Why Were There So Many Jews In SDS?

Mark Rudd, a former member of The Weathermen, writes:

     I’ve been thinking about this subject for a long time, almost forty years, so I want to begin by thanking the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society for giving me this opportunity to organize my ideas.  I first spoke publicly about the question in 1988 at the twentieth anniversary celebration of the Columbia strike.  In a rambling 45 minute monologue I touched on a lot of subjects, but the only one people seemed to respond to was my recognition of our Jewish backgrounds as relevant to our opposition to the war and racism.  That was during a mini-revival of Judaism and Jewish culture which took place among the not so new New Leftists in the 80’s.  With the death of the socialist dream we were all searching for direction at the time.  Unfortunately, I haven’t pursued the subject until now, but I do believe that the revolt of Jewish youth in the New Left of the sixties and seventies deserves to be studied and honored as an important chapter in the history of American Jews.   

     Before beginning to write, I checked out the subject on the internet.  Googling the words “Jews and SDS,”  the number two site that popped up was a page from “Jew Watch,” which monitors the ZOG, that is the Zionist Occupation Government of the United States.  The piece was called, “How the Jews Controlled the New Left of the 1960’s.”  Reading down, I found some decent scholarly references concerning the numerical preponderance of Jewish leaders and rank-and-file members of the New Left and SDS, at least until the late 1960’s.  But at one point, with no warning, the anonymous author suddenly flips into analysis mode with this paragraph:

“Radical Jewish students tended to come from liberal if not radical homes. While their parents might express some opposition, often on tactical grounds, they were generally quite supportive. Indeed, many Jewish parents spoke with pride of their "revolutionary" children. During the 1968 Columbia upheavals, Mark Rudd’s mother commented: "My revolutionary helped me plant these tulips last November, my rebel." Rudd, in turn, according to the same New York Times story,

speaks of his parents with respect and affection, and they maintain that they are "100 percent behind him," even though they don’t agree with all his views. On Mother’s Day (during the riotous period at Columbia) his parents went to the Columbia campus and bought a veal parmigiana dinner, which the family ate in their parked car on Amsterdam Avenue. [New York Times, May 19, 1968, p. 1.]”

     I’m not sure whether the author is jealous of the close, accepting Jewish family, or more likely, merely Jewish humor-impaired, not recognizing my mother’s obvious sarcasm. 

     Originally I was astounded that a quote from my dear mother, Bertha F. Rudd—now age 93 and still healthy and sharp-as-a-tack, living in the Lester Senior Housing Independent Living Apartments of the Jewish Community Housing Agency at the Metrowest Jewish Community Center, in Whippany, N.J.—would appear on a rabidly anti-semitic website. But then I remembered that Bertha had served as the model for Woody Allen’s mother in the 1989 movie “New York Stories, Oedipus Wrecks” in which his mother appears in the sky over Manhattan to tell the whole city about his shortcomings.

     Anonymous anti-semites aside, the numbers on Jews in SDS are clear.  The author Paul Berman, himself a Jewish veteran of Columbia SDS, in his excellent book, “A Tale of Two Utopias,” gives the following data from reliable sources:  two-thirds of the white Freedom Riders who traveled to Mississippi were Jewish; a majority of the steering committee of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement were Jewish; the SDS chapters at Columbia and the University of Michigan were more than half Jewish; at Kent State in Ohio, where only 5 percent of the student body was Jewish, Jews constituted 19 percent of the chapter.  I might add a strange statistic which I became aware of in the course of two trips to Kent State to commemorate the events of May, 1970:  three of the four students shot by the National Guard at Kent State were Jewish.  This, of course, defies all odds.