News
New Jersey Jewish News: Mark Rudd Profiled
The famed '60s radical and Maplewood native talks to NJJN about his life and his mother.
Before he joined the Weather Underground and became one of the most visible figures in American radical politics in the 1960s, Mark Rudd cut a far more nebbish persona. In his recently published memoir Underground, the Maplewood native describes his pre-radical college days in modest terms.
“[I was a] Jewish pisher from the New Jersey suburbs, in a leather armchair, sipping sherry and chatting with a WASP assistant dean about Plato.”
His Judaism would be the impetus for his actions in protest of the Vietnam war and of American racism. He viewed the war and the civil rights struggle in the light of the evil of the Holocaust, and cast in his lot with Students for a Democratic Society. He became an SDS leader, and helped lead the group during its seizure of several Columbia buildings. A tumultuous life in sometimes violent radical politics led him to go underground in the '70s until he surfaced to enjoy a family dinner of chicken soup and matzo balls in Maplewood.
Read the full story: How a Suburban "Pisher" became an urban guerilla.
Email
Log in to add your comment!