TJS S3E23 Spirit of the Sixties part IV: The radical break

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The first duty of a revolutionary, says Appy Hoffman, is to get away with it. Well, I'm definitely looking to make a revolution, and I guess you'll have to wait and see whether I pull it off. Because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 23, Spirit of the Sixties, The Radical Break. So things continue to heat up in everybody's favorite decade. Last episode, we saw a definite upswing in the intensity of the social conflicts, and our focus was on the civil rights movement and its shift away from the nonviolent struggle for integration into American society, read, white society, toward a far more activist approach to ending racial oppression altogether. Now, that story is far from over.

In fact, you can still read it in the news. Racism is no longer understood simply as a problem of inequality and a redistribution of rights. it's now seen as a matter of structural injustice in America and around the world. And at this point in our story, the growing alignment between the black power movement and the post-colonial struggles in the developing world, which led SNCC to denounce Israel after the Six-Day War, is in fact the first step in the process that led to Black Lives Matter, including an anti-Zionist plank in their platform in our day. Listen, love it or hate it, Just don't ignore the implications of the struggle for liberation rather than integration. So the Vietnam War is also escalating in the late 60s.

It's sending thousands of young Americans home in body bags and leaving untold Vietnamese dead behind. And the idea of bombing Vietnam back to the Stone Age may have begun as satire, but you should realize that by the time the war is over, the United States will have dropped nearly three times the amount of ordnance which was used altogether in World War II. Furthermore, it was all televised. The rising draft meant that the youth of America now sees life carrying them toward Southeast Asia with the inevitability of a moving sidewalk, and the nightly news makes sure they know exactly what it looks like, and it's not pretty. So last but certainly not least, we should at least just note, even though we're not going to get into it in our story, that 1968 was a year of global upheaval.

May 68 paralyzed France to the point of civil war. The campuses of Europe were literally in insurrection. The Tet Offensive was a gut punch to the U.S. military in Vietnam. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated. Drug, sex, and rock and roll are transforming American and global culture. And of course, just months before this fateful year began, the Jews returned to our ancient capital, fulfilling a prophetic promise made 2,500 years ago. And even though we're not going to speak about it directly now in America, we'll take it on more when we return to Israel, I want you to have that peace in mind as we round out this last episode on the Jewish American 60s. Because we're going to jump back and chart out a similar buildup towards 67 in Israel in the coming episodes.

But as we do, don't forget the 60s were a time when the whole world was feeling squeezed by the past. When it was becoming increasingly clear to larger numbers of people that the education, cultural, governmental structures, and religious, which had brought us to the present, were insufficient to take us into the future. Post-colonialism, racial justice, world peace, the late 60s were marked by a sense that the old world must fall away or be destroyed in order that the new one may come to be and i'll touch on at the end whether that actually happened but meanwhile back to school because at this stage our story about american jury is all about the college campuses if in the early 60s the battleground of social change was the lunch counters of the south In the late 60s, it became the college campuses of the North.

These students had succeeded in pushing off the threat of going to war with a four-year college deferment, but they all felt the injustice embedded in their status. By the way, they wouldn't have the right to change society until they turned 21, at least through voting, but they had the duty to die upholding the present order from age 18. And because of this, they were ripe for a political activism that took place outside of the voting booth or even, frankly, outside the formal structures of political power. Furthermore, as their teachers and more radical peers hammered them with critical theory and the media offered them access to post-colonial perspectives on the American dream, the war abroad and racial justice at home began to look like symptoms of the same disease.

As Stokely Carmichael said last episode, for a century this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation. Its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, Southern Africa and Vietnam. For racism to die, a totally different America must be born. And whether you agree with that or not, part of the phenomenon of the 60s was the belief that the past does not have to define the future. So once the universities became the battleground, the struggle of the 60s became even more of a Jewish story. At this point in America, Jews compromised about 5% of university students. That's a number from 1969. They're about 325,000 out of a total population of 6.7 million. Now, this is a time when the Jewish population as a whole is less than 3% of the U.S.

But it's not just about quantity. It's about quality as well. Jews were concentrated in the humanities and social science schools which were saturated in the politics of the new left, which we spoke about last episode, go do some review. And of course, many of their more radical professors were Jewish as well. But the question that's been bothering me for episodes still remains. People like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Mark Rudd, who we'll meet today, they're pushing for revolution in this episode. But were they revolutionary Jews? Or just Jews engaged in another social revolution? That question, again, I'm going to repeat it because we need to compare it when we get back to Israel. Are the Jews who are driving the upheaval of the 60s revolutionary Jews, or are they just Jews engaged in someone else's social revolution?

Certainly, they didn't see what they were doing as an expression of the Judaism that they'd received in their suburban existence. On the contrary, that Judaism was just more fuel for the fire. As one member of the SDS, Students for Democratic Society, that important element of the New Left, put it, in order that we children wouldn't forget our Jewish heritage, it had to be shoved down our throats. That was how I perceived my three times a week Hebrew classes, until my distaste for Judaism blended into my distaste for middle class society in general. Values that were decidedly Jewish were indistinguishable to me from values that were middle class. when I rejected the middle class, I rejected Judaism as well.

There are many ways to be a Jew. I mean, after all, just look, the original revolutionary in the Bible is Abraham, who stands on one side against the whole world, or Moshe, who definitely is all about taking apart the social structure. The Judaism that they had inherited, though, was what we would call the establishment version. And there's a very different thing going on in Israel at this point. So we're going to look today at at least two figures who represent a radical break with the America in which they were born. Abbie Hoffman, and truth is, three figures, and his partner, Jerry Rubin, and Mark Rudd. And we might get a glimpse of another person who broke with America, and that's Rav Merkahama.

At the end, we'll see where we get to. Our subject today is what happens to the American Jews. Tired of the suburban ease which they inherited, as the push for social change tips toward a race to revolution. If we're going to tell that story, we might as well start with a little bit of fun. On the morning of August 24, 1967, a group of hippies walked through the door of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Now today, CEOs have long hair, and no one would bat an eye to see a politician wearing a paisley shirt. Well, 1967, that wasn't so. It may have been the summer of love out in San Francisco, but no one was prepared for bell-bottoms, beads, and patchouli on the floor of the stock exchange. Least of all, the poor security guard on duty that day.

He stopped the scruffy bearded 20-something who seemed to be in charge and told him in no uncertain terms that they didn't allow demonstrations on the stock exchange. Well, Abbie Hoffman was not so easily thwarted. He began to complain in a loud voice that they were Jews, not protesters, and that the guard was an anti-Semite. Flustered at the calls of anti-Semite, the security man backed down. And what followed is a legend in the theater of social protests The group quickly ascended to the viewing gallery directly above the trading floor and Hoffman began to hand out one dollar bills He had a hundred of them in his pocket And then on the count of three they all rained the bills down on the heads of the trading stockbrokers.

Chaos followed. Some yelled, some cheered, other frozen shock at the sight of money raining down from above. Even more scrabbled on the floor, literally in pursuit of the almighty Now, Hoffman's stunt only shut down trading for five or ten minutes before they were forced out of the building. But then, in front of the waiting cameras, he burned a $5 bill in order to drive his point home. As a friend later said, to burn a draft card meant one refused to participate in the war. To burn money meant one refused to participate in society. It became known as a nonviolent shot heard around the world in the battle against greed. You know, by the summer of 1967, people were getting tired of the same old thing.

The process of evolution towards social change had lost its momentum, as we saw with the civil rights movement's tip toward black power, and eventually its rejection of nonviolence. The hope that demonstrations would stop the war had kind of tired in the mind of the demonstrators. And most of all, the press was worn out. I mean, how many angry student speeches can you cover? But the idea of a hippie invasion of the New York Stock Exchange, now that, that captured the imagination. And because it did, it was news. We left Abbie Hoffman back in 1966. If you recall, he had accepted Stokely Carmichael's contention that the movement for black liberation must be in black hands. And so he had gone off to look for a community of his own to organize instead of being involved in SNCC.

And he found it amongst the long-haired hippies of the East Village where he lived. There was something there for him, as he later reported. The new consciousness and the shifting realities of LSD, of acid, really appealed to him. and also he saw the profundity in the absurdity of dropout culture. It was Hoffman who really first saw that dropping out could itself become a political act and that the psychedelic experience could be a source of new political consciousness and not just personal insight. And so from civil rights worker, Abbie Hoffman became hippie activist and his chosen tool became guerrilla theater. No more brewing protests. No more chanting, end the war or fight, race in one, two, three, four, we refuse to go to war, in a rhythm that mainstream society had already learned to tune out or just to fit into the new normal.

Guerrilla theater is about opening consciousness through absurdity and crazy acts, crazy public acts, because Hoffman knew that though mass media was shaping a parv suburban world, it could also reach the very audience that would have never considered radical politics or counterculture. All he had to do was get their attention. And the people who saw him burning money on TV, calling himself Cardinal Spillman and claiming that he and his group didn't even exist, had no idea what was going on. And that was the goal. The very absurdity of what they saw might just make them think again about the way things were. The lack of explicit message would force them to figure that out for themselves, which is, of course, the most subversive act a person can do.

Now, guerrilla theater seemed destined for greatness from its outset, and soon Hoffman's slogan became, if you don't like the news, why not go out and make your own? Determined to do so on an ever-increasing scale, he soon teamed up with veteran Vietnam protest organizer and fellow Jew to make a revolution a lot more fun. We could easily see Jerry Rubin as just another casualty of the banal existence of Jewish life in the suburbs. Born in Cincinnati in 1938, he had a more placid youth than Abbiehofen. Maybe he just lacked the rebels' streak. Or maybe it was circumstance. Rubin's parents died early in the 60s, leaving with a small inheritance and responsibility for his younger brother Gil. At loose ends with such a change in life, he decided to take his brother to Israel in order to see the country and contemplate his future.

Now, it's noteworthy for our larger story that while he was questioning the suburban Jewish life that came with all its privilege, that Israel was there for him on the edge of his consciousness, offering a deeper life. But it didn't turn out to be quite the birthright trip that Jerry expected. Shortly after arrival, Rubin says that disappointment set in. He came looking for fulfillment of his socialist yearnings, but instead was repelled by the turn he said that Israel had taken toward the very bourgeois comforts and securities he was trying to abandon. That's a theme we're going to have to think about, because it's coming out of the Tzena, the very difficult economic conditions, you recall, I hope if you've been listening for a while, that Israel faced through the 50s.

The achievement of some modicum of material success looked very different in Tel Aviv than it did in Maplewood. So, seeking for the ideological roots of the country that he'd heard about, Jerry soon found a place amongst the intellectual left centered on the Hebrew University. Now, these thinkers had already begun to abandon the easy alliance that existed between Jewish nationalism and radical leftists for almost two generations. They were rapidly returning to the international revolutionary perspective, which was really their roots. That's a story we'll tell properly in the coming series on the 60s in Israel. But for now, under their influence, Rubin became increasingly radicalized, seeing the world more and more from a Marxist perspective.

I can relate. It's as if he went to Israel to become a Jew and ended up becoming a Marxist. I once had a friend when I came here to Israel during college, whose parents sent her from a Chicago suburban existence to get in touch with her Jewish roots, ended up converting and marrying a Bedouin man. You can imagine their shock. Anyway, so Rubin, through this Marxist lens, also came to see the racial issues of Israel in much the same way as he understood those of America. As he says in his autobiography, I saw Jews from the Arab world mistreated and dominated. Israelis openly described Arabs the way whites talked about blacks in America. I respected the Israelis as people, but I felt frustrated whenever politics came up.

The very things I was running away from in America I found in Israel. My heart was Jewish, but my head leaned toward internationalism. That's a quote that needs to be reflected upon. I'm curious if anyone listening now feels that that's their story. Send me an email if you do, and if you don't, just think about it. And so, if his heart was Jewish, but his head leaned toward internationalism, it was almost inevitable that Jerry Rubin's body head back to America. Indeed he did. He left Israel in January of 1964 for UC Berkeley and a PhD in sociology. Notice the theme. He lasted six weeks in the PhD program, but he stayed on in Berkeley for more than three years. And what follows reads like a case study in 60s politics.

Jerry Rubin joined the free speech movement on campus his first year. That was a predecessor to the anti-war movement. And in his first summer, he was actually selected to join a trip to Cuba led by the Progressive Labor Party on campus. Now, travel from the U.S. to Cuba at this point was illegal. So the group flew from New York to Paris and on to Czechoslovakia, where they then boarded a Cubana Airlines plane for the flight back across the Atlantic. Like it was a 13,000 mile trip to go 100 miles or so to avoid the CIA. And it was an exposure for him to a living anti-imperialist society, as he called it, framed by speeches and meetings with both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. And Rubin called it, quote, the final step for me.

I started to see things the way the Cubans did. He gained the outsider's perspective, which perhaps a true Jewish education would have given him, but had been denied to him by suburban existence. So upon return to Berkeley, Jerry quickly moved into a leadership role in the budding anti-war movement. And by 65, he was one of the principal organizers of the first Vietnam teach-in. He also helped to organize the radical Vietnam Day Committee, famous for its dramatic approach to protest. Now, Rubin's vision was internationalist, just like the other radical voices of his day. He saw Vietnam not as simply a war, but as symptomatic of an entire American system which needed revolutionary change. In one speech, he called Vietnam part of, quote, a declared worldwide American policy, a symptom of our society's sickness, and he added we are a dangerous country, a neurotic country, possessing deadly power.

Well, by 1966, Rubin had realized that protest was not enough, and he began to call for the creation of an active counterculture. Only an alternative consciousness could overcome the media culture what he called quote the most subtle and far propaganda machine the world has ever seen Because the way in which you know the world is largely shaped by the media which you consume Everyone needs to pause and think about that. So, it should come as no surprise that Jerry Rubin, who moved to New York City in the summer of 67 after a failed run for mayor of Berkeley, soon joined forces with Abbie Hoffman. and their first joint effort was a smashing success. Picture it. They gathered every hippie and war protester they could lay their hands on and brought them together at the Pentagon.

Waiting for them were self-proclaimed witches, warlocks, and necromancers who began to hand out noisemakers' crazy costumes, magic wands. It was October 21, 1967, and tens of thousands of counterculture's finest and brightest were singing and casting spells while the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, another Jew, led Tibetan chants to assist them. Facing off against them were the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division mulz-balized to hold the hippies back, and their goal became to levitate the Pentagon at least 300 feet in order to shake out all its evil spirits. It was a battle of the absurd versus the military machine. Needless to say, the Pentagon remained unmoved. But unfortunately, the troops did not.

The powers that be decided that the steps to the building must remain clear. And when the protesters approached, that's when the violence began. By the end, hundreds were jailed and dozens hospitalized. The television channels and the newspapers were ecstatic. America had never seen such a spectacle. They dubbed Hoffman and Rubin the media mavens of the anti-war movement and waited breathlessly for the next show. The idea was hatched on New Year's Eve 1967. Reuben and Hoffman were partying together in Hoffman's East Village apartment. Hoffman's wife, Anita, and Reuben's girlfriend, Nancy Kirshen, were there, as was Paul Krasner, himself an interesting character, editor and publisher of The Realist. It was a pioneering magazine of social, political, religious criticism, and satire.

It was a foundation stone of the 60s counterculture, and you might know it as having companionship, partnership, really, with Mad Magazine. Needless to say, they were all high. I mean, after all, it was 1967. And so, the conversation veered between contemplations of the Internet, uncontrollable fits of giggles, and tactical discussions about the upcoming 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. It was typical Hoffman and Ruthman. The subject was serious, and so the atmosphere had to be absurd. Everyone there was convinced that the 1968 Convention could be the turning point in the revolution, and that, in order for it to be so, it needed to be fun. No more sleepwalking through marches. No more rallies with endless speechmaking.

They wanted to wake the country up to the new consciousness, not put them to sleep, and certainly no violence. They were hoping to head off the anger and aggression that were growing ever greater within the movement. What they imagined was more along the lines of the music festivals that were making such an impression on the California hippie culture. Now, somewhere in the conversation, Paul Krasner declared that with the Democrats so supportive of the war in Vietnam, Chicago might as well be called a convention of death. And Rubin jumped on it. He combined it with the festival notion and proposed that they organize an alternative convention and call it the Festival of Life. It would be guerrilla theater on an unprecedented scale.

Hundreds of thousands of people dancing naked in the park, rock bands out in the streets. that could terrify the war machine by their very crazy presence. Now, once the idea came out, Huffman began to roll. Spinning out sentences about hippie as media myth, absurdity in the active spectacle, how the irrational magical possibilities of a youth festival of life would confront, overwhelm, and just freak out the convention of death. Suddenly, in the midst of all this passion, Krasner emerged with a shattering cry, Yippee! And thus, the Yippies were born. Now, it's true that before the night was over, Anita Hoffman gave the word a more formal meaning, the Youth International Party. She said that the New York Times and all the straights had to have something that they could relate to.

But really, it was just yippee-yippee-yay-yay was a childish, irrational, and fun name. It was the perfect absurdity around which they could organize both the mass media and their as yet unidentified constituency. For the next three months, Hoffman and Rubin worked full-time to bring the yippies into being and point them toward Chicago. Their first announcement really says it all. Join us in Chicago in August for an international festival of youth, music, and theater. Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball. Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth seekers, peacock, freaks, poets, barricade, jumpers, dancers, lovers, and artists. It is the last week in August, and the National Death Party meets to bless Johnson.

The life of the American spirit is being torn asunder by the forces of violence, decay, and napalm. We demand the politics of ecstasy. We will create our own reality. We are Free America, and we will not accept the false theater of the Death Convention. We will be in Chicago. Begin preparations now. Chicago is yours. Do it. Sounds like fun, right? It might well have been, except that between January and August of 1968, things in America were about to take a very serious turn. As Harlem burned, Mark Rudd watched the smoke fill the sky and was overwhelmed with the desire to get a little closer to the flames. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King had been gunned down just the day before and Harlem was on fire.

And while Mark Rudd looked down from his dorm at Columbia University, he prayed that the non-violence movement, or as his hero Stokely Carmichael call it, this non-violent BS, was finally over. Then he grabbed another long-haired friend and plunged into the chaos in order to be present as the new age of revolution dawned. Now, I want to know, what would drive a suburban Jewish college student to wander the streets of Harlem as the residents burned and looted, attacked police, and set up barricades to stop the fire engine? What exactly was he looking for? Born in 1947 in Irvington, New Jersey to a Polish immigrant father, Mark Rudd lived the life that Philip Roth made famous in his satire. His family carried the separatism of the Jewish urban ghettos of Newark and Elizabeth with them into the suburbs.

To mingle with the Goyim is just not done. He attended Hebrew school dutifully, eventually becoming the president of his junior congregation by his own account, quote, a perfect little Jewish boy in my suit and tie, talus, and occasionally tefillin. But God was not an active member of Congregation Beth El. He must have missed the move out of Newark. Now, his grandma was still back there in the city, in that urban ghetto keeping the faith. And it was only years after her death that Mark Rudd realized he'd missed something. Missed something that didn't come in the move, and in fact never noticed that his grandmother never once ate a meal at their suburban house in Maplewood, which of course was not kosher.

There are certain things that didn't make the jump, and he didn't know he was lacking them. Until sometime after his bar mitzvah, Mark decided that the God of Israel probably didn't exist. After all, he was just a social construct like every other god before him. And soon, therefore, he began to see the synagogue as just another expression of suburban social existence, materialist and hypocritical, and he wanted out. Rudd arrives as a freshman at Columbia College in 1965, only a few months after the escalation in Vietnam. And within weeks, a senior named David Gilbert came knocking at his door. Gilbert was one of the founders of the Columbia chapter of SDS, the Students for Democratic Society, if you recall that important founding member of the new left.

And at this point in 65, the SDS was giving up on its failed efforts to organize in the inner cities around racial issues and was shifting its focus to the anti-war movement on campus. It also happens to be that Gilbert was Jewish, along with John First, chapter chairman, as well as the vice chairman, Nick Freudenberg. In fact, as Rudd would later say, all of us were Jewish. He said, it's hard to remember the names of non-Jewish Columbia SDSers. It was as much a Jewish fraternity as Sammy. And reflecting why, that later in his life, Rudd made the remark, out of all the uncountable hours of discussion in SDS meetings, I don't remember one single conversation in which we discussed the fact that so many of us were Jewish.

It's just a strange thing. Imagine it. In today's consciousness of identity, can you picture a bunch of Jews sitting around in a room, plotting revolution, and never ever mentioning the fact that they were all Jewish? Well, Rudd did offer some insight. As he says later, World War II and the Holocaust were our fixed reference points. We often talked about the moral imperative not to be good Germans We were all anti We saw American racism as akin to German racism toward Jews As we learned more about the war we discovered that killing Vietnamese en masse was of no moral consequence to American war planners. So we started describing the war as racist genocide, reflecting the genocide of the Holocaust. This should sound familiar.

And then he goes on, he says, American imperialist goals around the world were to us little different from the Nazi goal of global conquest. And so Mark Rudd took the one remnant of his culture, which couldn't be abandoned, the memory of the Holocaust, and fit his present-day rejection of his suburban existence right into the mold. Add to this a scathing judgment which comes from Abbie Hoffman, deep down I'm sure we felt our parents' generation was a bunch of cop-outs. Six million dead, and except for the Warsaw Ghetto, hardly a bullet fired in resistance. And last, but certainly not least, as Rudd pointed out, a sense that they'd been lied to in the promise of suburbia. We were good Jewish kids, he says, the cream of the crop, who had accepted the myths of America.

We were betrayed by our country and the university when we learned, in a relative instant, that reality wasn't even close to those myths. We third-generation American Jews, even though, as he said, he wasn't thinking of himself as a Jew at the time, suddenly woke up and realized this country may be a blessing for us, but not so for many others who couldn't pass for white. And now, with all those elements in play, we can watch the angst of recent Jewish history, the Holocaust, the cultural deprivation of the suburbs, the rapid rise to economic privilege for which they were really culturally unprepared, play itself out through the protests of the late 60s. So Mark Rudd moved quickly up through the ranks of the Columbia SDS.

He was the one who helped focus their efforts on the university itself, trying to expose its claim to value neutrality toward the war as a lie. He pointed out Columbia's naval ROTC program, the fact that it allowed the Marines, CIA, and Dow Chemicals to recruit on campus, and its secret membership in the Institute for Defense Analysis, as a strategic partnership with the military. And as the war heated up, so did Rudd. His repeated calls for revolution as opposed to protests gained Mark and his friends the nickname of the Action Faction, and thus it was only a matter of time before things came to a head. In early 1968, a study exposed the role that Columbia was playing in displacing the poor residents of Harlem.

In the past seven years alone, the university had forced 7,500 people out of their homes in order to build more buildings for the children of the privileged, and its plan was to push out another 10,000. Only weeks after Rudd saw the story, Dr. King was murdered in Memphis, and Columbia President Grayson Kirk announced his intention to eulogize the reverend on campus. The hypocrisy was too much for Rudd and the action faction. At that very moment, the university was trying to prevent a union from organizing their black and Puerto Rican workers. and they had the chutzpah to eulogize the very man who would have laid down his life to make such a union happen? What followed looked like a revolution. It began as a protest, escalated into a building sit-in, and culminated into a full-on campus takeover and shutdown.

For more than a week, the protesters, led by the SDS, remained barricaded into four separate buildings on campus, while the rest of the university was empty. There were parallel strikes in high schools and colleges, not just throughout the country, around the world. Parallel, not necessarily in response, but this was after all the time. That first Saturday, after they took over the buildings on the Columbia campus, about 90,000 anti-war demonstrators filled the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Greta Scott King spoke in the place of her murdered husband. And the police ended up arresting dozens of protesters who tried to march from the park to Columbia to show support for the students. The words of Mark Rudd's letter to the university president, which were leaked to the press, were read around the country.

He said, we the young people can point to our meaningless studies, our identity crisis, our repulsion with being cogs in your corporate machines as a product of and reaction to a basically sick society. And then he promised we will take control of your world, your corporation, your university, and attempt to mold a world in which we and other people can live as human beings. And he ends with the following. There's only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it's the opening shot in a war of liberation. I'll use the words of Leroy Jones, whom I'm sure you don't like a whole lot, up against the wall, motherfuckers. This is a stick-up. Now part of me wishes I could tell you a story of happily ever after.

Of how Abby Offman and Jerry Rubman brought together hundreds of thousands of happy hippies at the Chicago Democratic Convention and transformed American consciousness. and how Mark Ludd started with a takeover of the Columbia campus, ended with a liberation of Harlem and the world. But it wasn't to be. The world doesn't give up on the old way all that quickly. The police broke up the student takeover at Columbia after about a week. With brutal force, they clubbed the protesters in submission, racking up 120 charges of police brutality, the most from any single incident in the history of the NYPD. The scene at the Chicago convention looked much the same. Google it if you've never seen the pictures of bleeding hippies running for cover, weeping and crying from the tear gas.

Bottom line, the system is not so easily changed, or even challenged. There's quite an epilogue to these stories, and maybe we'll have to tell it someday, perhaps in Season 4. Mark Rudd left the SDS when it broke up. He became part of the Weatherman Underground, a radical left-wing offshoot that eventually descended into terrorism. And lest you think I'm exaggerating, his mentor David Gilbert is still sitting in prison right now on three counts of felony murder committed in the process of an armed robbery in 1981. Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin stood trial in the famous Chicago 8 or Chicago 7, depending on how you tell the story, which I feel like we're going to have to touch on in next season. But he also ended up going underground.

though in his case it was to avoid a drug bust, and he maintained the life of an activist until his suicide in 1989. Jerry Rubin went from yippee to yuppie. He became an advocate of self-help, early investor in Apple computers, and a pioneer of what we now call socially conscious capitalism, and I think we're going to have to tell more of their stories, or at least the stories of American Jewry that flow from them in the next season. And there's a whole other voice that we haven't even touched on, that outgrowth of the 60s radicalism that we're certainly going to have to treat. Those for whom Judaism wasn't a vacuum to be escaped or a vague moral imperative toward revolution, but rather a substantive source.

We're going to have to talk about the worldview, for instance, of SDS leader Michael Lerner, who in 1969 said that Jewish tradition itself could be a guide for, a revolutionary overthrow of both the present corrupt Jewish community and the larger bourgeois society of which it's a part. And by the way, if you're not familiar with his name, he's still fighting that fight today. Then, of course, there's Ralph Merkahana, who published the following advertisement in a New York newspaper on May 24, 1968, less than a month after the cops broke the siege of the Columbia campus. We are talking of Jewish survival. Are you willing to stand up for democracy and Jewish survival? Join and support the Jewish Defense Corps.

That's the original name of the JDL. We'll follow Rav Kahana's story most likely when we get into the next season. Basically, the radical Jews are far from gone in the American story. It's just that the world is not quite as easily changed as they hope. In the next season, we're going to have to map a shift amongst them from those who reach for the universal at the price of their Jewish inheritance toward those who turn to the particular, each in their own way. So I'll just say, Adkan unto here, the American Jewish 60s. I want to thank some folks. I want to thank all the folks who give their hard-earned money to make this show happen, keep it free and widely available. I want to invite you to join them.

Go right now to my website, jewishstory.co, and in the upper right-hand corner you can see a button there that says Be a Patron. Click on through for a little bit of per-podcast support. or if that's too much, you can always send me an email, robmikefoyer at gmail.com or you can personal message me on Facebook, robmikefoyer or Jewish Story Podcast and I'll send you the details about how you can dedicate an episode. I want to thank folks at the Land of Israel Network, that's thelandofisrael.com for building a platform that allows me to reach so many fantastic people. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, P-A-R-E-S.org.il for building an educational institution that gives me the privilege to teach so many amazing Jews and I want to thank you for listening.

I'm Rav Mike Boyer, and this is The Jewish Story.