“In That Basic Sense the Zionists Were Right”: A Conversation with Irving Howe

A truncated version of the following interview, conducted in 1986, first appeared in the Jerusalem Post on September 5 of that year.

—The Editors

America in the 20th century was a strange place. It could let a man spend 30 years writing essays, translating Yiddish stories, and editing a socialist magazine, which had few readers and barely paid the rent, and then, overnight, make him comfortable if not rich with a best seller about the vanished world of his immigrant parents.