THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Friday, November 29, 1985
of stuff that the administration didn't
want. Along with the rest of the staff, I
was forced to resign. Then," smiled Hen-
toff, "I became very interested in this
stuff."
Justice and decency — the "borscht" of
life — may have been on Hentoff's mind,
but his first professional moves were in
jazz criticsm. Hentoff had always been
pulled toward music. In fact, "The first
music that ever hit me hard," he said,
"was cantorial music — deep Jewish blues.
Also, there was a synagogue not far from
where I lived in the Roxbury section of
Boston where klezmerim would play
almost every day. And I would run and
hear them. There's a lot of jazz in that, you
know."
Hentoff is perplexed that there have
been so few great Jewish jazz musicians.
"Every player who turned things around
has been black," he said. "There have been
a number of really first-class jazz players
who have been Jewish. But with the em-
phasis in Jewish secular and religious
music on improvisation, I would expect
more to come out of that tradition.
Somehow it hasn't."
In the late 1940's and early 1950's, Hen-
toff wrote and MC'ed a jazz show for a
Boston radio station. He became associate
editor for Downbeat magazine in New
York and music adviser for several CBS-
TV shows. He knew the jazz greats —
Duke Ellington, Jack Teagarden, Benny
Goodman — and would sit backstage and
rap or go out on the road with them.
From that, says Hentoff, his journalism
"inevitably" broadened. "The guys I knew
in jazz," he said, "were mostly black. I
would hear things from them about civil
rights long before there was a civil rights
movement." Hentoff heard about the
schools in different parts of the country,
about "gas station attendents in Connec-
ticut locking the door to the men's room
as Count Basie's band pulled in for a fill-
up. Civil rights is an ineluctable part of
jazz because that's what conversations are
all about. Jazz is about people's lives."
Almost three decades ago, Hentoff mov-
ed his typewriter to The _Village Voice.
Ever since, his weekly, 2,000-word col-
umns have been devoted to "peoples'
lives." He has written about a West
Virginia librarian's battle against book
Hentoff's knees do not
jerk — politically. He is a
"nuclear pacifist," a
pro-lifer, a Zionist who
frets over Israeli militar-
ism, and a liberal who
considers Meir Kahane "a
valuable intellectual
force."
censorship; the efforts of two Orthodox
public school students in Virginia to
change the date of their graduation from
a Saturday to a Sunday so they could at-
tend; the jailing without trial of a black
woman suspected of drug dealing; the con-
demnation of Huck Finn by a southern
school district because Mark Twain used
the word "nigger" 160 times; and efforts
by that archetypical liberal, Jane Fonda,
to suppress an "unauthorized" biography
of her.
As with most of what goes into the
Voice, Hentoff makes little attempt to
curry favor. Readers' reactions to his col-
umns can vary from outraged to indig-
nant. But at least, judging from the
volume of mail that is printed about his
words, Hentoff knows he is being read.
And sometimes, for a writer, that is all one
can hope for.
One of the few times, though, that Hen-
toff genuinely feared for his well being
after he had written something was dur-
ing the summer of 1982. Israel had just in-
vaded Lebanon, carnage was everywhere
and American Jews, wrote Hentoff, were
silently acquiescing to a new Israeli
militancy. Never a fan of the shananigans
of either Menacham Begin or of Ariel
Sharon ("a veritable Haman to the Palesti-
nians"), Hentoff worried that their
destruction of Israel "from within" would
lead to its survival only as a "splendid, as-
toundingly armed golem."
Hentoff jumped on American Jews'
mute reaction to the Israeli invasion.
"They are convinced," he wrote, "that
Israel's only hope for survival is totally
unified support of the Jewish state ... This
approach to even the most viciously
degrading Israeli represssions in the oc-
cupied territories deprives Israel of the
kinds of criticism it most needs to hear —
if Israel is to survive as something better
than South Africa."
Asked Hentoff, "Where are you,
American Jews who would save Israel?"
Hentoff heard from Jews, but not those
whom he had hoped would "save" Israel.
The death threats against him seemed
authentic enough for Hentoff to notify the
police. "It was just astonishing," said
Hentoff. "Everyone wanted me to die.
There was a blind loyalty that Begin must
Continued on next page
15