Shopping cart (0 items) |
RSS

Contents

March 23, 1967 • Volume 8, Number 5

LETTERS

Contributors

Nigel Dennis (1912–1989) was an English writer, critic and editor. His books include Boys and Girls Come Out to Play and An Essay on Malta.

M. I. Finley (1912-1986), the son of Nathan Finkelstein and Anna Katzellenbogen, was born in New York City. He graduated from Syracuse University at the age of fifteen and received an MA in public law from Columbia, before turning to the study of ancient history. During the Thirties Finley taught at Columbia and City College and developed an interest in the sociology of the ancient world that was shaped in part by his association with members of the Frankfurt School who were working in exile in America. In 1952, when he was teaching at Rutgers, Finley was summoned before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He refused to answer, invoking the Fifth Amendment; by the end of the year he had been fired from the university by a unanimous vote of its trustees. Unable to find work in the US, Finley moved to England, where he taught for many years at Cambridge, helping to redirect the focus of classical education from a narrow emphasis on philology to a wider concern with culture, economics, and society. He became a British subject in 1962 and was knighted in 1979. Among Finley’s best-known works are The Ancient Economy, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, and The World of Odysseus.

Andrew Kopkind (1935–1994) was a journalist and editor. Kopkind’s work chronicled the turbulence of the American sixties and seventies; he wrote on the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War era, and the rise of Ronald Regan in Time Magazine, The Nation, and The New Republic, where he served as associate editor. An anthology of his work, The Thirty Years’ Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994, was published in 1995.

Walter Laqueur is a historian of Europe and the Middle East. He has taught at Brandeis, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago.

Noam Chomsky is an Institute Professor and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics at MIT.