Word: sds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...proteans, as the authors awkwardly refer to them, steered SDS for four years, eventually fading from prominence when their theories failed to translate into long-term success with projects such as ERAP. A new, non-Jewish psychological type grabbed the reins and evolved into what the 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...
...SMALL BODY of scholarship that bothers to examine the student movement's early years with any care, most commentary treats the SDS leadership with a degree of respect verging on reverence. "Ideological contamination," the authors of Roots call it, and they argue a convincing case for the generalization. The most-often cited secondary sources on SDS were written by people who openly proclaim their sympathy for, if not actual participation in, some aspect of the New Left. Kirkpatrick Sale, author of the meticulously detailed SDS, describes the group's charter members as "a remarkable group of people... committed, energetic, perceptive...
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...
...authors argue that the Jews who 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...
...student leaders. As both fans and critics of the New Left have noted the Jewish tradition of leadership in American and European radical movements, in addition to the Jews' unusual concern for other groups separated from the mainstream, must be prominent elements of any thorough portrait of the early SDS...