Lenni Brenner
Lenni Brenner (born 1937) is an American Marxist Trotskyist writer. In the 1960s, Brenner was a prominent civil rights activist and a prominent opponent of the Vietnam War.
Brenner was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. He became an atheist at age 10 or 12[1] and a Marxist at age 15.[1] Brenner's involvement with the American 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's 1963 "I Have a Dream" march on Washington. (Neither were Marxists.)
Brenner was arrested three times during civil rights sit-ins in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent 39 months in jail when a court revoked his probation for marijuana possession, because of his activities during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964.
He was an anti-war activist from the first days of the Vietnam War, speaking frequently at rallies in the Bay Area. In 1963 he organized the Committee for Narcotic Reform in Berkeley. In 1968 he co-founded the National Association for Irish Justice, the American affiliate of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.
In the 1990s, he and Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael), the legendary "Black Power" leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, co-founded the Committee against Zionism and Racism. They also published The Anti-War Activist.
In 2003, Brenner spoke at the inaugural meeting of Jews Against Zionism in London.
[edit] Writing
Brenner is the author of four books: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, Jews in America Today, and The Lesser Evil, a study of the Democratic Party. His books have been widely translated][2], and have been reviewed in 11 languages, to markedly mixed reviews.
His articles have also appeared in The Nation, Amsterdam News, Jewish Guardian, Atlanta Constitution, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Middle East International, Journal of Palestine Studies, New Statesman, Al-Fajr and United Irishman.
In 2002, he edited 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. It contains complete translations of many of the documents quoted in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and The Iron Wall. In 2004, he edited Jefferson & Madison On Separation of Church and State: Writings on Religion and Secularism.
Brenner is said to be working on a memoir, tentatively called The World's Grouchiest Marxist.
[edit] References
- ^ a b Lenni Brenner: biographical details
- ^ Zionism in the Age of the Dictators has been translated into Japanese: Fuashizumu jidai no shionizumu, by Shiba Kensuke (芝健介), Hosei Daigaku 2001, and German (in a revised edition), as Zionismus und Faschismus : über die unheimliche Zusammenarbeit von Zionisten und Faschisten, tr. Verena Gajewski Homilius, Kai, Berlin 2007
[edit] External links
- Lenni Brenner. Beyond the UN's Rhetoric: Holocaust History, CounterPunch, January 29, 2005.
- Lenni Brenner. The plot to stigmatize "51 Documents" on Amazon.com, CounterPunch, May 25, 2005.
- "It's All Rabbis and No Jews": An Interview with Lenni Brenner
