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Reviews 137 retaining their socialism. The fourding ofthe Canadian Jewish Outlook (the magazine's first name) was one result. The approach towards the Soviet Union became increasingly critical. The anthology has a long 1964 piece laying bare a Soviet anti-semitic book, but missing is a history of the movement's relationship to the USSR. The emotional ties of the Jewish Communist movements and their successors to the Soviet Union have been far from simple. The soviet state destroyed virtaully aU Jewish life within its bourndaries, a fact which an increasing number of movement members came to recognize. And yet, years of pro-Soviet politics, plus the image of the USSR as having defeated Nazi Germany, made it difficult for Jewish Communists to admit that the very state claiming to be the socialist vanguard oppressed its Jewish population. In Canada, the UJPO eventually passed resolutions against Soviet anti-Semitism, though its US counterpart was even more critical. Still, it is entirely historicaUy fitting that the anthology begins with a memorial to Vancouver movement activist member and Outlook board member Ben Chud, in which his daughter notes that he would have enthusiasticaUy celebrated the recent improvements in Soviet-IsraeU relations. The anthology unfortunately hardly considers the future of the Jewish left. In fact, the emerging Jewish left today is far different in several crucial respects from the older, primarily Yiddish-speaking socialist movements, whose future is in serious doubt. The newer left—New Jewish Agenda is the largest organization—is somewhat reminiscent of the '60s new left. Centered around ideals of economic and social justice, peace and disarmament, Jewish renewal and support for IsraeU peace movements, NJA far more broad based and less attached to specific ideologies than the older Jewish left. Agenda was organized in 1979-80 by individuals who came out of the left Reform Judaism and the Hvurah (nontraditional religious) movement. Certainly it is more broad based than the EngUsh speaking SociaUst-Zionist groups, such as Americans for a Progressive Israel, which wil, however, probably continue to exist. NJA attempts to be "a Jewish presence on the left and a left presence in the Jewish community." Unlike the Jewish socialist groups in the old days, there is at the moment no widespread, grassroots Jewish movement for societal change within which Agenda or other new groups might flourish. Not surprisingly the critical artistic expressions and journalism of the older left, particularly the important Yiddish literature groudswell which helped sustain the movements, has no parallel as yet on the new Jewish left. Anything similar will have to be encouraged from within the new Jewish left itself though new pubUshing houses, journals, public readings and the Uke. SHLOIME PEREL Mj Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture by Andrew Ross. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. pp. 269. $32.50 (cloth); $13.95 (paper). A mildly curious paradox underwrites Andrew Ross's project in No Respect. It is this: himself an academic intellectual teaching at one of the most eUte institutions in the U.S., Ross has undertaken to criticize university and other high culture intellectuals for their condescension ofeven contempt towards American popular culture. One surmises that the primary audience for this book can only be those whose hands Ross so unceremoniously bites, though its publication by Routledge positions it ambiguously in the book market between the intellectually sanctioned baUiwick of university presses and that other vast, somewhat nebulous category known to booksellers and marketing managers alike as "the trade." StUI, it's safe to bet no one wiU mistake Mj Respect for a genuinely "popular" book, either in the conventional sense of the word or in the highly mediated and closely defined sense Ross gives it in this study. So, it would appear on the face of it that Ross is being a traitor, if not to his class, then to his most immediate peer group: university-based intellectuals interested in and writing about popular culture. 138 the minnesota review As well he might. Ross narrates a lurid tale ofAmerican intellectuals' retreat from their embrace ofpopular cultural production in the middle to late 1930s, to their by now tediously familiar jeremiad against the vulgarity and moral bankruptcy of the masses. Those...

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