A book review by Maurice Isserman, the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History, was recently published by The New School’s Public Seminar.
In his review of Making History, Making Blintzes: How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America (2018), by Mickey Flacks and Dick Flacks, Isserman called the memoir “an engaging account of two intertwined and well-lived lives over more than a half century of left-wing engagement.”
The authors were active during the early days of the New Left and Students for a Democratic Society. In 1974 Dick Flacks published an essay, titled “Making History,” described by Isserman as “one part autopsy of 60s radicalism, one part prescription for the revival of the American Left in the 70s and beyond.” The essay formed the basis for a book of the same title, published in 1988.
Isserman said that in Making History, Making Blintzes, the authors relate “the making of history to the making of blintzes, the soul food of their childhood, and a ‘stand-in’ for the role of ‘Left Jewish secular culture’ in the 60-plus years their lives have been linked.”
