List of Jewish American activists
Encyclopedia
This is a list of notable Jewish American activists and polemicists

For other notable Jewish Americans, see List of Jewish Americans.

AIDS activists

  • Elizabeth Glaser
    Elizabeth Glaser
    Elizabeth Glaser, born Elizabeth Meyer, , was a major American AIDS activist and child advocate married to actor and director Paul Michael Glaser. She contracted HIV very early in the modern AIDS epidemic after receiving an HIV-contaminated blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth...

    , founder of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
    Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
    The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing pediatric HIV infection and eliminating pediatric AIDS through research, advocacy, and prevention and treatment programs...

  • Larry Kramer
    Larry Kramer
    Larry Kramer is an American playwright, author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for Women in Love in 1969, earning...

    , co-founder of GMHC

Anti-corporate activists

  • Judi Bari
    Judi Bari
    Judi Bari was an American environmentalist and labor leader, a feminist, and the principal organizer of Earth First! campaigns against logging in the ancient redwood forests of Northern California in the 1980s and '90...

    , environmentalist (Jewish mother)
  • Robert "Gypsy Boots" Bootzin
    Gypsy Boots
    Gypsy Boots , born Robert Bootzin , was an American fitness pioneer, actor, and writer. He is credited with laying the foundation for the acceptance by mainstream America of "alternative" lifestyles such as yoga and health food...

    , Health food and fitness guru
  • Laurie David
    Laurie David
    Laurie David is an American environmental activist. She serves as a trustee on the Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of the Advisory Board of the Children's Nature Institute and is a contributing blogger to The Huffington Post.-Personal life:David was born as Laurie Ellen Lennard, and...

    , environmental activist
  • Rob Reiner
    Rob Reiner
    Robert "Rob" Reiner is an American actor, director, producer, writer, and political activist.As an actor, Reiner first came to national prominence as Archie and Edith Bunker's son-in-law, Michael "Meathead" Stivic, on All in the Family. That role earned him two Emmy Awards during the 1970s...

    , actor, director, producer, writer and anti-tobacco activist; son of Carl Reiner
  • Henry Spira
    Henry Spira
    Henry Spira is widely regarded as one of the most effective animal rights activists of the 20th century....

    , animal rights activist

Anti-racist

  • Kivie Kaplan
    Kivie Kaplan
    Kivie Kaplan was a Jewish-American businessman and philanthropist.Kivie Kaplan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the youngest of three sons of Benjamin and Celia Kaplan, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants...

    , head of the NAACP
  • Winona LaDuke
    Winona LaDuke
    Winona LaDuke is a Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for vice president as the nominee of the United States Green Party, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. In the 2004 election, however, she endorsed one of Nader's opponents, Democratic...

    , Native American activist & environmentalist (Jewish mother)
  • Stanley Levison
    Stanley Levison
    Stanley David Levison was a Jewish businessman from New York, who had also attained a law degree from St. John's University. He was a life-long activist in progressive causes. He is best known as an advisor to, and close friend of the Rev...

    , Communist Party USA
    Communist Party USA
    The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....

     member, advisor to Martin Luther King
  • Abel Meeropol
    Abel Meeropol
    Abel Meeropol was an American writer and song-writer, best known under his pseudonym Lewis Allan and as the adoptive father of the young sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.-Biography:...

    , composer of anti-lynching song Strange Fruit
    Strange Fruit
    "Strange Fruit" is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday, who released her first recording of it in 1939, the year she first sang it. Written by the teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem, it exposed American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans. Such lynchings had occurred...

  • Michael Schwerner
    Michael Schwerner
    Michael Henry Schwerner , was one of three Congress of Racial Equality field workers killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by the Ku Klux Klan in response to their civil rights work, which included promoting voting registration among Mississippi African Americans...

     & Andrew Goodman
    Andrew Goodman
    Andrew Goodman was one of three American civil rights activists murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, during Freedom Summer in 1964 by members of the Ku Klux Klan.-Early life and education:...

    , CORE
    Congress of Racial Equality
    The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE was a U.S. civil rights organization that originally played a pivotal role for African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement...

     activists, KKK victims
  • Joel & Arthur Spingarn, early NAACP leaders
  • Tim Wise
    Tim Wise
    Timothy Jacob Wise is an American anti-racist activist and writer. Since 1995 he has lectured at over 600 college campuses across the US...

    , anti-racism activist

Anti-war

  • Leslie Cagan
    Leslie Cagan
    Leslie Cagan is an American activist, writer, and socialist organizer involved with the peace and social justice movements. She is the former national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, the former co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and the former chair...

    , founder of United for Peace and Justice
    United for Peace and Justice
    United for Peace and Justice is a coalition of more than 1,300 international and U.S.-based organizations opposed to "our government's policy of permanent warfare and empire-building."...

  • Daniel Ellsberg
    Daniel Ellsberg
    Daniel Ellsberg, PhD, is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War,...

    , leaked the Pentagon Papers
    Pentagon Papers
    The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967...

  • Allen Ginsberg
    Allen Ginsberg
    Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

    , poet and Pentagon-levitator
  • Allard K. Lowenstein
    Allard K. Lowenstein
    Allard Kenneth Lowenstein, , was a liberal Democratic politician, a one-term congressman representing the 5th District in Nassau County, New York from 1969 until 1971. His work on civil rights and the antiwar movement has been cited as an inspiration by public figures including Congressmen, John...

    , politician and anti-Vietnam war leader
  • Bernard Lown
    Bernard Lown
    Bernard Lown, M.D. is the original developer of the defibrillator and is an internationally known peace activist. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, an organization he helped to create, was awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its work against nuclear proliferation...

    , co-founder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
    International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
    is a non-partisan federation of national medical groups in 63 countries, representing tens of thousands of doctors, medical students, other health workers, and concerned citizens who share the common goal of creating a more peaceful and secure world freed from the threat of nuclear annihilation...

    , Nobel Peace Prize (1985)
  • Murray N. Rothbard, writer

Anti-Zionist

  • Elmer Berger
    Elmer Berger (rabbi)
    Elmer Berger was a Jewish Reform rabbi widely known for his anti-Zionism. He was the executive director of the American Council for Judaism from its founding in 1942 until 1955...

    , Reform rabbi, deceased
  • Noam Chomsky
    Noam Chomsky
    Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

    , linguist, historian and author
  • Norman Finkelstein
    Norman Finkelstein
    Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...

    , former professor, (denied most recent tenure at DePaul University)
  • Fred Newman
    Fred Newman
    Frederick Delano "Fred" Newman was an American philosopher, psychotherapist, playwright and political activist, and creator of a therapeutic modality called Social Therapy.-Early life:...

    , founder of International Workers Party
  • Adam Shapiro
    Adam Shapiro
    Adam Shapiro is an American co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement , a pro-Palestinian organization, the stated mission of which is to bring civilians from around the world to resist nonviolently the Israeli occupation of West Bank and previously the Gaza Strip...

    , member of International Solidarity Movement
  • Anna Baltzer
    Anna Baltzer
    Anna Baltzer is a Jewish-American activist for Palestinian human rights, author, and public speaker, known for taking positions counter to the Israeli government regarding the Palestinian territories, including the wall/fence and checkpoints...

    , author and public speaker.

Civil liberties

  • Felix Frankfurter
    Felix Frankfurter
    Felix Frankfurter was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.-Early life:Frankfurter was born into a Jewish family on November 15, 1882, in Vienna, Austria, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe. He was the third of six children of Leopold and Emma Frankfurter...

    , Supreme Court Justice, helped found the American Civil Liberties Union
    American Civil Liberties Union
    The American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...

  • Nadine Strossen
    Nadine Strossen
    Nadine Strossen was president of the American Civil Liberties Union from February 1991 to October 2008. She was the first woman and the youngest person to ever lead the ACLU. A professor at New York Law School, Professor Strossen sits on the Council on Foreign Relations...

    , head of ACLU (father half Jewish holocaust survivor)

Conservatives and neoconservatives

  • Midge Decter
    Midge Decter
    -Biography:Midge Rosenthal Decter was born on July 25, 1927 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She attended the University of Minnesota, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and New York University....

    , writer
  • David Horowitz, writer, activist, commentator
  • Irving Kristol
    Irving Kristol
    Irving Kristol was an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism"...

    , founder of American Neoconservatism.
  • William Kristol
    William Kristol
    William Kristol is an American neoconservative political analyst and commentator. He is the founder and editor of the political magazine The Weekly Standard and a regular commentator on the Fox News Channel....

    , editor, writer
  • Rabbi Daniel Lapin, founder of Toward Tradition
    Toward Tradition
    Toward Tradition is a politically conservative non-profit organization founded by Rabbi Daniel Lapin based in Mercer Island, Washington, United States...

  • Jay Lovestone
    Jay Lovestone
    Jay Lovestone was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions...

    , AFL-CIO cold warrior; earlier, chairman of Communist Party USA ousted on orders from Joseph Stalin
    Joseph Stalin
    Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

  • John Podhoretz
    John Podhoretz
    John Podhoretz is an American neoconservative columnist for the New York Post, the editor of Commentary magazine, the author of several books on politics, and a former presidential speechwriter.-Life and career:...

    , writer and commentator
  • Norman Podhoretz
    Norman Podhoretz
    Norman B. Podhoretz is an American neoconservative pundit and writer for Commentary magazine.-Early life:The son of Julius and Helen Podhoretz, Jewish immigrants from the Central European region of Galicia, Podhoretz was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn...

    , writer

Counterculture

  • Abbie Hoffman
    Abbie Hoffman
    Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....

    , co-founder of the Youth International Party
    Youth International Party
    The Youth International Party, whose members were commonly called Yippies, was a radically youth-oriented and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the 1960s. It was founded on Dec. 31, 1967...

     (Yippies)
  • Ed Rosenthal
    Ed Rosenthal
    Ed Rosenthal is a California horticulturist, author, publisher, and Cannabis grower known for his advocacy for the legalization of marijuana use. He served as a columnist for High Times Magazine during the 80's and 90's...

    , cannabis activist
  • Jerry Rubin
    Jerry Rubin
    Jerry Rubin was an American social activist during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, he became a successful businessman.-Early life:...

    , co-founder of the Yippie movement
  • A.J. Weberman, Yippie activist, author

Electronic rights activists

  • Mitch Kapor
    Mitch Kapor
    Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation...

    , co-founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation
    Electronic Frontier Foundation
    The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...

  • Bruce Perens
    Bruce Perens
    Bruce Perens is a computer programmer and advocate in the open source community. He created the Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric S...

    , open source advocate, co-founder of Software in the Public Interest
    Software in the Public Interest
    Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is a non-profit organization formed to help other organizations create and distribute free/open-source software and open-source hardware...

  • Richard Stallman
    Richard Stallman
    Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...

    , founder of Free Software Foundation
    Free Software Foundation
    The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...

  • Jonathan Tasini
    Jonathan Tasini
    Jonathan Yoav Tasini is a strategist, organizer, activist, commentator and writer, primarily focusing his energies on the topics of work, labor and the economy. On June 11, 2009, he announced that he would challenge New York U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in the Democratic primary for the 2010...

    , National Writers Union
    National Writers Union
    National Writers Union , founded on November 19, 1981, is the trade union in the United States for freelance and contract writers: journalists, book and short fiction authors, business and technical writers, web content providers, and poets...

     leader, fighter for electronic rights for authors

Feminism and gay rights

  • Bella Abzug
    Bella Abzug
    Bella Savitsky Abzug was an American lawyer, Congresswoman, social activist and a leader of the Women's Movement. In 1971, Abzug joined other leading feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan to found the National Women's Political Caucus...

    , feminist politician, deceased
  • Gloria Allred
    Gloria Allred
    Gloria Rachel Allred is an American lawyer noted for taking high-profile and often controversial cases, particulary those involving the protection of women's rights.-Early life:...

     (1941–) lawyer and radio talk show host
  • Bettina Aptheker
    Bettina Aptheker
    Bettina Fay Aptheker is an American activist, author, feminist, and professor.-Early years and education:Aptheker was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina to the first cousins Fay Philippa Aptheker and Herbert Aptheker, a radical activist and Marxist historian. She was raised in Brooklyn, New York....

     (1944–) lesbian activist, author, and educator
  • Andrea Dworkin
    Andrea Dworkin
    Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women....

    , feminist writer
  • Susan Faludi
    Susan Faludi
    Susan C. Faludi is an American feminist, journalist and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee thought showed the "human costs of high finance".-Biographical...

    , feminist writer
  • Leslie Feinberg
    Leslie Feinberg
    Leslie Feinberg is a transgender queer and communist activist, speaker, and author. Feinberg's first novel Stone Butch Blues is widely considered a groundbreaking work about gender.- Career :...

    , transgender activist & author
  • Clara Fraser
    Clara Fraser
    Clara Fraser was a feminist and socialist political organizer, who co-founded and led the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women.-Early life:...

    , founder of Radical Women
    Radical Women
    Radical Women is a socialist feminist, grassroots activist organization that provides a radical voice within the feminist movement, a feminist voice within the Left, and trains women to be leaders in the movements for social and economic justice...

     and the Freedom Socialist Party
    Freedom Socialist Party
    The Freedom Socialist Party is a socialist political party with a unique program of revolutionary feminism that emerged from a split in the United States Socialist Workers Party in 1966. It is currently a working class organization that works towards creating social justice and order for all...

  • Betty Friedan
    Betty Friedan
    Betty Friedan was an American writer, activist, and feminist.A leading figure in the Women's Movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the "second wave" of American feminism in the twentieth century...

    , co-founder & first president of NOW
    National Organization for Women
    The National Organization for Women is the largest feminist organization in the United States. It was founded in 1966 and has a membership of 500,000 contributing members. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S...

  • Franklin E. Kameny
    Franklin E. Kameny
    Franklin Edward "Frank" Kameny was "one of the most significant figures" in the American gay rights movement. In 1957, Kameny was dismissed from his position as an astronomer in the Army Map Service in Washington, D.C...

    , gay rights leader
  • Harvey Milk
    Harvey Milk
    Harvey Bernard Milk was an American politician who became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors...

    , murdered gay rights activist and openly gay politician
  • Robin Morgan
    Robin Morgan
    Robin Morgan is a former child actor turned American radical feminist activist, writer, poet, and editor of Sisterhood is Powerful and Ms. Magazine....

    , editor of Ms. Magazine
    Ms. magazine
    Ms. is an American feminist magazine co-founded by American feminist and activist Gloria Steinem and founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin together with founding editors Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, and Mary Peacock, that first appeared in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine...

  • Ernestine Rose
    Ernestine Rose
    Ernestine Louise Rose was an atheist feminist, Individualist Feminist, and abolitionist. She was one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America....

    , feminist
  • Gloria Steinem
    Gloria Steinem
    Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s...

    , founder of Ms. Magazine (Jewish father)
  • Rebecca Walker
    Rebecca Walker
    Rebecca Walker is an American writer. She has been named by Time Magazine as one of the 50 future leaders of America.-Early life:...

     (1969–) feminist writer
  • Naomi Wolf
    Naomi Wolf
    Naomi Wolf is an American author and political consultant. With the publication of The Beauty Myth, she became a leading spokesperson of what was later described as the third wave of the feminist movement.-Biography:...

    , feminist writer
  • Evan Wolfson
    Evan Wolfson
    Evan Wolfson is an American civil rights attorney and advocate. He is founder and executive director of Freedom to Marry, a group favoring same-sex marriage in the United States...

    , gay marriage activist

Cults

  • Maurice Davis, Rabbi, testified to joint-Congressional panel in 1976
  • Steven Hassan
    Steven Hassan
    Steven Alan Hassan is a licensed mental health counselor and an exit counselor. Hassan was an early advocate of exit counseling, and is the author of two books on the subject of "cults", and what he describes as their use of mind control, thought reform, and the psychology of influence in order...

    , exit counselor author, Combatting Cult Mind Control
    Combatting Cult Mind Control
    Combatting Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best-selling Guide to Protection, Rescue, and Recovery from Destructive Cults is a non-fiction work by Steven Hassan. The author describes theories of mind control and cults based on the research of Margaret Singer and Robert Lifton as well as the cognitive...

  • Rick Ross
    Rick Ross (consultant)
    Rick Alan Ross works as a consultant, lecturer, and intervention specialist, with an interest in exit counseling and deprogramming of former cult members. He runs a blog at CultNews.com, and in 2003 founded the Rick A...

    , consultant on cult
    Cult
    The word cult in current popular usage usually refers to a group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre. The word originally denoted a system of ritual practices...

    s

Gun rights advocacy

  • Sandra Froman
    Sandra Froman
    Sandra S. Froman is a past President of the National Rifle Association of America.*Froman was raised in the San Francisco, California Bay Area, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics with distinction from Stanford University in 1971 and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1974...

     — President of the National Rifle Association (NRA), second female president and first Jewish president

Anti-Semitic hate groups

  • Daniel Burros, American Nazi Party and KKK activist (committed suicide in 1965 when his background was revealed)

  • Adam Yahiye Gadahn
    Adam Yahiye Gadahn
    Adam Yahiye Gadahn is an American who is a senior operative, cultural interpreter, spokesman and media advisor for the Sunni islamist group Al-Qaeda. Since 2004, he appeared in a number of videos produced by Al-Qaeda as "Azzam the American"...

    , Al Qaeda member, federal fugitive (son of musician Phil Pearlman, who converted from Judaism to Christianity)
  • Harold von Braunhut
    Harold von Braunhut
    Harold Nathan Braunhut , also known as Harold von Braunhut, was an American mail-order marketer and inventor, most famous as the creator and seller of both the Amazing Sea-Monkeys and the X-Ray Specs...

    , wealthy Aryan Nation and KKK supporter, deceased (born Jewish according to Washington Post)

Leaders of Jewish communal organizations

  • Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe
  • Abraham Foxman
    Abraham Foxman
    Abraham H. Foxman is the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League.-Early life:Foxman, an only son, was born in Baranovichi, just months after the USSR took the town from Poland in the Nazi-Soviet Pact and incorporated it into the BSSR. The town is now in Belarus...

    , national director of the Anti-Defamation League
    Anti-Defamation League
    The Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...


Liberal and leftwing activists (miscellaneous)

  • Michael Albert
    Michael Albert
    Michael Albert is an American activist, economist, speaker, and writer. He is co-editor of ZNet, and co-editor and co-founder of Z Magazine. He also co-founded South End Press and has written numerous books and articles...

    , co-founder of Z Magazine
  • Saul Alinsky
    Saul Alinsky
    Saul David Alinsky was a Jewish American community organizer and writer. He is generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing, and has been compared in Playboy magazine to Thomas Paine as being "one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left." He is often noted...

    , community organizer
  • Ben Cohen
    Ben Cohen (ice cream)
    Ben Cohen , is a co-founder of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry's.-Early life:Raised in the town of Merrick on Long Island by his parents Frances and Irving, Cohen first met and befriended his future business partner, Jerry Greenfield, in a junior high school gym class in 1963...

    , founder of TrueMajority
    TrueMajority
    TrueMajority is a liberal advocacy group in the United States. In 2008 TrueMajority had over 700,000 members, making it, together with MoveOn, one of the two largest liberal advocacy groups in the U.S...

  • Jeff Cohen
    Jeff Cohen (media critic)
    Jeff Cohen is a journalist, media critic, professor, and the founder of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting , a media watchdog group in the US. He was formerly a lawyer for the ACLU and authored or co-authored five books that criticize media bias, mainly written with Norman Solomon...

    , founder of FAIR
    Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
    Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting is a progressive media criticism organization based in New York City, founded in 1986.FAIR describes itself on its website as "the national media watch group" and defines its mission as working to "invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity...

  • John Garfield
    John Garfield
    John Garfield was an American actor adept at playing brooding, rebellious, working-class character roles. He grew up in poverty in Depression-era New York City and in the early 1930s became an important member of the Group Theater. In 1937 he moved to Hollywood, eventually becoming one of Warner...

    , blacklisted actor, left-liberal activist
  • William Kunstler
    William Kunstler
    William Moses Kunstler was an American self-described "radical lawyer" and civil rights activist, known for his controversial clients...

    , civil rights lawyer
  • Al Lewis, actor, Green Party candidate, anti-prison and anti-drug war activist
  • Eli Pariser
    Eli Pariser
    Eli Pariser is the former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, and the organization's current Board President....

    , campaigns director of MoveOn.org
  • George Soros
    George Soros
    George Soros is a Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, philosopher, and philanthropist. He is the chairman of Soros Fund Management. Soros supports progressive-liberal causes...

    , founder of Open Society Institute
    Open Society Institute
    The Open Society Institute , renamed in 2011 to Open Society Foundations, is a private operating and grantmaking foundation started by George Soros, aimed to shape public policy to promote democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform...

  • Barbra Streisand
    Barbra Streisand
    Barbra Joan Streisand is an American singer, actress, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, four Emmy Awards, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy,...

    , entertainer, liberal activist and fundraiser

Jewish Defense

  • Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League
    Jewish Defense League
    The Jewish Defense League is a Jewish organization whose stated goal is to "protect Jews from antisemitism by whatever means necessary"...

    , deceased
  • Mordechai Levy
    Mordechai Levy
    Mark "Mordechai" Levy is a U.S.-based political activist and founder of the militant Jewish Defense Organization , a breakaway faction of the Jewish Defense League...

    , founder and chairman of the Jewish Defense Organization
    Jewish Defense Organization
    The Jewish Defense Organization is a militant Jewish organization in the United States.-Background and ideology:The JDO was founded in the early 1980s by Mordechai Levy after a violent feud with the Jewish Defense League's former leader Irv Rubin, who was killed or committed suicide in jail in 2002...

    ,
  • David Marcus
    David Marcus
    David Marcus was an Irish Jewish editor and writer who was a lifelong advocate and editor of Irish fiction.- Life and times :...

     ("Mickey" Marcus), U.S. Army Colonel, hero of Israeli War of Independence
  • Avi Weiss
    Avi Weiss
    Avraham Weiss is an American Modern Orthodox rabbi who heads the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in The Bronx, New York. He is an author, teacher, lecturer, and activist...

    , Orthodox rabbi, leader of Free Soviet Jewry movement

Nazi hunters and Holocaust educators

  • Marvin Hier
    Marvin Hier
    Rabbi Marvin Hier is the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, its Museum of Tolerance and of Moriah, the Center's film division....

    , Orthodox rabbi, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
  • Eli Rosenbaum
    Eli Rosenbaum
    Eli M. Rosenbaum was the director of the U.S. DOJ Office of Special Investigations , which was primarily responsible for identifying and deporting Nazi war criminals, from 1995 to 2010, when OSI was merged into the new Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section...

    , director of the Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations since 1995; Nazi hunter since early 1980s

Rights of Ethiopian Jews

  • Graenum Berger
    Graenum Berger
    Graenum Berger was an American Communal administrator, institutional and communal planner, educator, world traveler, and the founding President of the American Association for Ethiopian Jews....

    , founder of American Association for Ethiopian Jews

Socialists, anarchists and communists (historical)

  • Alexander Berkman
    Alexander Berkman
    Alexander Berkman was an anarchist known for his political activism and writing. He was a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century....

    , anarchist leader
  • Daniel De Leon
    Daniel De Leon
    Daniel DeLeon was an American socialist newspaper editor, politician, Marxist theoretician, and trade union organizer. He is regarded as the forefather of the idea of revolutionary industrial unionism and was the leading figure in the Socialist Labor Party of America from 1890 until the time of...

    , revolutionary socialist leader
  • Emma Goldman
    Emma Goldman
    Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century....

    , anarchist leader
  • Murray N. Rothbard, anarchist leader
  • Charles Ruthenberg
    Charles Ruthenberg
    Charles Emil Ruthenberg was an American Marxist politician and a founder and long-time head of the Communist Party USA .-Biography:Charles Emil Ruthenberg was born July 9, 1882 in Cleveland, Ohio...

    , early leader of the Communist Party USA
    Communist Party USA
    The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....

  • Max Shachtman
    Max Shachtman
    Max Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He evolved from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL-CIO President George Meany.-Beginnings:...

    , democratic socialist leader and theorist

Trade union leaders

  • David Dubinsky
    David Dubinsky
    David Dubinsky was an American labor leader...

    , labor leader
  • Samuel Gompers
    Samuel Gompers
    Samuel Gompers was an English-born American cigar maker who became a labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor , and served as that organization's president from 1886 to 1894 and from 1895 until his death in 1924...

    , labor leader
  • Sidney Hillman
    Sidney Hillman
    Sidney Hillman was an American labor leader. Head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, he was a key figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in marshaling labor's support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party.-Early years:Sidney Hillman was...

    , labor leader
  • Jackie Presser
    Jackie Presser
    Jackie Presser was an American labor leader and president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1983 until his death in 1988. He was closely connected to organized crime, and allegedly became president of the Teamsters based on the approval and support of the Cleveland Mafia...

    , Teamster leader, racketeer

Weather Underground and its offshoots

  • Kathy Boudin
    Kathy Boudin
    Kathy Boudin is a former American radical who was convicted in 1984 of felony murder for her participation in an armed robbery that resulted in the killing of three people. She later became a public health expert while in prison...

    , Weather Underground member, leader, and convicted terrorist
  • David Gilbert, Weather Underground member, leader, and convicted terrorist
  • Terry Robbins
    Terry Robbins
    Terry Robbins was a U.S. leftist radical activist. A key member of the Students for a Democratic Society Ohio chapter, he led Kent State into its first militant student uprising in 1968. Robbins was credited for drawing inspiration from Bob Dylan’s song Subterranean Homesick Blues which later...

    , Weather Underground member and bomb maker (died in explosion of his own bomb)
  • Bernardine Dohrn
    Bernardine Dohrn
    Bernardine Rae Dohrn is a former leader of the American anti-Vietnam War radical organization, Weather Underground. She is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the immediate past Director of Northwestern's Children and Family Justice Center...

    , Weather Underground, member, and leader of Days of Rage
    Days of Rage
    The Days of Rage demonstrations were a series of direct actions taken over a course of three days in October 1969 in Chicago organized by the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society...

  • Mark Rudd
    Mark Rudd
    Mark William Rudd is a political organizer, mathematics instructor, and anti-war activist, most well known for his involvement with the Weather Underground. Rudd became a member of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963. By 1968, he had emerged as a leader...

    , Students for a Democratic Society
    Students for a Democratic Society
    Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...

     leader during 1968 Columbia University strike; later a Weather Underground member and leader
  • Naomi Jaffe, Weather Underground, member and leader
  • Laura Whitehorn
    Laura Whitehorn
    Laura Jane Whitehorn was born in April 1945 to Lenore and Nathaniel Whitehorn of Brooklyn, New York. As a college student in the 1960s, she organized and participated in civil rights and anti-war movements. as well as involvement in a series of revolutionary bombings and armed robberies...

    , Weather Underground, member and leader
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