Lenni Brenner facts for kids

Lenni Brenner (born 1937), formerly known as Leonard Glaser or Lenny Glaser, is an American Trotskyist writer. In the 1960s, Brenner was a prominent civil rights movement activist and vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Since the 1980s, his activism has focused on anti-Zionism. He has published widely on the history of Zionism, in particular asserting that the movement collaborated with the Nazis.

Early life

Brenner was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1937. He says he developed an early interest in history from reading Hendrik Willem van Loon's The Story of Mankind at age seven, which his brother had received as a bar mitzvah present. He had no interest in Jewish issues until around 1973, since, Brenner has remarked, he hailed from a milieu that frequented the synagogue only until the bar mitzvah rite was completed.

Political activity

Brenner has recounted that his involvement with the Civil Rights Movement began when he met James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, later the organizer of the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s. He also worked with Bayard Rustin, later the organizer of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Brenner was arrested three times during civil rights sit-ins in the San Francisco Bay Area, In an article in the San Francisco Examiner Brenner, together with Mike Myerson, was identified as a member of the W.E.B. Du Bois youth wing of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) within the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination (AHCED).

Berkeley 1964, arrest and imprisonment

Brenner, then known as Glaser, came to Berkeley in 1962. A bid to enroll in the orthodox Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party was rejected though he was permitted to join its youth branch.

Though a non-student, Brenner at UC had become by this time a long-time campus orator, a familiar if solitary figure on the Berkeley campus (UC), where he delivered passionate tirades to passing students while protesting issues like Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. On the missile crisis he once delivered a non-stop speech from noon to midnight at Bancroft and Telegraph Avenue in 1962. That venue was not thought to be on University property. The UC, under Chancellor Clark Kerr, who believed Communist influence lay behind the Free Speech Movement (FSM), had recently banned political activities on campus, and speakers were obliged to address passers-by outside, on city-owned property, though card-tables with leaflets were permitted a few steps inside. On September 14, 1964, the University administration extended its ban, in effect from the 21st., to these card tables on the 26 foot brick walkway, technically also University property, just outside the campus entrance. The tightening of this regulation triggered a wave of defiance, with students challenging the order by moving the card-tables inside the campus grounds.

On October 1, 1964, Jack Weinberg a student of mathematics who had graduated with great distinction, challenged the ruling by setting up one such card table in Sproul Plaza. He was collecting funds for Congress of Racial Equality(CORE): a number of campus activists at the time, including philosophy student Mario Savio, were spending their summers aiding the civil rights movement to get Afro-Americans to register for a vote in the face of Ku Klux Klan violence.

After Weinberg refused to identify himself to emissaries of the dean, a lieutenant from the campus police was called in and informed him of the infraction. Outnumbered, the policeman then left and came back with three more officers who arrested Weinberg for trespass and for violating the regulation against political activity. Weinberg, using a passive disobedience technique, went limp and had to be hauled to a police car, which was almost immediately encircled by hundreds of students. Brenner, in what has been described as an "historic event," is generally reported to have been the first in the crowd to try and physically block the exit of the police vehicle detaining Weinberg by Weinberg by rolling under it. Several hundred joined him and the car remained "entrapped" for 32 hours. In response, 643 police were assembled on the campus by 2 October. The hood of the car was turned into a platform where Savio, and one source claims Brenner himself, made speeches and Joan Baez sang before a growing student crowd of thousands.

Brenner, though present, later stated he was opposed to the ensuing demonstration, and that he had approached the car and asked Weinberg if he wanted to get out. Weinberg replied negatively saying that his presence there was of symbolic value. The University authorities regarded Brenner as a trouble-maker. Some days after the incident, the University police expressed concern that Brenner's exceptional rhetorical talents might induce "mob action or violence" on the campus. According to David Goines, Brenner was then arrested. He was sentenced to 1 to 10 years' imprisonment. Brenner's appeal against his conviction was turned down by Judge Richard Sims who however, according to Brenner, wrote that he was troubled by Judge Dieden's ruling. For Sims, Brenner was not a felon. If he were mentally ill, referral to an appropriate institution would have been proper. Were he a trespassing social malcontent, he should have been judged for a normal misdemeanour.

Latter activism

Brenner joined in the Free Speech Movement when it emerged on campus in the mid-1960s. He was an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War. In 1968 he co-founded the National Association for Irish Justice, the American affiliate of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.

In the 1990s, he and the Black Power leader Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael) co-founded a Committee against Zionism and Racism. They also published The Anti-War Activist.

Brenner spoke at an Israeli Apartheid Week event in 2011 at Berlin, Connecticut.

Writing

His books have been widely translated and reviewed in 11 languages. His books have been reviewed in the London Times, the London Review of Books, Booklist magazine, and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

His articles have also appeared in publications related to the Middle East and identifying with the political left, including The Nation, Amsterdam News, Atlanta Constitution, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Journal of Palestine Studies, New Statesman, Al-Fajr and United Irishman.

The Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust denial platform, has cited, promoted, and sold Brenner's work. Brenner has opposed his work being used by those on the far right, and those engaged in Holocaust denial. Antisemitism scholar Kenneth S. Stern has described Brenner as antisemitic. Brenner says that since he is Jewish, rather than being called an "anti-Semite", he is often called a "self-hating Jew".

Anti-Zionist activist Uri Davis positively reviewed both Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983) and The Iron Wall (1984) for Race and Class. He said that both works contained invaluable information and documentation, but had uneven quality. In Davis's view, the former book was an important "work informed by the moral and the political insight of the author as an anti-Zionist scholar". Davis found the thrust of the latter study, despite its impeccable documentation, somewhat weakened by passages of "pseudo-Freudian causal explanations" that Brenner wrote to supplement his political analysis. Secondly Davis says that Brenner makes "repeated irresponsible political statements verging on the nonsensensical", such as Brenner's notion that, were it not for the presence of the British army, the tiny Zionist yishuv would have been driven into the sea.

In 2016, British socialist politician Ken Livingstone praised Brenner's book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators while defending comments he made about Adolf Hitler which were widely considered antisemitic, helping to spark a controversy about Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party. Historian of Nazi Germany Michael Burleigh said that Brenner and Livingstone "strain[ed] the objectively episodic and marginal into something maliciously significant".

Wider views

• Brenner is said to have read legal works extensively during his incarceration, and to have become contemptuous of law generally and the Supreme Court in particular (making an exception of the Fourth Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall. In his view

  The wind blows a piece of paper into the law courts and it takes a yoke of oxen to get it out.