The present combination of sometimes-violent protests, riots, racial tensions, collapsing cities, and a young left seized with revolutionary fervor has put some in mind of the “long, hot summers” of the late 1960s. While many of the leading figures behind that New Left fervor were Jewish—whether intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, and Herbert Marcuse or activists like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin—so too were many of its liberal critics. It is to the latter group that David Herman turns, looking to the writings of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the critic Lionel Trilling, and the novelist Saul Bellow:

[T]he British media continue to see the 60s through the eyes of the New Left. . . . But there were others who saw the 60s very differently, older writers and intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, and Saul Bellow.

Isaiah Berlin, an almost exact contemporary of Trilling’s, . . . was almost sixty when the Columbia students started rioting. . . . He wrote to [the former national security adviser] McGeorge Bundy on May 31, [1968] about his impending visit to New York, “I propose to come armed with a water pistol, and if any militant student approaches me I shall rise up against him and say that the dons have turned, the worms fight back, and douse him. . . . Why cannot the professors build barricades of their own?”

Saul Bellow, like Trilling and Berlin, was appalled by the riots in the 60s, but took a tougher line than either. . . . He had been a supporter of the Congress of Racial Equality and wrote to the papers attacking the Vietnam War. Then came the riots in his beloved Chicago in 1968. He watched the chaos on TV, appalled by the anarchy on the streets of his hometown. . . . There’s a new tone to Bellow’s fiction during the late 60s. His sympathies moved from young men like Augie March and Tommy Wilhelm (Seize the Day) to older authority figures like Mr. Sammler, Mosby in Mosby’s Memoirs, and Braun in The Old System.

What’s interesting about the reactions of Trilling, Berlin, and Bellow, is that they all saw the 60s as a terrible moment. The language is revealing. “The crazy sixties (Bellow), “The rapid growth of barbarism” (Berlin). “Abominable,” “a total rejection of a way of life” (Trilling).

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.