A Conversation with Mark Rudd
Mark Rudd, onetime leader of Students for a Democratic Society and its revolutionary offshoot, the Weathermen, sounds remarkably well adjusted for a man who spent the 1970s underground.
SDS was a national student activist group that developed in the early 1960s out of a widespread frustration among young people with the rank-and-file communist and socialist movements of their parents’ generation. Galvanized by the war in Vietnam and inspired by the Black Power movement, the group became a major organizing vehicle of the New Left.
Although in no way officially Jewish, SDS had a disproportionate number of Jewish leaders and members, including Rudd, a New Jersey native, who chaired the organization’s Columbia University chapter. Rudd was by his own admission something of a square – a radical, but not a hippie. James Simon Kunen, a sophomore at Columbia when Rudd was at the helm SDS, writes in his book The Strawberry Statement (Random House, 1969) that Rudd, “Public Figure, idol to the boppers of the nation, has neither horns nor rays of light emanating from his brow. He could be the boy next door, if he happened to live there.”
Rudd and his cohorts at Columbia brought SDS to national attention in 1968, when a student strike they had organized led to on-campus clashes with police. In the aftermath, Rudd and several others on the SDS National Committee committed themselves to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. The name of their faction, the Weathermen, recalled a line from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues: “you don’t need a weatherman/to know which way the wind blows.” An SDS convention in 1969 erupted into chaos when the Weathermen declared themselves the sole leaders of the organization. Unable to form a consensus, SDS disbanded.
In 1970, three Weathermen died when a bomb they had intended to plant at a military officers’ dance exploded in their Greenwich Village brownstone. Targeted by the FBI, Rudd and others went into hiding. They continued to plot mayhem against the government, but the three who died in Greenwich Village remained their only casualties. Rudd lived under assumed names until 1977, when he turned himself in. Because of FBI bungling, all charges were dropped.
Today, Rudd lives in Albuquerque, where he teaches mathematics at a community college and remains involved in progressive activism. In recent interviews and essays, he has expressed a mixture of amazement with the energy and commitment he and his comrades demonstrated in their youth, and ruefulness at their naiveté and use of violence. In 2005, Rudd gave a lecture at the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society in response to the question, “Why were there so many Jews in SDS?” New Voices spoke with Rudd about some of the ideas he brought up in his lecture, which deals with a particularly rich and complicated moment in the history of the American Jewish left.
I’d like to begin with something you said in your lecture: you rejected the thesis that most of the Jewish students in SDS grew up in radical circles. You suggested that many of the Jews in SDS came, like you, from Philip Rothian homes in the suburbs. Was there any tension between the students coming from leftist backgrounds and the kids from backgrounds like yours?
Mark Rudd: No, we liked them. We didn’t grow up with [radicalism], so it wasn’t natural for us. We learned a lot from them. Some of the red diaper babies were really angry at their parents. One guy I knew was angry at his father, who was CP [American Communist Party]. He thought his father was ridiculous, so what did he do? He went out and formed his own Maoist party! It would make an interesting psychological study.
You also mentioned that for sixties radicals who came from backgrounds like your own, radicalism was a way to become less Jewish and more cosmopolitan. That is interesting in light of the Jewish labor movements of the twenties and thirties, in which many Jewish immigrants became assimilated through their involvement with American socialism. Do you see any commonalities between your generation and that older generation, in terms of radicalism and assimilation?
MR: I think there were quite a few commonalities. The historian Paul Buhle argues that there are two paths within the left in the United States: a sort of foreign-born socialist orientation, and a nativist orientation. And they come together at certain times and places, like the American Communist Party, which was started by foreign-born socialists in 1917 in this country. Even so, it had an American element to it, and the foreigners always got off on the idea that they were becoming Americans. And they started SDS, too.
Can you talk a little more about how that confluence played out in SDS?
MR: Well, there were three different generations in SDS, and I was in the third. The first was heavily Jewish, and from the coasts, and from a few key Midwest places. Their number one theoretician, Tom Hayden, was Irish and from Michigan. That was sort of a feather in the cap for everybody. But then later, around ’65, ’66, a generation of leadership came in that was all from the center of the country. The leaders were people like Carl Davidson and Greg Calvert. It was called Prairie Power, and the old guard was on its way out. The third generation was the revolutionary kids, my age, who didn’t really get involved until ’67, ’68, and that group was again heavily Jewish. And I remember thinking, what a movement, because it involved not only New York Jews, but also these true Americans.
It sounds like it was successful, then, in allowing you to assimilate.
MR: I think so. I mean, I can literally never remember once having a conversation about being Jewish. But on the other hand, we brought with us certain baggage and certain limitations. Along national lines, racial, class. We had a white outlook, and were kind of in awe of black revolutionaries. We tended to not be from the working class. A lot of people got sort of hooked on the thing that they were not.
In spite of your understanding of white privilege, did you identify with black Americans because of the outsider status that you shared?
MR: Absolutely.
Do you think the black activists that you worked with had a similar sense of identification?
MR: I think the bottom line is, blacks and Jews tend to be attracted to each other, except when we’re killing each other. And I’ve found this in close friendships and political relationships with other non-white people, that there’s an attraction…and a repulsion. In New York in 1968, the repulsion was enormous because of the teacher’s strike [in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which pitted black students and their families against a predominantly Jewish group of teachers]. The strike became a symbolic issue for Black Power, Latino Power, of taking back the institutions. It also informed the radicalization of SDS, especially of our branch, the Weathermen. Our critique [of the situation] was that the United States had conquered this whole country, that internally there were these conquered people. And racism was an artifact of that material relationship.
During tense incidents like the teacher’s strike, did liberal Jews try to exculpate themselves from charges of racism by saying, “we’re not white, we’re Jewish”?
MR: You’ll find that to a large extent in the late sixties and the seventies, the urban Jews were in a race war with the blacks. This tends not to be discussed very much. Yes, there was a significant trend within mainstream Judaism that was pro-civil rights. And there were key people, like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rabbi Joachim Prinz of Newark, who were pro-black. But when it came to people’s own neighborhoods… Rabbi Prinz, for example, fled Newark with his congregation and built a giant new Reform temple twenty miles west. You had many liberals, but they themselves were not going to stay and raise their children in poverty and in a race war.
You mentioned in an earlier interview that you and your peers used the “€œgood Germans,’€\xc2\x9d whose inaction enabled the Nazis, as a standard for what you did not want to be. How did you make the leap from identification with the victims of the Holocaust – which might seem more intuitive – to identification with the oppressor?
MR: In the context of American war against the Vietnamese, we’re the Germans. We identified as Americans in the world. For us, it was crystal clear. But at the same time that we identified as Americans, there were right-wing Jews who identified as Jews in the world and preferred to focus on the oppression of Jews in Russia and the threat [to Israel] from Arabs.
Did you see the Soviet Jewry movement as right-wing?
MR: Absolutely. It justified the Cold War. We didn’t like the Cold War. The right-wingers did like the Cold War. Right-wing Jews identified as the true oppressed, but that brought them closer to the oppressors. They wanted to be Americans, and they are! I don’t want to be an American.
What do you think about contemporary progressive Jewish organizations like Brit Tzedek v’Shalom or Progressive Jewish Alliance – the groups that are the political descendants of Michael Lerner?
MR: When Michael Lerner comes to Albuquerque, he speaks at the big synagogue and argues with the official Jews, and that’s a good thing. I subscribe to Tikkun [Lerner’s magazine, which connects progressive politics to Jewish values], even though I don’t always agree with it. There’s a number of good organizations that I support financially, like Jewish Voices for Peace, based in Berkeley. In Albuquerque, there’s a Jewish peace alliance, and a Jewish renewal synagogue, of which I’m a member. This summer, when Israel invaded Lebanon, we got about fifty people out on a Friday night, protesting.
You’ve talked about being a diasporist, about believing that Jews do better in a diaspora than concentrated in a Jewish state. I’d like to hear more about that.
MR: In this world, for a Jewish state to thrive, it has to be aligned with an imperial power. And that in itself raises many problems. Not just ethical problems, but survival problems, because all empires fall. When you align with an empire it’s dangerous. Then there’s the aspect of displacing people who are on the land. I’m pretty democratic, I believe in one man, one vote. In my heart of hearts – not that it matters what I think, because I don’t live there – I think it would be so much nicer to have one democratic state, Israel-Palestine, than two states unequal states, each with their own racism. I don’t like nationalism. I don’t relate to it. It doesn’t make sense.
