Jerry Rubin Quotes

Politics is how you live your life, not whom you vote for.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld advised aspiring comedian Brad Isaac that, because daily writing was the key to writing better jokes, Isaac should buy a calendar with a box for every day of the year, and every day, after writing, cross off the day with a big red X. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld explained. “You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.

Until you're prepared to kill your parents, you're not really prepared to change the country, because our parents are our first oppressors.

In early December 1971, he signed a rather flat defense of Bob Dylan, who had suffered months of harassment from a “fan” named A. J. Weberman: “A.J. claims everything Dylan writes is either about Weberman or about heroin. What bullshit,” the letter read. “It is time we defended and loved each other—and saved our anger for the true enemy, whose ignorance and greed destroys our planet.” The letter was signed: “The Rock Liberation Front, David Peel, Jerry Rubin, Yoko Ono, John Lennon.

Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, it was commonly known as MOBE. The key words were mobilization and end. MOBE was not going to listen to a three-point plan like Bobby Kennedy’s. Nothing less than a definitive and absolute end to the war in Vietnam was acceptable. David Dellinger was MOBE’s main coordinator. Dellinger was not one of the kids. He was Gene McCarthy’s age, fifty-two, a lifelong pacifist. During World War II, when nothing like the antiwar fervor of the 1960s could have been imagined, David Dellinger refused to serve in the military and was imprisoned. He had a history in radical pacifism like no one else in the anti-Vietnam movement. By 1967, Dave Dellinger’s time had finally come. Dellinger coordinated the October 21 march with a man of a totally different stripe, twenty-nine-year-old Jerry Rubin, whose activism was born in the Berkeley Free Speech movement of 1964. Rubin dropped out of Berkeley then and had been making trouble for establishments ever since. Rubin’s radical style seemed frivolous compared to Dellinger’s. Jerry Rubin mixed stunts, costumes, nudity, drugs, music, and jokes. Rubin concocted a theatrical potion intended

Among non-Jewish Jews there have been some who, in addition to their alienation from Jewish roots, have not felt rooted in the non-Jewish society in which they lived. During the last century, some of these Jews have contributed to intense Jew-hatred. These are radical and revolutionary Jews. The reasons for the antisemitism they engender are unique. First, their challenges to non-Jews do not come from within Judaism. Second, they not only challenge the non-Jews’ values, but the non-Jews’ national and religious identity as well. Third, they are as opposed to Jews’ values and identity as to non-Jews’. Nevertheless, and unfortunately for other Jews, the behavior of these radical non-Jewish Jews is identified as Jewish. The association of Jews with revolutionary doctrines and social upheaval has not, unfortunately, been the product of antisemites’ imaginations. Marx, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rosa Luxemburg, Béla Kun, Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin,William Kunstler, Norman G. Finkelstein, and Noam Chomsky are among the better known.2 The phenomenon of the highly disproportionate role played by Jews in radical causes often has been commented upon. As the social psychologist Ernest van den Haag noted, “although very few Jews are radicals, very many radicals are Jews: out of one hundred Jews five may be radicals, but out of ten radicals five are likely to be Jewish. Thus it is incorrect to say that a very great number of Jews are radicals but quite correct to say that a disproportionate number of radicals are Jews. This was so in the past, and it has not changed.”3 How are these Jewish radicals made and why do they cause antisemitism? The making of a Jewish radical is a complex social and psychological process but its essential elements can be discerned. First, these individuals have inherited a tradition of thousands of years of Jews challenging others’ values—though of course in the name of Judaism and ethical monotheism rather than radical secular ideologies. Non-Jewish Jews do not base their radical doctrines on the Jewish tradition; indeed, they usually denigrate it, but the tradition’s impact could not be avoided, only transformed.4 Second, radical non-Jewish Jews are rootless in that they do not feel rooted in either the Gentiles’ or the Jews’ religion or nation. They may very well have become revolutionaries precisely to overcome this root-lessness or alienation. Because they refuse to become like the non-Jews by identifying with the non-Jews’ religious or national identities, they seek to have non-Jews (and Jews) become like them, alienated from all religious or national identities. Only then, these revolutionaries believe, will they cease to feel alienated.

phrase from James Collins and Jerry Porras’s book Built to Last: “BHAG—Big Hairy Audacious Goals, all the way. I resisted this for years, thinking that to shoot too high only meant I would fail. What I didn’t realize was that shooting high motivated me much more.