I CLOSE-UP
Solidarity
Forever
Many Detroit area radicals and activists
in the 1960s were Jewish. Some are still
trying to change the world.
LAURIE MAYERS
Special to The Jewish News
ilr
he last few years have
been inundated with
20-year retrospectives on
everything from the re-
lease of the Sergeant Pep-
per album to the violence of the 1968
Democratic convention — so much so
that it sometimes seemed the most in-
_ teresting thing about 1988 was that
it was 20 years after 1968.
But even,after the recent death of
Yippie Abbie Hoffman and the 19-
year anniversary of the Kent State
shootings this month, political ac-
tivism is not ancient history.
Certainly, some things have
changed. Two decades ago at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor,
civil disobedience meant more than
vandalism after the big game. In
1960, U-M students picketed
Woolworth and Kresge stores, which
practiced segregation in the South. In
1970, to protest the Vietnam War,
members of Students for a Democra-
tic Society (SDS) disrupted visits by
military and corporate recruiters and
broke windows at the ROTC building.
Two decades ago in Detroit, crack
cocaine was nonexistent, but plenty
of young people were experimenting
with LSD, marijuana and speed. A
walk-in clinic in Detroit called Open
City offered free services to men and
women who wanted help.
Although segregation is no longer
legal, the Vietnam Was is over and
Open City is closed, those dedicated
to their causes remain. Many radicals
and activists from the 1960s and
1970s are Jewish, and many are still
trying to change the world.
A
lan Haber saw the birth of
SDS, which began as a move-
ment for participatory
democracy and ended a dozen years
later known best for its paramilitary
splinter group, the Weathermen.
Haber, a student at U-M, became
active in the socialist Student League
for Industrial Democracy, which in
1960 changed its name to the
24
Students fora Democratic Society. He
was elected president at the first na-
tional SDS convention, and, back in
Ann Arbor, recruited for the SDS the
-Mighigan Daily editor who was to
become one of the most famous
figures of the age, Tom Hayden. In
Democracy Is in the Streets, James
Miller's history of the SDS, Hayden
describes Haber in 1960:
"He was the campus radical. He
had a beard and a lot of books and he
just knew a lot, and he was much
older than anyone else, and he came
over to talk to me about the sit-in
movement." Hayden wrote an
editorial supporting the sit-ins and
joined SDS.
As president, Haber organized an
intellectual framework for the SDS,
set goals and recruited hundreds of
new members. At its 1962 convention
at a United Auto Workers' camp in
Port Huron, members elected Hayden
to succeed Haber and endorsed a
manifesto written by Haden which
began, "We are people of this genera-
tion, bred in at least modest comfort,
housed now in universities, looking
uncomfortably to the world we in-
herit."
Haber, a long-time undergradu-
ate, earned a degree in history in
1965. He moved to California in 1968,
but frequently comes back to Ann Ar-
bor where his mother lives. Haber,
now 52, and his wife, Odile Hugonot,
came through Ann Arbor last month
on their way to Greece and Israel to
organize a peace conference. The con-
ference will be held next year, they
hope, in Israel in the ancient region
of Megiddo, from which the word Ar-
mageddon comes.
Haber and Hugonot are co-
creators of the Long Haul, an
organization that works with the
homeless in Berkeley, Calif. She is a
nurse. He is a furniture maker and is
building two arks for the University
of Michigan Hillel Foundation.
.
Haber is optimistic about young
people and the future of the nation.
"I think young people have a kind of
cynicism about their capacity to in-
fluence society because of duplicity in
FRIDAY, MAY 12, 1989
•
government;' he said. "But there's
also a lot of lively expression and en-
thusiasm."
A
llison Lewis Friedman didn't
become involved in counter-
cultural activities until she
was in graduate school at Wayne
State University. She finished her
bachelor's degree in nursing in 1965
and was working on her master's
degree in nursing and psychiatry.
"While I was at Wayne, the drug
problem had really started to hit, par-
ticularly with acid," she said. Mean-
while, Friedman's roommate, Cathie
Kurek, also a nurse, was dating cam-
pus activist Harvey Ovshinsky. They
are now married. In 1969, Ovshinsky
started a free walk-in legal and
medical clinic above an old storefront
on Third Street and called it Open Ci-
ty. "There wasn't any place where
people with long hair and no money
could go," Ovshinsky recalled.
Friedman said her roommate
"came back one day and said Harvey
was trying to get this clinic started
and they really needed some nursing
input." Friedman, who was working
in psychiatrics and mental health,
began volunteering at Open City.
"I'll never forget one kid who
came in;' she said. "He was so com-
mitted to the movement that every
penny he earned he would use to buy
paper and run a press so he could run
off fliers that would be distributed all
over the city and the campus . . . He
was obsessed with the movement."
The youth's commitment left him
"thin as a rail" and anemic, she said.
After Friedman finished graduate
school, she married and moved to the
suburbs. At a New Year's party, she
met a man trying to start a program
in the northern suburbs for young
people with drug-abuse problems.
"The story he told me was that there
was a group of kids in the Birming-
ham-Bloomfield area that wanted to
do something for their friends they
saw going bonkers in school every
day;" she recalled.
Adults would come up with money
for the project, and it needed a direc-
tor. Friedman was teaching at Wayne
and didn't want to take a new posi-
tion, but she found the first director,
Norm Olshansky, and joined the