1986 Interview Of Nat Hentoff: Good Stuff From A Complex, Influential Writer

[HuckleB]

http://www.csmonitor.com/1986/0502/bhent-f1.html

"IN ``Boston Boy'' (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, $15.95), Nat Hentoff tells of the time, as a teen-ager, he slipped and fell on the ice on Elm Hill Avenue. When he looked up, a gang of Irish kids were standing around him. Was he Jewish, they wanted to know? Desperate, the decidedly Jewish Nat decided to pretend he was Greek. After all, this was Boston around the late '30s, a time when gangs of Irish toughs stalked the neighborhood like wolf packs, looking for Jewish prey; a place where Father Coughlin's newspaper, Social Justice -- sold each Sunday throughout the city -- warned constantly of the Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

Later, Nat was less fortunate and had a tooth punched out when Irish youths caught him unprotected. But this time his Greek tactic allowed him to escape unscathed. What's more, a pop-music record he was clutching somehow remained unbroken.

Potent vignettes like these -- recalled from a mellow distance by a clear-eyed journalist -- trace the roots of Hentoff's social views as he tells of his life in Boston until the time he left for New York at age 28 to write about jazz in Down Beat magazine.

Hentoff's name was later to become virtually synonymous with fiercely independent stands -- on First Amendment rights, Middle Eastern politics, and many other social issues -- taken in his Village Voice and Washington Post columns, his books, and elsewhere. And that pop record he was clutching was an early sign of his other lifelong interest -- jazz -- which, in ``Boston Boy,'' serves as a frequent metaphor both for life and for the freedom of expression that means so much to him: Hentoff became a renowned jazz critic whose pieces are seen on the Leisure & Arts page of the Wall Street Journal and in other publications. Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and other jazz greats strengthened his ``life as heretic, a tradition I kept precisely because I am a Jew,'' he says in the book. These jazz musicians were ``my chief rabbis for many years.''

..."

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A great mid-week break, or so I think.

[Chef Eric]

1. There's a great documentary about Nat Hentoff.

It's called "The Pleasures of Being Out of Step."

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_pleasures_of_being_out_of_step/?search=pleasures%20of%20being%20out%20of%20step

[HuckleB]

2. It's good stuff!

[tishaLA]

3. he's a great jazz writer

and an anti-choice activist and an apologist for the invasion and occupation of Iraq who, despite all the deaths it caused, purports to be pro-life.

[Bluenorthwest]

4. I know him mostly from his anti-choice activism and his loud support for the Iraq War, Tony Blair

and his denigration of Democrats and others who opposed that invasion and who doubted the intel that was used to instigate that war. He believed Bush about the WMD and attacked those who did not.

So your theory is that sometimes such a man is correct about something?

[HuckleB]

5. So you agree with everything every person in your life thinks all of the time?

You've never made a mistake?

Interesting.