Everything about Jonah Raskin totally explained
Jonah Raskin (born
January 3,
1942), an American writer who left an East Coast university teaching position to participate in the 1970s radical counterculture as a free-lance journalist, returned to the academy in California in the 1980s 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.
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.
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. Raskin turned his Ph.D. thesis into a book entitled
The Mythology of Imperialism, which Random House published in 1971.
The New York Times called it "Maoist" literary criticism.
Edward Said, the author of
Orientalism and
Culture and Imperialism, wrote in 1984 that it was "one of the genuinely important handful of book on modern literature published in the last two decades," and that "Raskin's quite unique feat was to have connected the genuine aesthetic power of the novelists to the political power of the culture abroad."
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. 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.
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. Raskin later interviewed Leary for
High Times magazine shortly before Leary’s death in 1996.
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.
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. 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'd 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.
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.
Raskin settled in
Sonoma County, California, in the winter of 1976, where he'd come to visit his parents, who had retired to the rural community of
Occidental. Gradually detaching 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.
Return to the University in the 1980s
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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's latest book is on
Jack London's political writing,
The Radical Jack London.
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