly and all those things, as well as beautiful. It’s a fascinating time to be alive. And how do artists – how does anyone, because everyone is an artist – really retain that connection to soul, to spirit, to the unseen, to the thing that really pulls us? Our own personal genius. Our own personal calling. Giftedness."

"It seemed to me, ruled my writing, whatever its subject: my belief that even in an unsatisfactory society the individual is best defined by his social geography."

"To be sure, the part played by television in disturbing the normal rate of national and even international development and in robbing us of the physical distance which formerly separated us from events and therefore forced us to exercise our own minds and imaginations in order to get even a first grasp on history-in-the-making, is not to be underestimated as a factor in our recent dislocation in space and time. The death of John Kennedy, however, made for a subtler and perhaps a more pervasive disturbance in our historical balance. It altered our sense of ourselves as a people; it deprived us of the promise of a future. What could more profoundly affect the motions of time?"

"What I have found in life-it makes me very sad-is that one friend sustains me in one direction, another in another direction. What's missing are the friends who sustain one altogether."

"we may protest that women's small contribution to culture doesn't indicate a lack of capacity but merely reflects the way men have contrived things to be: we can blame women's small place in culture on culture. But this leaves unanswered the question of why it is that over so many hundreds of years women have consented to follow the male dictate and allowed men to fashion the culture according to male design. It also leaves unanswered the even more fundamental question of why it is that in every society which has ever been studied-so Margaret Mead tells us-whatever is the occupation of men has the greater prestige"

"In the forties Diana Trilling could write words that in their sharp moral focus may remind us of some Victorian prophet: "Ours being in all spheres such a 'know-how' culture, a civilization so brilliantly skilled in turning out anything it sets its hand to and yet so appallingly ignorant of what is worth making or to what use the things it makes should be put, we cannot be surprised that our literature, too, shows a marked ascendancy of craft over conscience. Probably there has never been a time when so many people wrote so 'well' as now but to such meager purpose; when, indeed, the emptier a novel's content, the surer its technical proficiency." If the reader thinks that sounds more like a critic than a book reviewer, he is right. And as a critic, Diana Trilling has range; she is not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning, for she perceives that "literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society." It follows that "just as dictatorship, war, and all the other hideous phenomena of our political day undoubtedly answer a profound need in the modern mass-personality, so the debasement of our literary standards reflects a loss of standard throughout our lives.""

"as Freud's views on the childhood source of mental disorder have permeated our culture, there has been mounted a wide campaign of mother-suspicion and mother-discreditation. From Sidney Howard's play The Silver Cord, in the mid-twenties, to Philip Roth's more recent Portnoy's Complaint, our literature has disseminated the idea that American women alternate a diet of husbands with a diet of sons."

"Love idealizes, or at least traditionally that has been one of the differential diagnoses: love idealizes, adds, but sex is just body meeting body, sometimes with love, sometimes with affection, sometimes with neither, just for the fun or satisfaction of it."

"In a speech last year on women's liberation, I said how wonderful it was for us to be living in a period in which Dostoevski's statement that there was no such thing as an ugly woman was at last coming true. Of course I don't mean that absolutely and literally but I said it seriously in that speech because I was talking about the terrible Madison Avenue-contrived notions of sexual attractiveness that were imposed upon the girls of my generation and how dreadful it was to be made to think, as I did, that you had to conform to some impossible standard of advertising beauty in order to be in the sexual running at all. How can anyone of my generation do anything except celebrate the fact that this is no longer how things are?"

"Susan was employee number sixteen at Google."

"As a company that has long supported free expression, Google obviously stands by the right that employees have to voice, publish or tweet their opinions, but while people may have a right to express their beliefs in public, that does not mean companies cannot take action when women are subjected to comments that perpetuate negative stereotypes about them based on their gender"

"I realized the impact Google was going to have when I started using it in 1998 when it was just getting started. One day I couldn’t access the service and realized I couldn’t get my work done. I realized how Google could help people all over the world to find the information they needed."

"With YouTube, I remember our first hit was of two Chinese students in their dorm room singing (with roommate studying in the background). That was the first time I saw that anyone could become a creator and that people wanted to watch content from all types of creators."

"I mean we're not going to be as effective if they don't have trust in us and we're also not going to get the best people coming to the Intelligence Community if they don't trust us. ...We are not doing everything perfectly. We understand that. We see problems too. We're going to try to correct it. We do sometimes needs space for people to say, okay, you're doing something that is totally unacceptable, but okay, you've admitted to it. Now, let's actually fix it and get better and work on that."

"Director Avril Haines has earned a stellar reputation of bipartisan collaboration and deep expertise. Many of you worked with her when she served as Deputy Director at the CIA and the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor during the Obama Administration. And the agency she now oversees have been the consequential players as the free world counters Russian aggression. In the days leading up to Putin's vicious assault on democracy, the United States Intelligence Community over and over accurately and precisely predicted his every move and revealed his intentions. That public use of intelligence exposed false flag operations, it built trust in America's warnings, it united our allies, and it gave the Ukrainians greater time to prepare."

"Yes, I think the survey is indicating that there's a lack or the trust in the military, not the Intelligence Community, but I do think that we also have a challenge with public trust in the Intelligence Community. And honestly, we’ve seen for years public trust deteriorating in public institutions more broadly. This is something that's happening in the United States, and also in Europe... I mean I think coming in it was one, from my perspective, one of the key priorities, is can we increase public trust in the Intelligence Community? And I see it as fundamental, frankly, to our mission. Which is to say that when we have an opportunity to warn the public about threats and challenges that we're facing as a country, I'm hoping that they will actually believe what we're saying, right?"

"Last month, when US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines presented the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee, committee members praised her for the “excellent work” leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and for “continuing to keep us informed.” To the US intelligence community’s credit, and to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chagrin, US senators weren’t the only ones kept informed. The rest of the world was, too, thanks to thorough strategic US intelligence disclosures. Making intelligence public is more art than science, and spies and analysts have struggled to master it. But when it comes to Ukraine, CIA Director William Burns deserves recognition for changing how the agency thinks about revealing its secrets. A former ambassador to Moscow, Burns told the Senate committee that, “In all the years I spent as a career diplomat, I saw too many instances in which we lost information wars with the Russians.”"

"Radical Jews of the 1960s and 1970s were the most bitter critics of Jewish suburbia. Irving Howe contended that assimilation there had extinguished some of the most distinctive qualities of the Jewish spirit: "an eager restlessness, a moral anxiety, an openness to novelty, a hunger for dialectic, a refusal of contentment, an ironic criticism of all fixed opinion." Certainly, these qualities describe the Jewish women activists in this book."