by Lawrence Bush on April 23, 2012
Bernard (Benny) Rothman, a Romanian-born political activist in the United Kingdom, led a “mass trespass” of some five hundred “ramblers” (countryside walkers, mostly unemployed workers) on this date in 1932, to protest the lack of public access to broad swaths of public land in England and Wales. The protestors, mostly from Manchester, sang “The Internationale” and clashed violently with gameskeepers on Kinder Scout, a large plateau, resulting in six arrests. Rothman, who was among those arrested (he served four months in prison), was head of the British Workers Sports Federation in the North, which organized bike rides, camping trips, and rambles. The protest led to the passage, in 1949, of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, which ended upper-class monopoly over access to Great Britain’s public land. Three decades later, Rothman helped to mobilize renewed protests against Margaret Thatcher’s environmental and property-use policies. He died in 2002. For a video featuring Ewan MacColl’s song about the Mass Trespass, click here.
“Jewish by descent, tiny in stature and fiery in rhetoric . . . Benny Rothman, who has died aged 90, is now revered as the patron saint of the British outdoor community.” —Jim Perrin, The Guardian
by Alyssa Goldstein on March 18, 2012
Gilad Atzmon
A few days ago, the U.S. Palestinian Community network published a letter signed by a number of prominent Palestinian authors, intellectuals and activists (including Ali Abunimah, Nadia Hijab, and Omar Barghouti) calling for the disavowal of Gilad Atzmon for his anti-semitism. The letter states that
Atzmon’s politics rest on one main overriding assertion that serves as springboard for vicious attacks on anyone who disagrees with his obsession with “Jewishness.” He claims that all Jewish politics is “tribal,” and essentially, Zionist. Zionism, to Atzmon, is not a settler-colonial project, but a trans-historical “Jewish” one, part and parcel of defining one’s self as a Jew. Therefore, he claims, one cannot self-describe as a Jew and also do work in solidarity with Palestine, because to identify as a Jew is to be a Zionist. We could not disagree more. Indeed, we believe Atzmon’s argument is itself Zionist because it agrees with the ideology of Zionism and Israel that the only way to be a Jew is to be a Zionist.
. . . We reaffirm that there is no room…for any attacks on our Jewish allies, Jews, or Judaism; nor denying the Holocaust; nor allying in any way shape or form with any conspiracy theories, far-right, orientalist, and racist arguments, associations and entities. Challenging Zionism, including the illegitimate power of institutions that support the oppression of Palestinians, and the illegitimate use of Jewish identities to protect and legitimize oppression, must never become an attack on Jewish identities, nor the demeaning and denial of Jewish histories in all their diversity.
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by Lawrence Bush on February 17, 2012
The Chicago Seven Trial ended on this date in 1970 with acquittals for Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner on charges of conspiracy. Five of them were convicted of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot and were each fined $5,000 and sentenced to five years in prison, but the convictions were reversed on appeal in 1972. Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, who had his case severed from the others (and was at one point bound and gagged in the courtroom), received a four-year contempt-of-court sentence from Judge Julius Hoffman and was the only defendant to serve prison time. The trial resulted from anti-war street demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, which were met with extensive police violence. Hoffman and Rubin, in particular, with help from their attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, injected both political drama and farce into the proceedings, which captured national media attention for weeks. For an extensive website about the case, with audio clips and transcripts, click here.
“MR. WEINGLASS: Where do you reside?
“THE WITNESS: I live in Woodstock Nation.
“MR. WEINGLASS: Will you tell the Court and jury where it is?
“THE WITNESS: Yes. It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind in the same way as the Sioux Indians carried the Sioux nation around with them. It is a nation dedicated to cooperation versus competition, to the idea that people should have better means of exchange than property or money, that there should be some other basis for human interaction. . . .” —Testimony by Abbie Hoffman
by Lawrence Bush on February 12, 2012
Fran Lee (Lederman), whose consumer advocacy led to New York’s “pooper-scooper” law in 1978, died in Jerusalem at age 99 on this date in 2010. As a radio and television personality from the 1940s to the 1990s (appearing on the Tonight Show, Steve Allen Show, etc. as Mrs. Fix-It, Mrs. Consumer, or Granny Franny), she took on cyclamates, asbestos, and other dangerous products while “simultaneously encapsulating Ralph Nader, a favorite Jewish grandmother and a foghorn,” according to her New York Times obituary. In the 1970s Lee launched the Children Before Dogs campaign, with the goal of eliminating dog waste (which can cause a roundworm-based disease in children) from the city’s streets. Her activism led to the enactment of the Canine Waste Law on August 1, 1978. The law was challenged as a violation of religious freedom for Orthodox Jews (who are forbidden from scooping on the sabbath) but was sustained in court. Cities that followed New York (with clean shoe soles) include San Francisco, Houston, Washington, DC, Raleigh, NC, and Lebanon, NH, which DNA-tests abandoned poop to locate scofflaws.
“I’m telling you manufacturers right now: Lay off Fran Lee. I’m not afraid of you. You can’t buy me, you can’t bribe me and you can’t tell me to be sweet.” —Fran Lee
Bernard (Benny) Rothman, a Romanian-born political activist in the United Kingdom, led a “mass trespass” of some five hundred “ramblers” (countryside walkers, mostly unemployed workers) on this date in 1932, to protest the lack of public access to broad swaths of public land in England and Wales. The protestors, mostly from Manchester, sang “The Internationale” and clashed violently with gameskeepers on Kinder Scout, a large plateau, resulting in six arrests. Rothman, who was among those arrested (he served four months in prison), was head of the British Workers Sports Federation in the North, which organized bike rides, camping trips, and rambles. The protest led to the passage, in 1949, of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, which ended upper-class monopoly over access to Great Britain’s public land. Three decades later, Rothman helped to mobilize renewed protests against Margaret Thatcher’s environmental and property-use policies. He died in 2002. For a video featuring Ewan MacColl’s song about the Mass Trespass, click here.
