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Nathan Glazer's intellectual journey may have left him at the margins of academic sociology but tookhim to the heart of one of the most politically influential circles of American writers, policy analysts, andthinkers of the twentieth century. Yet he was not a political person, but a uniquely honest and humble socialcritic and analyst.

An appreciation of the career and work of Nathan Glazer, who passed away in January 2019.

Nathan Glazer’s 1957 semi-popular book, American Judaism, was unprecedented in its academic and unapologetic approach to its topic. Even more noteworthy was Glazer’s perspective on the future of Jews and religion in America. While Glazer did not foretell the end of Jews in America, his book, unlike several “Introduction to Judaism” books of its era, also did not attempt to portray Judaism as a religion just like Christianity. Rather, Glazer noted the essential difference of Judaism: it did not fit comfortably within the category of religion. And yet, Judaism had, in recent years, attained a hallowed position among American religions. Much of Glazer’s book sought to explore this puzzle of why contemporary Judaism in America did not harmonize with Protestant notions of religion even as it was being embraced as “America’s third faith.” To understand this tension between Judaism and other religions and between Jewish intellectuals such as Glazer and the Judaism that they observed on the new suburban frontiers of American Jewish life was not resolve it. Glazer’s book sought to keep alive such tensions. In this way, Glazer shared common with some of the young Jewish novelists of his era. Glazer’s book is also distinctive in its attention to socioeconomic factors: a newly middle class status among American Jews affected their use of a religion category and the level of acceptance they received from other Americans. So too did a rise in economic status become correlated with a loss of distinctive Jewish culture, in Glazer’s telling.

Pineiro and Wagner discuss how the state deals with ethnic differences. The discipline of sociology has a long international tradition of both theoretical and empirical research on processes of ethnic differentiation and the manifold consequences that accompany them. However, it was not until the 1960s that the notion of ethnicity began to spread more widely in the sociological context and established itself as a fundamental concept. As late as the mid-1970s, Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, in their classic reader, promoted \"ethnicity\" as \"a new term\" helping to understand what was meant by \"black politics\" or \"to find a satisfactory place for the French-speaking element in an undivided Canada\". The relevance of this new sociological category was high and equivalent to the classical category of social class.

This article explores the influence of East Asia's economic growth on the evolution of American neoconservative thought in the 1970s and 1980s. It traces how prominent neoconservative thinkers—Nathan Glazer, Peter L. Berger, Herman Kahn, Michael Novak, and Lawrence E. Harrison—developed the claim that the region's prosperity stemmed from its alleged Confucian tradition. Drawing in part from East Asian leaders and scholars, they argued that the region's growth demonstrated that tradition had facilitated, rather than hampered, the development of a distinct East Asian capitalist modernity. The article argues that this Confucian thesis helped American neoconservatives articulate their conviction that “natural” social hierarchies, religious commitment, and traditional families were necessary for healthy and free capitalist societies. It then charts how neoconservatives mobilized this interpretation of Confucian East Asia against postcolonial critiques of capitalism, especially dependency theory. East Asia, they claimed, demonstrated that poverty and wealth were determined not by patterns of welfare, structural exploitation, or foreign assistance, but values and culture. The concept of Confucian capitalism, the article shows, was central to neoconservatives’ broad ideological agenda of protecting political, economic, and racial inequality under the guise of values, culture, and tradition.

It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the \"wholesale conversion of the Jews to Zionism,\" as Norman Podhoretz famously phrased it. This \"conversion\" is equally, if often less explicitly, said to coincide with the end of the era of Jewish marginality in the U.S. and West more broadly, as Jews of European descent were half-included, half-conscripted, into normative structures of whiteness, class ascension, and citizenship. While this epochal shift in Jewish racial formation and political allegiance is undeniable especially in the context of large Jewish secular and religious institutions, at the time this \"conversion\" was seen as anything but inevitable. Many Jewish liberals, including Irving Howe, Seymour Lipset, and Nathan Glazer, and reactionaries such as Meir Kahane, saw Jewish overrepresentation and hypervisibility in New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Youth International Party, and the Socialist Workers Party as a sign that Jewish youth rejected Zionism as well as the Jewish rise into the middle class. That retrospectively we see Jewish racial formation and political alignment after 1967 as a fait accompli often relies on the erasure not only of mass Jewish participation in the New Left, but also the erasure of the New Left's anti-imperialist political commitments, including critique of expansive Israeli militarism and the settler colonial assumptions underlying Zionism. Looking at memoirs, pamphlets, histories, and original interviews with Jewish participants in the New Left, this article excavates the political alignments of Jewish New Left activists, exploring opposition to the U.S.'s new support of the Israeli state as well as the changing Ashkenazi Jewish racial assignment. Rather than finding Third World and Black Power critiques of Israel antisemitic, it was precisely the Jewish New Left's politics of international and multiracial solidarity that encouraged their support for Black Power critiques of Zionism. In this way, Jewish members of the New Left also attempted to critically challenge their own whiteness, aligning support for Israel after 1967 with support for the racial and economic structures of militarism and capitalism at home.

The Puerto Rican government played a crucial part in the postwar migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States, a role that is an important element in the literature on political transnationalism. This fact, along with other factors, has been used by prominent scholars to contend that Puerto Rican migration is a transnational one even though Puerto Rico is a colonial territory and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. This article examines the argument and after reviewing the literature on political transnationalism argues that the Puerto Rican postwar experience shows many elements of political transnationalism, particularly in the role played by the colonial state in the organization and promotion of migration. However, the article asserts that these are a consequence of the particular historical construction of colonialism on the island and that Puerto Rican migration is best understood as a colonial migration: the movement of colonial citizens from the colonial periphery to the metropolitan territory. [Key words: transnationalism; transnational migration; political transnationalism; colonial migration; colonial citizens; colonial state and migration]

This paper revisits Steele’s claims about the politics of social equality and justice by interrogating some of his postulates about the allegedly ineluctable effects of preferential policies on African American social mobility. Although his arguments about the psychological and cultural effects of preferential treatment on this community’s academic and economic performance might be relatively sound, he fails to provide solutions to go about the persistence of anti-black racism. The discussion of the potential impacts of preferential policies on career building among African Americans shall in this paper draw on the wider debate on the “moral politics” involved in the practices of victimization and compensation. The paper also demonstrates that preferential treatment is currently the only effective assistance that the government could provide for students from this disadvantaged community in the absence of concrete political solutions to the problem of unequal educational preparation by which it seems to be most affected.