23 Facts About Jonah Raskin

Jonah Raskin's parents were Communists in the 1930s and 1940s, but as his father became a successful attorney in the 1950s, they concealed their radical politics and were careful to blend into their middle-class community.

Hiding, dissembling, and disguising would become persistent themes in Jonah Raskin's writing, along with the personas of the exile and the fugitive.

Jonah Raskin gave every appearance of being the all-American teenager; he was co-captain of his high school football team, and named to Newsday's All-Suffolk Football Squad in 1958.

Jonah Raskin worked as a sports reporter for The Long Islander in his last year of high school.

Jonah Raskin taught at Winston-Salem State College in the summer of 1964, then married and moved to England in the fall to study British and American literature at the University of Manchester.

Jonah Raskin was arrested and beaten by New York police in December 1969 after smashing windows in a street demonstration organized by Weatherman.

Jonah Raskin joined Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner in the Youth International Party in 1967, and was designated its Minister of Education in 1970.

Jonah Raskin traveled to Algiers with Jennifer Dohrn as part of a Yippie delegation in October 1970 to meet with Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary, whom the Weather Underground had helped escape from a low-security prison in California.

Jonah Raskin later interviewed Leary for High Times magazine shortly before Leary's death in 1996.

Jonah Raskin helped Abbie Hoffman go underground in 1974, and traveled with him when he was a fugitive for much of the 1970s, coming into contact with the Weather Underground, a subject he addressed in an autobiographical novel, Underground.

In 1974 Jonah Raskin compiled and wrote an introduction to a collection of Weather Underground communiques, The Weather Eye, and set up an imprint, Union Square Press, to publish the work.

Jonah Raskin's introduction was academic in tone, and gave no hint that he'd had a hand in drafting the statement, "New Morning, Changing Weather", that adopted a more moderate tone and began the process of Weather leaders resurfacing from the underground.

Jonah Raskin covered the trial of the Panther 21 in New York in 1970, and wrote about such fugitives and prisoners as Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement and Oscar Collazo, the Puerto Rican nationalist.

Jonah Raskin traveled to Mexico in 1975 in search of the elusive writer B Traven, a journey that became the subject of My Search for B Traven.

Jonah Raskin settled in Sonoma County, California, in the winter of 1976, where he had come to visit his parents, who had retired to the rural community of Occidental.

Gradually detaching himself from New York and the radical left, Jonah Raskin began to meet such California writers as Tillie Olsen and Jessica Mitford, and pitched ideas for movies to Hollywood producers.

Jonah Raskin created the characters and the story about marijuana cultivation in northern California for the movie Homegrown, eventually produced in 1996, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal; Raskin appears in a crowd scene at the end of the film.

Jonah Raskin returned to academics as a lecturer in the English Department at Sonoma State University from 1981 to 1987, and became chair of the Communication Studies Department from 1988 to date.

Jonah Raskin has taught media law, the history of communications, film noir, and writing for newspapers, magazines, radio, the movies and memoirs.

Jonah Raskin explores the consequences of Ginsberg's mother's mental illness on the theme of societal insanity in "Howl", and relates the court case that set a new direction for artistic freedom at the end of the repressive 1950s.

Jonah Raskin has subjected his radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s to a searching and thoughtful analysis, and he now views his affiliation with the Weather Underground and his endorsement of its politics as largely self-dramatization that wasted the energy and resources of the above-ground enablers as well as the underground fugitives.

Jonah Raskin allowed his introduction to be edited for the collection, but he published an expanded version in a left journal.

Jonah Raskin began reviewing with New York Journal of Books in 2015.