In the early days of April, 1968, ten months after the Six-Day War, in a district some fifteen miles north of Cairo there occurred an event that for several months became the focus of attention not only for thousands of Egyptians of different religions and social backgrounds but also hundreds of foreigners, members of the international press, resident scholars and diplomats, representatives of Western Christianity and the perennial tourists. This event, known locally as the Apparition of Zeitoun, involves the alleged multiple appearances of the Virgin Mary on the dome of a Coptic Christian church in the district of Zeitoun. The Copts are an Egyptian Christian minority who are descendants of the original Egyptian population at the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century and who were never converted to Islam.

It is the night before another antiwar demonstration and a half a dozen students—long-haired, bearded, blue-jeaned and sandaled— are painting placards and writing propaganda in one of the rooms of the student hall of Doshisha University. In a few hours they will board a slow train to Tokyo (they do not have enough money for the shinkansen, or bullet) and will join thousands of their contemporaries in a carefully orchestrated melee ardund one of the large stations, probably Shinjuku, favorite haunt of the young and the mod. It will not be a major demonstration resulting in mass arrests and injuries. It will barely delay trains and blockade traffic for two or three hours—enough for page one of the national papers, enough to remind everyone that radical youth is not entirely dead, enough for middle-class, nonviolent Japan to recall with shrugs of remorse and distaste the bloody excesses of the past year.

The dramatic shifts of recent years in the fortunes and policies of the nations involved in East Asian affairs are forcing Japan to undertake a basic reappraisal of its foreign policy for the first time since the end of the American occupation in 1952. This will be a difficult and painful process for the Japanese in view of their past unhappy experiences in Asian politics, domestic disagreements over the appropriate role for their, country and widespread uncertainty about the pattern of relationships that is evolving in the area.

Japan, it is said, is advancing rapidly on the road to great power status. On that assumption, people ask how Japan's domestic and foreign policies will be shaped by its new status. In attempting to respond to that question I will begin by challenging the assumption.

The so-called "big power status" really means nothing to the ordinary Japanese, and no domestic issues have ever arisen because some Japanese demanded domestic or foreign policies appropriate to that status. So far, the notion of Japan's being a "big power" has been entirely foreign in origin, and the Japanese, gasping in the world's most polluted air and feeling sick with the world's worst food and water, can scarcely think of Japan as a big power. Under the circumstances it will be very difficult for the Japanese government to conduct its foreign policy in ways historically associated with the behavior of big powers.

At the height of the Chicago Seven (originally Eight) trial in 1969 the defendants came to our suburban synagogue to raise money and plead their cause. Almost a thousand people filled our auditorium to meet them and hear from each. They were by turns reckless {Abbie Hoffman), touching (John Froines), strong (Tom Hayden), stoned (Jerry Rubin), humorous (Lee Weiner) and intellectual (David Dellinger). But the chief spokesman, the one who stated their views most brilliantly and persuasively that night and often later, was Rennie Davis. Coming from a background of the 4-H Club and the Boy Scouts of America, middle-American Davis was the model of committed radical activist. Less flamboyant than most of the others, he often seemed more focused and more professional. Indeed, he was so courageous that some on the far Left rumored that he was a plant from the FBI.

The strawberry plant is a stemless, rosaceous herb of the genus Fragaria. The confectioner has a multitude of uses for its fruit, from ice cream toppings to pastry fillings. But in addition to the interest its fruit adds to ouixliet, the strawberry plant is currently making a most improbable social impact: It forms the basis of a program of fundamental socioeconomic reform in Guatemala's central highlands.

The story of the role of the strawberry in bringing about basic social change and the practical and theoretical implications of the program of which it is an integral part begins with my father, Carl H. Jacob, a former college professor from southeastern Idaho and a Fulbright lecturer at the national university of El Salvador.

One of the convictions shared by the Israelis on the eve of the Six-Day War has just been seriously shaken. The certainty that the Jewish state was threatened with extermination in May-June, 1967, has attained a status of dogma, which no one could question without the likelihood of being accused of treasor or mental instability."

Thus begins a review of the "annihilation controversy" in Israel, or the "Generals' polemic," as it has been called by an Israeli Jewish journalist, Amnon Kapeliuk, writing in Le Monde. (I am heavily indebted to this important review in early sections of this article.) On June 12, 1967, immediately after the war was over, Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime minister, stated to the Knesset: "The existence of the Israeli state hung on a thread, but the hopes of the Arab leaders to exterminate Israel were brought to nought."

A remarkable number of Christian theologians are, perhaps surprisingly, praising B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. A number of others believe his work incompatible with Christianity. Both may be wrong.

Professor Skinner would be the last person to claim autonomous credit for Beyond Freedom and Dignity. It was not he, it was the environment that controlled the book's coming into being. And if we suppose that Skinner is a latter-day Thomas Aquinas, we might well imagine on his lips the echoes of an ancient outlook: "It was not owing to anything in me; everything was gift. Yet, I set hand to paper, but only through God's grace sweetly disposing all things…." We recall the countless unsigned medieval masterpieces, the anonymous achievements of Chartres and that now lost social and cultural sense which did not attach much significance to which individual it was who expressed best the artistic genius of the age. It was enough, in those days, that the people, the culture, flowered. So imagining, so remembering, we recover more fully the shock of the sudden birth of ego: the Eenaissance, the Enlightenment and the Age of the Individual.

Can a moderate parliamentary democracy survive in the tensions of the Middle East? This is the question confronting Lebanon in the face of military raids by its neighbors and potential civil war. Israeli attacks and Palestinian pressures create a continuing crisis which has undermined the foundations of both Lebanese moderation and democracy.

Since independence Lebanon has maintained its position as a nonmilitaristic democracy supporting moderate solutions to the conflicts in the Middle East. Despite great pressures it has remained Western-oriented and has withstood the siren calls of radical socialism and militant nationalism. Yet when Lebanon was under threat and attack, it received remarkably little concrete support from the major Western powers. One result has been a growing frustration among Lebanese, many of whom believe that no matter what they do they will be attacked and possibly destroyed by forces beyond their control.

The "peaceful uses only" clause is one of the most widely used and abused clauses in the postwar history of nuclear politics. Contrary to what we might expect, the terms "peaceful" and "military," as defined in various atomic energy agreements, are not antonymous. For two decades the terms have been used in different ways without any consensus about what they mean even between two parties to an agreement. The various meanings given the terms reflect certain value-premises, and the values are in turn based less on logic than on the policy needs of specific states. Definitions reflect and foster a distinction between nuclear weapons states and nonnuclear weapons states, between the nuclear superpowers and those states which have sophisticated civilian nuclear programs.