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Lenni Brenner (born 1937), formerly known as Leonard Glaser or Lenny Glaser, [lower-alpha 1] is an American Trotskyist writer. In the 1960s, Brenner was a prominent civil rights movement activist and vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Since the 1980s, his activism has focused on anti-Zionism. He has published widely on the history of Zionism, in particular asserting that the movement collaborated with the Nazis.
Brenner was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1937. [1] He says he developed an early interest in history from reading Hendrik Willem van Loon's The Story of Mankind at age seven, which his brother had received as a bar mitzvah present. [1] [2] He had no interest in Jewish issues until around 1973, since, Brenner has remarked, he hailed from a milieu that frequented the synagogue only until the bar mitzvah rite was completed. [lower-alpha 2]
Brenner has recounted that his involvement with the Civil Rights Movement began when he met James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, later the organizer of the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s. He also worked with Bayard Rustin, later the organizer of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. [1] Brenner was arrested three times during civil rights sit-ins in the San Francisco Bay Area, [1] In an article in the San Francisco Examiner Brenner, together with Mike Myerson, was identified as a member of the W.E.B. Du Bois youth wing of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) within the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination (AHCED). [3]
Brenner, then known as Glaser, came to Berkeley in 1962. A bid to enroll in the orthodox Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party was rejected though he was permitted to join its youth branch, from which he was expelled for ignoring an order that he desist from talking about drug reform at street rallies. [4] In February 1964, he was arrested on a drug charge and put on probation for marijuana possession. [5] [lower-alpha 3]
Though a non-student, [6] Brenner at UC had become by this time a long-time campus orator, [7] a familiar if solitary figure on the Berkeley campus (UC), where he delivered passionate tirades to passing students while protesting issues like Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the papal opposition to birth control, while also advocating for the legalization of marijuana. [8] On the missile crisis he once delivered a non-stop speech from noon to midnight at Bancroft and Telegraph Avenue in 1962. [4] [lower-alpha 4] That venue was not thought to be on University property. [lower-alpha 5] The UC, under Chancellor Clark Kerr, who believed Communist influence lay behind the Free Speech Movement (FSM), [9] had recently banned political activities on campus, and speakers were obliged to address passers-by outside, on city-owned property, though card-tables with leaflets were permitted a few steps inside. On September 14, 1964, the University administration extended its ban, in effect from the 21st., to these card tables on the 26 foot brick walkway, technically also University property, just outside the campus entrance. [10] The tightening of this regulation triggered a wave of defiance, with students challenging the order by moving the card-tables inside the campus grounds. [4]
On October 1, 1964, Jack Weinberg a student of mathematics who had graduated with great distinction, [11] challenged the ruling by setting up one such card table in Sproul Plaza. He was collecting funds for Congress of Racial Equality(CORE): [7] a number of campus activists at the time, [12] including philosophy student Mario Savio, were spending their summers aiding the civil rights movement to get Afro-Americans to register for a vote in the face of Ku Klux Klan violence. [13]
After Weinberg refused to identify himself to emissaries of the dean, a lieutenant from the campus police was called in and informed him of the infraction. [14] Outnumbered, the policeman then left and came back with three more officers who arrested Weinberg for trespass and for violating the regulation against political activity. [15] [12] Weinberg, using a passive disobedience technique, went limp and had to be hauled to a police car, which was almost immediately encircled by hundreds of students. [11] [7] Brenner, In what has been described as an "historic event," [7] [lower-alpha 6] is generally reported [lower-alpha 7] to have been the first in the crowd to try and physically block the exit of the police vehicle detaining Weinberg by Weinberg by rolling under it. [16] [6] Several hundred [lower-alpha 8] joined him and the car remained "entrapped" for 32 hours. In response, 643 police were assembled on the campus by 2 October. [18] The hood of the car was turned into a platform where Savio, and one source claims Brenner himself, [19] [lower-alpha 9] made speeches and Joan Baez sang before a growing student crowd of thousands.
Brenner, though present, later stated he was opposed to the ensuing demonstration, and that he had approached the car and asked Weinberg if he wanted to get out. Weinberg replied negatively saying that his presence there was of symbolic value. [4] The University authorities regarded Brenner as a trouble-maker. Some days after the incident, the University police contacted Brenner's probation officer expressing concern that his exceptional rhetorical talents might induce "mob action or violence" on the campus. [4] According to David Goines, Brenner was then arrested when a policemen observed him accepting a beer from a passer-by and charged him with drinking in public. [lower-alpha 10] This charge signified legally that he had violated the terms of his three year probation. [20] [lower-alpha 11]
Lewis Feuer frequently referred to Brenner (Glaser) as the nihilistic Nechayev of the FSM, the evil genius behind the movement. [4] The UC sent a representative to testify against Brenner's probation while Brenner was denied the right to call witnesses on his own behalf. The court ruling revoked his probation on the grounds that he had obstructed police in the execution of their duties. [21] [1] He was sentenced to 1 to 10 years' imprisonment. Brenner's appeal against his conviction was turned down by Judge Richard Sims who however, according to Brenner, wrote that he was troubled by Judge Dieden's ruling. For Sims, Brenner was not a felon. If he were mentally ill, referral to an appropriate institution would have been proper. Were he a trespassing social malcontent, he should have been judged for a normal misdemeanour. [4]
UC faculty scholar William Petersen wrote an extensive report on the incident which, on 17 May 1965, was read into a Senate inquiry into putative Communist influence on American universities into internal security laws. In it Petersen described Brenner as a convicted narcotics user who assaulted police. [15] Brenner subsequently spent 39 months in jail at California Men's Colony. [22] In the Oakland lockup, while waiting to be sent to the state penitentiary, he met and had intense discussions with Huey Newton. [2] [1] He recalls that his time in prison enabled him to read widely in the library, enjoy free medical care, and engage with some of the "most impressive & intelligent people" he encountered in the 60s decade. [22]
Brenner was released on January 22, 1968, after serving a term of 3 years and 3 months. [23] In a memoir of the period, one of the FSM leaders, Michael Rossman [24] argued that the movement, in failing to stand by Brenner when he was targeted by the authorities, had effectively betrayed him and his distinctive campus voice. [8]
Brenner joined in the Free Speech Movement when it emerged on campus in the mid-1960s. [8] He was an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War. [25] In 1968 he co-founded the National Association for Irish Justice, the American affiliate of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. [25]
In the 1990s, he and the Black Power leader Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael) co-founded a Committee against Zionism and Racism. [25] They also published The Anti-War Activist. [25] In the early 2000s, he also became active in endeavouring to organize a Coalition for Narcotic Law Reform in the US. [25]
Brenner spoke at an Israeli Apartheid Week event in 2011 at Berlin, Connecticut.
His books have been widely translated and reviewed in 11 languages. His books have been reviewed in the London Times , the London Review of Books , Booklist magazine, and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs . [26]
His articles have also appeared in publications related to the Middle East and identifying with the political left, including The Nation , Amsterdam News , [lower-alpha 12] Atlanta Constitution , Washington Report on Middle East Affairs , Middle East Policy , Journal of Palestine Studies , New Statesman , Al-Fajr and United Irishman .[ citation needed ]
The Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust denial platform, has cited, promoted, and sold Brenner's work. [27] [28] Brenner has opposed his work being used by those on the far right, and those engaged in Holocaust denial. [27] Antisemitism scholar Kenneth S. Stern has described Brenner as antisemitic. [lower-alpha 13] Brenner says that since he is Jewish, rather than being called an "anti-Semite", he is often called a "self-hating Jew". [lower-alpha 14]
Anti-Zionist activist Uri Davis positively reviewed both Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983) and The Iron Wall (1984) for Race and Class . [29] He said that both works contained invaluable information and documentation, but had uneven quality. In Davis's view, the former book was an important "work informed by the moral and the political insight of the author as an anti-Zionist scholar". [30] Davis found the thrust of the latter study, despite its impeccable documentation, somewhat weakened by passages of "pseudo-Freudian causal explanations" that Brenner wrote to supplement his political analysis. Secondly Davis says that Brenner makes "repeated irresponsible political statements verging on the nonsensensical", such as Brenner's notion that, were it not for the presence of the British army, the tiny Zionist yishuv would have been driven into the sea. [31]
In 2016, British socialist politician Ken Livingstone praised Brenner's book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators while defending comments he made about Adolf Hitler which were widely considered antisemitic, helping to spark a controversy about Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party. [27] [32] [33] Historian of Nazi Germany Michael Burleigh said that Brenner and Livingstone "strain[ed] the objectively episodic and marginal into something maliciously significant". [34]
Brenner has authored, co-authored and edited a number of books:
The wind blows a piece of paper into the law courts and it takes a yoke of oxen to get it out. [4]
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Lehi, often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang, was a Zionist paramilitary militant organization founded by Avraham ("Yair") Stern in Mandatory Palestine. Its avowed aim was to evict the British authorities from Palestine by use of violence, allowing unrestricted immigration of Jews and the formation of a Jewish state. It was initially called the National Military Organization in Israel, upon being founded in August 1940, but was renamed Lehi one month later. The group referred to its members as terrorists and admitted to having carried out acts of terrorism.
Mario Savio was an American activist and a key member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He is most famous for his passionate speeches, especially the "Bodies Upon the Gears" address given at Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley on December 2, 1964.
Revisionist Zionism is a form of Zionism characterized by territorial maximalism. Revisionist Zionism promoted expansionism and the establishment of a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan River.
The Polish 1968 political crisis, also known in Poland as March 1968, Students' March, or March events, was a series of major student, intellectual and other protests against the ruling Polish United Workers' Party of the Polish People's Republic. The crisis led to the suppression of student strikes by security forces in all major academic centres across the country and the subsequent repression of the Polish dissident movement. It was also accompanied by mass emigration following an antisemitic campaign waged by the minister of internal affairs, General Mieczysław Moczar, with the approval of First Secretary Władysław Gomułka of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). The protests overlapped with the events of the Prague Spring in neighboring Czechoslovakia – raising new hopes of democratic reforms among the intelligentsia. The Czechoslovak unrest culminated in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on 20 August 1968.
Antisemitism at universities has been reported and supported since the medieval period and, more recently, resisted and studied. Antisemitism has been manifested in various policies and practices, such as restricting the admission of Jewish students by a Jewish quota, or ostracism, intimidation, or violence against Jewish students, as well as in the hiring, retention and treatment of Jewish faculty and staff. In some instances, universities have been accused of condoning the development of antisemitic cultures on campus.
The Zionist Freedom Alliance (ZFA) is a Zionist movement that advocates Israel's moral, legal and historic rights for the Jewish people to the entire Land of Israel, which they consider to include the territory captured during the 1967 Six-Day War. It was established in 1999 by Magshimey Herut activists in response to what they perceived to be growing anti-Israel sentiment among young people throughout the world. ZFA claims that their narrative has not been presented since before the start of the Oslo peace process and that this has resulted in the world's ignorance of Israel's claim to all territory between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. ZFA views Zionism as a revolutionary struggle and itself as the voice of Jewish national liberation. Its members are both religious and non-religious Jews.
Perdition is a 1987 stage play by Jim Allen. Its premiere at London's Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, in a production directed by Ken Loach, was abandoned because of protests, and criticism by two historians, over its controversial and tendentious claims.
SLATE, a pioneer organization of the New Left and precursor of the Free Speech Movement and formative counterculture era, was a campus political party at the University of California, Berkeley from 1958 to 1966.
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—a region partly coinciding with the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way.
Revisionist Maximalism was a short-lived right-wing militant political ideology and Jewish militant ideology which was part of the Brit HaBirionim faction of the Zionist Revisionist Movement (ZRM) created by Abba Ahimeir.
The 1960s Berkeley protests were a series of events at the University of California, Berkeley, and Berkeley, California. Many of these protests were a small part of the larger Free Speech Movement, which had national implications and constituted the onset of the counterculture of the 1960s. These protests were headed under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and others.
Wir Juden is a 1934 book by German rabbi Joachim Prinz that concerns Hitler's rise to power as a demonstration of the defeat of liberalism and assimilation as a solution for the "Jewish Question", and advocated a Zionist alternative to save German Jews. The book urged German Jews to escape National Socialist persecution by emigrating to Palestine. Prinz himself was expelled in 1937, travelling to the US where he became a leader of the American Jewish community and the Civil Rights Movement.
The Muslim Student Union of the University of California, Irvine is a student organization at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in Irvine, United States, and an affiliated chapter of the national Muslim Students' Association. Its self-declared mission is to create an open environment, to promote social awareness, to strengthen Islamic foundations, and to cater to the Muslim student community at UCI.
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio. Other student leaders include Jack Weinberg, Tom Miller, Michael Rossman, George Barton, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Michael Teal, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg and others.
The AMCHA Initiative is a non-advocacy group that combats antisemitism on campuses through investigation, documentation, and education in order to protect Jewish students from assault and fear. In that capacity, it has sought to undermine BDS activities on campuses. AMCHA was founded in 2012 by University of California Santa Cruz lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and University of California Los Angeles Professor Emeritus Leila Beckwith. The term Amcha is Hebrew for "your people" or "your nation."
Students for Justice in Palestine is a pro-Palestinian college student activism organization in the United States, Canada and New Zealand. It has campaigned for boycott and divestment against corporations that deal with Israel and organized events about Israel's human rights violations. In 2011, The New York Times reported that "S.J.P., founded in 2001 at the University of California, Berkeley, has become the leading pro-Palestinian voice on campus."
Jack Weinberg is an American environmental activist and former New Left activist who is best known for his role in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964.
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators is a 1983 work by the American free-lance journalist, outspoken pro-Palestinian activist, Trotskyist and Jewish author Lenni Brenner. The book makes the argument that Zionist leaders collaborated with fascism, particularly in Nazi Germany, in order to build up a Jewish presence in Palestine.
Alliance of Libertarian Activists (ALA) was a libertarian student organization primarily located in the San Francisco Bay area, mostly active at University of California, Berkeley, established in 1965–1966, and considered the first campus group to adopt the term “libertarian.” ALA gained members from both the purged Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) Moïse Tshombe chapter and the Cal Conservatives for Political Action (CCPA) at UC Berkeley, which was a continuation of the 1964 Cal Students for Goldwater, both founded and first chaired by Dan Rosenthal.
Zionist antisemitism or antisemitic Zionism refers to a phenomenon in which antisemites express support for Zionism and the State of Israel. In some cases, this support may be promoted for explicitly antisemitic reasons. Historically, this type of antisemitism has been most notable among Christian Zionists, who may perpetrate religious antisemitism while being outspoken in their support for Jewish sovereignty in Israel due to their interpretation of Christian eschatology. Similarly, people who identify with the political far-right, particularly in Europe and the United States, may support the Zionist movement because they seek to expel Jews from their country and see Zionism as the least complicated method of achieving this goal and satisfying their racial antisemitism.
