Word: rothman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...authors call the rigid authoritarian rebel": all of the protean's hang-ups, minus his respect for intellectual matters and his adherence to non-violent tactics. Total immersion in anti-war protest became inevitable after the huge U.S. troop deployments of 1965 and intensification of the draft, say Rothman and Lichter, and the New Left became a "carrier movement" for "irrationalism, spontaneous action [and] social disruption." In their view, style came to dominate content, and "the dynamic of escalating protest forced [young people] either to embrace all-out revolution by 'any means necessary' or to withdraw from the field...
...Rothman and Lichter take the opposite approach, searching for self-interest even in the halcyon formative stages of SDS. Their initial quantitative ethnic survey of group members finds that over half of the initial SDS leadership was Jewish, rather than the more commonly accepted estimate in Sale's book of "perhaps a third." Operating with that in mind, the authors offer a complicated two-pronged assessment: 1) Jewish psychological defense mechanisms, not radical idealism, sparked what turned out to be a valuable new critique of American society and 2) when the original leadership gave way to a largely non-Jewish...
...joined Tom Hayden and other gentiles in shaping SDS carried with them an urge to overcome a form of ethnic alienation generally referred to as "marginality." Though that analysis has been used for decades to explain Jews' affinity for progressive politics in this country, as well as in Europe. Rothman and Lichter customize the proposition by divining from their charts and graphs that this particular group of Jews subconsciously strove to destroy the essentially "Christian institutions which helped keep them on the "margin" of American society. Compounding this psychological maelstrom, say the authors, was a tendency toward authoritarianism within...
...Rothman and Lichter call this phenomenon the "protean form of psycho-political rebellion" because the (Jewish) rebels sought out "change, flux, and fluidity... [aiming] at the continual destruction of social institutions, insofar as they interfere[d] with individual experimentation...
...piling the sociological data to new heights. Rothman and Lichter do not add much to these conclusions. Moreover, when the authors take the Jewish theme to its extreme, intertwining it with their SDS caricatures of various "rebel" types, they settle into some dubious armchair psychoanalysis...