Jonah Raskin
Jonah Raskin, May 2005; photograph by Daniel Raskin
Born	January 3, 1942 New York, NY
Occupation	writer, professor

Jonah Raskin (born: January 3, 1942), an American writer who left an East Coast university teaching position to participate in the 1970’s radical counterculture as a free-lance journalist, returned to the academy in California in the 1980’s to write probing studies of Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg, and reviews of northern California writers whom he styled as “natives, newcomers, exiles and fugitives.” Beginning as a lecturer in English at Sonoma State University in 1981, he moved to chair of the Communications Studies Department from 1988 to 2007, while serving as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. January 3 is the 3rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1942 (MCMXLII) was a common year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1942 calendar). ... Abbott Howard Abbie Hoffman (November 30, 1936 – April 12, 1989) was a social and political activist in the United States, co-founder of the Youth International Party (Yippies), and later, a fugitive from the law, who lived under an alias following a conviction for dealing cocaine. ... Irwin Allen Ginsberg (IPA: ) (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American Beat poet. ... Sonoma State University is a campus of the California State University system located in Rohnert Park, California (about seven miles south of Santa Rosa and fifty miles north of San Francisco and Oakland). ... Todays San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. ... Santa Rosa is the Spanish name for Saint Rose. ... The Press Democrat is a daily newspaper in Santa Rosa, California. ...

Early Life

Born in New York City to a secular Jewish family, Raskin was raised in Huntington, Long Island. His parents were Communists in the 1930s and 40s, but as his father became a successful attorney in the 1950s, they concealed their radical politics and were careful to blend into their middle-class community. Hiding, dissembling, and disguising would become persistent themes in Raskin’s writing, along with the personas of the exile and the fugitive. Raskin gave every appearance of being the all-American teenager; he was co-captain of his high school football team, and named to Newsday’s All-Suffolk Football Squad in 1958. He also worked as a sports reporter for The Long Islander in his last year of high school.^[1] See also Samuel Huntington See also Huntingtons disease Huntington is the name of a number of places: United Kingdom Huntington, East Lothian, Scotland Huntington, Cheshire, England Huntington, City of York, England Huntington, Herefordshire, England Huntington, Staffordshire, England United States of America Huntington in Sebastian County, Arkansas Huntington in Fairfield... Map showing Long Island; to the north is Connecticut and to the west are New York City and New Jersey. ... This article is about communism as a form of society, as an ideology advocating that form of society, and as a popular movement. ... Newsday is a daily tabloid-size newspaper that primarily serves Long Island and the New York City borough of Queens, although it is sold throughout the New York City metropolitan area. ...

Raskin attended Columbia College, studying literature with Lionel Trilling, receiving a B.A. degree in 1963, and an M.A. in American Literature in 1964. He taught at Winston-Salem State College in the summer of 1964, then married and moved to England in the fall to study British and American literature at the University of Manchester. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 with a dissertation on the mythology of imperialism in the work of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, and obtained his first full-time teaching position in the English Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1967 to 1972.^[2] Columbia College is the name of several institutions of higher education. ... Lionel Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. ... It has been suggested that Victoria University of Manchester be merged into this article or section. ... // Cecil Rhodes: Cape-Cairo railway project. ... This article is about the British author. ... Joseph Conrad. ... Stony Brook University (SBU), also known as the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNYSB), is a public research university located in Stony Brook, New York (on the north side of Long Island, about 65 miles east of Manhattan, New York). ...

Into The Seventies

Identifying with the growing social movements of the late 1960s, Raskin joined the building occupation led by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Columbia University in 1968. His wife, Eleanor Raskin, became involved with the Weatherman faction of SDS, and he followed with some ambivalence. He was arrested and beaten by New York police in December 1969 after smashing windows in a street demonstration organized by Weatherman.^[3] Failing to get tenure at Stony Brook because of his militant activity, Raskin abandoned his academic career for the life of a radical free-lance journalist. SDS Button Logo The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was, historically, a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the countrys New Left. ... BBCs Alex Deakin presenting a weather report. ...

He joined Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner in the Youth International Party (the Yippies) in 1967, and was designated its Minister of Education in 1970. He traveled to Algiers with Jennifer Dohrn (sister of Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn) as part of a Yippie delegation in October 1970 to meet with Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary, whom the Weather Underground had helped escape from a low-security prison in California. Their plan, to link the anti-war movement in the United States with global protests, came to naught when Cleaver attempted to arrest Leary, and Leary and his wife fled to Switzerland. ^[4] Raskin later interviewed Leary for High Times magazine shortly before Leary’s death in 1996. Jerry Rubin (July 14, 1938 – November 28, 1994) was a high-profile American social activist during the 1960s and 1970s. ... Paul Krassner (born April 9, 1932) was editor and frequent contributor to the Freethought magazine The Realist, which, first published in 1958, is a very early example of the countercultural press in the United States. ... The Youth International Party (whose adherents were known as Yippies, a variant on Hippies) was a highly theatrical political party established in the United States in 1967. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... For the American baseball player use Tim Leary (baseball player) Timothy Francis Leary, Ph. ...

In 1974, Raskin received a grant from the Rabinowitz Foundation in N.Y. for research on the Cold War and American culture in the literature of the period from 1945 to 1960, reading and interviewing that would inform his later book on Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, American Scream. For other uses, see Cold War (disambiguation). ... “Beats” redirects here. ...

Raskin helped Abbie Hoffman go underground in 1974, and traveled with him when he was a fugitive for much of the 1970s, coming into contact once again with the Weather Underground, a subject he addressed in an autobiographical novel, Underground.^[5] His wife Eleanor had become a fugitive, and he made an unsuccessful effort to preserve their floundering marriage by making contact with her. In 1974 Raskin compiled and wrote an introduction to a collection of Weather Underground communiqués, The Weather Eye, and set up an imprint, Union Square Press, to publish the work. His introduction was academic in tone, and gave no hint that he had had a hand in drafting the statement, “New Morning, Changing Weather,” that adopted a more moderate tone and began the process of Weather leaders resurfacing from the underground.^[6]

During this period Raskin lived on fees and advances from articles and books, writing for a variety of publications including Monthly Review, the San Francisco Review of Books, The International Herald Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Village Voice, and for various alternative newspapers and magazines, including Liberation News Service, The Seed, University Review, Liberation, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, L.A. Weekly, and the northern California Bohemian. He covered the trial of the Panther 21 in New York in 1970, and wrote about such fugitives and prisoners as Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement and Oscar Collazo, the Puerto Rican nationalist. He traveled to Mexico in 1975 in search of the elusive writer B. Traven, a journey that became the subject of My Search for B. Traven.^[7] Monthly Review is a socialist magazine published in New York City. ... The International Herald Tribune (or IHT) is fully owned by the New York Times, which along with its own staff journalists and news agencies supplies it with news and features. ... The Los Angeles Times (also L.A. Times) is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California and distributed throughout the Western United States. ... The Village Voice is a New York City-based weekly newspaper featuring investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts reviews and events listings for New York City. ... The Liberation News Service (LNS) was a leftist alternative news service which published news bulletins from 1967 to 1981. ... // The San Francisco Bay Guardian (also known as the SF Bay Guardian, Bay Guardian, and the Guardian) is a free alternative newspaper published weekly in San Francisco, California. ... Bohemians, or gypsies, are inhabitants of Bohemia, in the Czech Republic. ... The Black Panther Party (originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was an African American organization founded to promote civil rights and self-defense. ... Dennis Banks (born April 12, 1932), a Native American leader, teacher, lecturer, activist and author, is an Anishinabe born on Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. ... AIM logo AIM flag The American Indian Movement (AIM), is a Native American activist organization in the United States. ... Oscar Collazo (1914 – February 21, 1994) born in Florida, Puerto Rico, was one of two Puerto Ricans who attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman. ... B. Traven (d. ...

Raskin settled in Sonoma County, California, in the winter of 1976, where he had come to visit his parents, who had retired to the rural community of Occidental. Gradually detatching himself from New York and the radical left, Raskin began to meet such California writers as Tillie Olsen and Jessica Mitford, and pitched ideas for movies to Hollywood producers. He created the characters and the story about marijuana cultivation in northern California for the movie Homegrown, eventually produced in 1996, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal; Raskin appears in a crowd scene at the end of the film.^[8] Sonoma County is on the north Pacific coast of California, in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. ... Occidental means generally western. It is a traditional designation (especially when capitalized) for anything belonging to the Occident or West — the western part of the classical world (Europe) and the New World, and especially of its society. ... Tillie Lerner Olsen (b. ... The Honourable Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford, known to friends and family as Decca (September 11, 1917–July 22, 1996), self-described muckraker and political radical, was one of the noted Mitford sisters, daughters of David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, the 2nd Baron Redesdale. ... Stephen Gyllenhaal (pronounced JILL-en-hall), born October 4, 1949 in Cleveland, Ohio, is an American film and television director and member of the Gyllenhaal family. ...

Return to the University in the 1980’s

Raskin returned to academics as a lecturer in the English Department at Sonoma State University from 1981 to 1987, and became chair of the Communication Studies Department from 1988 to date (2007). He has taught media law, the history of communications, film noir, and writing for newspapers, magazines, radio, the movies and memoirs. He was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Ghent and University of Antwerp, Belgium, in 1986-1987, teaching 19th and 20th century American literature and culture. Ghent University (in Dutch, Universiteit Gent, abbreviated UGent) is one of the two large Flemish universities. ... Universiteit Antwerpen (University of Antwerp) is a university based in Antwerp, Belgium. ...

During the 1980s and 90s, Raskin wrote scores of book reviews for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other publications. His signature format coupled his reviews with separate in-depth interviews that often evoked wide-ranging conversations with the authors, including writers from Doris Lessing and Kurt Vonnegut to Alice Walker and Greg Sarris. Doris Lessing, CH, OBE (born October 22, 1919), is a British writer, born Doris May Taylor in Kermanshah, Persia (Iran). ... Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ... Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an African-American author and feminist who received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 for The Color Purple. ... Greg Sarris, of Pomo descent, is a college professor, author, screenwriter, and current Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. ...

Raskin’s biography of Abbie Hoffman, For the Hell of It, captures the genius and the flaws of the Yippie spokesman and his place in the tumultuous sixties, follows him as he flees underground to avoid prison on drug charges, and is straightforward in acknowledging the bipolar disorder that led to Hoffman’s suicide in 1989.^[9]

In American Scream, Raskin studies Allen Ginsberg’s development as a poet in the context of “Howl,” the most influential poem of his generation. Raskin traces Ginsberg’s studies with Lionel Trilling, his relationship with his father (a schoolteacher and poet), and his Beat Generation colleagues. Raskin explores the consequences of Ginsberg's mother’s mental illness on the theme of societal insanity in “Howl,” and relates the court case that set a new direction for artistic freedom at the end of the repressive 1950s.^[10] This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... “Beats” redirects here. ...

Raskin has subjected his radicalism of the 1960’s and 70’s to a searching and thoughtful analysis, and he now views his affiliation with the Weather Underground and his endorsement of its politics as largely self-dramatization that wasted the energy and resources of the above-ground enablers as well as the underground fugitives. A final moment of political disillusionment with the radical left and dreams of Third World socialism came with a visit to Hanoi in 1995, where he experienced Vietnam as a country run by a Communist elite rapidly enriching themselves from a freewheeling capitalist economy.^[11] Hanoi (Vietnamese: Hà Ná»™i, Hán Tá»±: 河内)  , estimated population 3,145,300(2005), is the capital of Vietnam. ...

Raskin’s distance from his former comrades is apparent in his new introduction to the collection of Weather Underground communiqués republished, along with his original introduction, in Sing a Battle Song. Raskin allowed his introduction to be edited for the collection, but he published an expanded version in a left journal. To anyone who wants to go underground and commit acts of violence in America today, Raskin advises, “Don’t do it. Be visible. Talk openly. Go out and meet people. Organize. Educate. Avoid violence. Democracy is in the streets, on the Internet, and wherever people meet.”^[12]

Current Work

In the 1990s, Raskin began writing poetry and publishing it in chapbooks. His poems are unpredictable – alternately satiric, droll, and tender. He often performs his poems with musicians. Continuing his work on northern California authors, Raskin is presently writing a book on Jack London's published and unpublished political works. Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916),[1][2][3] was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and over fifty other books. ...

Notes

1. ^ Jonah Raskin, Out of the Whale, (New York: Links, 1974), pp. 11-37.
2. ^ Out of the Whale, pp. 80-91.
3. ^ Thomas P. Ronan, “2 Arrested at Anti-Nixon Protests Say They Were Beaten by Police,” The New York Times, December 14, 1969.
4. ^ Out of the Whale, pp. 161-179.
5. ^ Jonah Raskin, Underground, (Bobbs-Merrill, 1978).
6. ^ Jonah Raskin,“Looking Backward: Reflections on Language, Gesture and Mythology in the Weather Underground,” in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974, ed. by Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), pp. 121-129.
7. ^ Jonah Raskin, My Search for B. Traven (New York: Methuen, 1980); Richard Elman, "Mysterious Treasure," The Nation, November 1, 1980, pp. 450-451; Shepherd Bliss, "Who was B. Traven?" Guardian, September 17, 1980, p. 21.
8. ^ Tina Barni, “Sonoma State Professor Cultivates ‘Homegrown’ for Big Screen,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 1998, p. NB 3.
9. ^ Jonah Raskin, For the Hell of It (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996), pp. 234-258; Vivian Gornick, "Wildman," The Nation, January 6, 1997, pp. 25-27; Jonathan Rieder, "The Groucho Marxist," The New York Times Book Review, February 2, 1997, p. 13; Sarah Peyton, "Free Radical," The Sonoma County Independent, February 13-19, 1997, pp. 17-18.
10. ^ Jonah Raskin, American Scream (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2004), pp. 44-64; Vivian Gornick, "Wild at Heart," The Nation, June 14, 2004, pp. 34-36.
11. ^ Jonah Raskin, “Vietnam Now: Land of Sadness & Survival,” Sonoma Mandala, Vol. 22 (Fall 1994/ Spring 1995).
12. ^ Jonah Raskin, “Looking Backward: Reflections on Language, Gesture and Mythology in the Weather Underground,” Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 20, No. 2, (July 2006), pp. 121-135; and Sing A Battle Song, p. 129.

Vivian Gornick is an American critic, essayist, and memoirist. ...

Publications by Jonah Raskin

Books

• The Mythology of Imperialism: Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Joyce Cary (New York: Random House, 1971). ISBN 0394468376

• Out of the Whale: Growing up in the American Left (New York: Links, 1974). ISBN 0825630398

• Editor, The Weather Eye: Communiques from the Weather Underground (New York: Union Square Press, 1974).

• Puerto Rico: The Flame of Resistance, co-author with Lincoln Bergman et al. (San Francisco: Peoples Press, 1976/7?) ISBN 0914750054

• Underground: In Pursuit of B. Traven and Kenny Love (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978). ISBN 0672523825

• My Search for B. Traven (New York: Methuen, 1980). ISBN 0416007414 Translated into French by Virgine Girard, A la recherche de B. Traven (Arles: Les Fondeurs de Briques, 2007).

• James D. Houston (Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1991). ISBN 0884300986

• For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ISBN 0520205758

• American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). ISBN 0520240154

• Natives, Newcomers, Exiles and Fugitives (Healdsburg, CA: Running Wolf Press, 2004). ISBN 0970133383

Poetry Chapbooks Edward Morgan Forster (January 1, 1879 - June 7, 1970) was an English novelist. ... D. H. Lawrence David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was one of the most important, certainly one of the most controversial, English writers of the 20th century, who wrote novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. ... Time magazine cover featuring Joyce Cary, October 20, 1952 This article is about the male author Joyce Cary. ...

• Jonah Raskin's Greatest Hits: Poems 1996-1998 (Healdsburg, CA: Running Wolf Press, 1999).

• More Poems, Better Poems (Healdsburg, CA: Running Wolf Press, 2001).

• Bone Love (San Francisco: Alexander Book Company, 2004).
• Public Spaces, Private Places: New Poems (Salt Spring Island, BC: Running Wolf Press, 2007). ISBN 0-9746680-7-9

External Link

Jonah Raskin’s home page at Sonoma State University