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<DIV>Nat Hentoff, Journalist and Social Commentator, Dies at 91</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>by Robert D. McFadden</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>New York Times, January 7, 2017</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Nat Hentoff, an author, journalist, jazz critic and civil libertarian who
called himself a troublemaker and proved it with a shelf of books and a mountain
of essays on free speech, wayward politics, elegant riffs and the sweet
harmonies of the Constitution, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was
91.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>His son Nicholas said he was surrounded by family members and listening to
Billie Holiday when he died.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Mr. Hentoff wrote for The Village Voice for 50 years and also contributed
to The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Down Beat magazine and dozens of other
publications. He wrote more than 35 books -- novels, volumes for young adults
and nonfiction works on civil liberties, education and other subjects.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The Hentoff bibliotheca reads almost like an anthology: works by a jazz
aficionado, a mystery writer, an eyewitness to history, an educational reformer,
a political agitator, a foe of censors, a social critic. He was -- like the jazz
he loved -- given to improvisations and permutations, a composer-performer who
lived comfortably with his contradictions, although adversaries called him
shallow and unscrupulous and even his admirers sometimes found him infuriating,
unrealistic and stubborn.</DIV>
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<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In the 1950s, Mr. Hentoff was a jazz critic in Manhattan, frequenting
crowded, smoky nightclubs where musicians played for low pay and audiences ran
hot and cold and dreamy. “I knew their flaws as well as their strengths,” he
recalled, referring to the jazz artists whose music he loved, many of whom he
befriended, “but I continued to admire the honesty and courage of their
art.”</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In the 1960s and ’70s, he wrote books for young adults, nonfiction works on
education, profiles of political and religious leaders and essays on racial
conflicts and the Vietnam War. He became an activist, too, befriending Malcolm X
and joining peace protests and marches for racial equality.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In the 1980s and ’90s, he produced commentaries and books on censorship and
other constitutional issues; murder mysteries; portraits of educators and
judges; and an avalanche of articles on abortion, civil liberties and other
issues. He also wrote a volume of memoirs, “Speaking Freely” (1997).</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>His writing was often passionate, even inspirational. Much of it was based
on personal observations, and some critics said it was not deeply researched or
analytic. His nonfiction took in the sweep of an era of war and social upheaval,
while many of his novels caught the turbulence, if not the character, of
politically astute young adults.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>While his sympathies were usually libertarian, he often infuriated leftist
friends with his opposition to abortion, his attacks on political correctness
and his criticisms of gay groups, feminists, blacks and others he accused of
trying to censor opponents. He relished the role of provocateur, defending the
right of people to say and write whatever they wanted, even if it involved
racial slurs, apartheid and pornography.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>He had a firebrand’s face: wreathed in a gray beard and a shock of unruly
hair, with dark, uncompromising eyes. Once, a student asked what made him tick.
“Rage,” he replied. But he said it softly, and friends recalled that his
invective, in print or in person, usually came wrapped in gentle good humor and
respectful tones.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston on June 10, 1925, the son of Simon
and Lena Katzenberg Hentoff. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and
he grew up in the tough Roxbury section in a vortex of political debate among
Socialists, anarchists, Communists, Trotskyites and other revolutionaries. He
learned early how to rebel.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In 1937, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement and fasting, the
12-year-old Nat sat on his porch on a street leading to a synagogue and slowly
ate a salami sandwich. It made him sick, and the action outraged his father. He
had not done it to scandalize passing Jews who glared at him, he said in a
memoir, “Boston Boy” (1986). “I wanted to know how it felt to be an outcast,” he
wrote. “Except for my father’s reaction and for getting sick, it turned out to
be quite enjoyable.”</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>He attended Boston Latin, the oldest public school in America, and read
voraciously. He discovered Artie Shaw and fell passionately for Louis Armstrong,
Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and other jazz legends. As more modern
styles of jazz emerged, Mr. Hentoff also embraced musicians like Thelonious
Monk, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus and, later, Ornette Coleman and Cecil
Taylor.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>At Northeastern University, he became editor of a student newspaper and
turned it into a muckraker. When it dug up a story about trustees backing
anti-Semitic publications, the university shut it down. Mr. Hentoff and members
of his staff resigned, but he graduated in 1946 with high honors and a lasting
devotion to the First Amendment.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>After several years with a Boston radio station, he moved to New York in
1953 and covered jazz for Down Beat until 1957.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>He was one of the most prolific jazz writers of the 1950s and ’60s,
providing liner notes for countless albums as well as writing or editing several
books on jazz, including “Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by
the Men Who Made It” (1955), which he edited with Nat Shapiro. It was a seminal
work of oral history.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In 1958, he was a founding editor of The Jazz Review, an influential
publication that lasted until 1961. In 1960, he began a notable, if brief,
career as a record producer, supervising sessions by Mingus, Max Roach and
others for the Candid label.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Around the same time, he began a freelance career that took him into the
pages of Esquire, Harper’s, Commonweal, The Reporter, Playboy and The New York
Herald Tribune.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In 1958, he began writing for The Village Voice, the counterculture weekly.
It became a 50-year gig, despite changes of ownership and editorial direction.
Veering from jazz, he wrote weekly columns on civil liberties, politics,
education and other topics, all widely syndicated to newspapers.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In January 2009, he was laid off by The Voice, but he said he would
continue to bang away on the electric typewriter in his cluttered Greenwich
Village apartment, producing articles for United Features and Jewish World
Review and reflections on jazz and other music for The Wall Street
Journal.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Citing the journalists George Seldes and I. F. Stone as muses, he promised
in a farewell Voice column to keep “putting on my skunk suit at other garden
parties.”</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>He wrote for The New Yorker from 1960 to 1986 and for The Washington Post
from 1984 to 2000. He also wrote for The Washington Times and other
publications. For years, he lectured at schools and colleges, and he was on the
faculties of New York University and the New School.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Mr. Hentoff’s first book, “The Jazz Life” (1961), examined social and
psychological aspects of jazz. Later came “Peace Agitator: The Story of A. J.
Muste” (1963), a biography of the pacifist, and “The New Equality” (1964), on
the role of white guilt in racial reforms.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>“Jazz Country” (1965) was the first of a series of novels for young adults.
It explored the struggles of a young white musician breaking into the black jazz
scene. Others included “This School Is Driving Me Crazy” (1976), “Does This
School Have Capital Punishment?” (1981) and “The Day They Came to Arrest the
Book” (1982). They addressed subjects like the military draft, censorship and
the generation gap, but some critics called them polemics in the mouths of
characters.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Many of Mr. Hentoff’s later books dealt with the Constitution and those who
interpreted and acted on it. In “Living the Bill of Rights” (1998), he profiled
Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court, the educator Kenneth Clark and
others as he explored capital punishment, prayer in schools, funding for
education, race relations and other issues.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In “Free Speech for Me -- but Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right
Relentlessly Censor Each Other” (1992), he attacked not only school boards that
banned books but also feminists who tried to silence abortion foes or close
pornographic bookstores; gay rights groups that boycotted Florida orange juice
because its spokeswoman, Anita Bryant, crusaded against gay people; and New York
officials who tried to bar South Africa’s rugby team because it represented the
land of apartheid.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In 1995, Mr. Hentoff received the National Press Foundation’s award for
lifetime achievement in contributions to journalism, and in 2004, he was named
one of six Jazz Masters by the National Endowment for the Arts, the first
nonmusician to win the honor.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Mr. Hentoff was the subject of an award-winning 2013 biographical film,
“The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,” produced and directed by the journalist
David L. Lewis, which played in theaters across the country.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Mr. Hentoff’s first two marriages, to Miriam Sargent in 1950 and to Trudi
Bernstein in 1954, ended in divorce. His third wife, the former Margot Goodman,
whom he married in 1959, is a columnist and an author of essays, reviews and
short stories.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Besides his wife and his son Nicholas, he is survived by two daughters,
Jessica and Miranda; a son, Thomas; a stepdaughter, Mara Wolynski Nierman; a
sister, Janet Krauss; and 10 grandchildren.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>[Christopher Mele contributed reporting.]</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>___________________________________</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Nat Hentoff, Journalist Who Wrote on Jazz and Civil Liberties, Dies at
91</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>by Martin Weil</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Washington Post, January 8, 2017</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Nat Hentoff, a journalist, author, champion of jazz music and passionate
defender of civil liberties in columns he wrote for The Washington Post and
Village Voice, among other publications, died Saturday in Manhattan. He was
91.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>His son, Nick Hentoff, announced the death on Twitter, saying his father
died while listening to jazz singer Billie Holiday.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Over a long and admired career -- he was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize -- Mr. Hentoff was a writer and editor for the jazz magazine Down Beat,
co-founded the publication Jazz Review, was immersed in efforts to bring jazz to
television, briefly ran a record label for which he oversaw the recording of
major jazz musicians including Max Roach and Cecil Taylor, and wrote liner notes
for John Coltrane’s landmark album “Giant Steps” (1960).</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In 2003, he was one of the first nonmusicians to be recognized as a Jazz
Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. Yet his interests went far beyond
the realm of jazz. He wrote for print publications including the New Yorker
magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times and Legal Times. Late in
his career, he was a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Through years of turmoil and turbulence, through times of political
divisions evoked by the Vietnam War, in eras of social discord and widespread
concerns about crime as well as attempts to suppress dissenting voices, Mr.
Hentoff was regarded as among the country’s staunchest public advocates of
American constitutional guarantees.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In his columns on civil liberties, published in the Voice for a
half­century and in The Post in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Hentoff sometimes
aroused the ire of many of who might have seemed to be his natural allies in the
progressive camp. At the same time, he unabashedly shared, in print, views that
were dear to many who might not have expected to find him congenial. For such
reasons, a 2013 documentary about his life was plausibly titled “The Pleasures
of Being Out of Step.” On-screen he declared, “the Constitution and jazz are my
main reasons for being.”</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>“Duke Ellington used to tell me that ‘we gave the world the freest
expression ever in the arts,’ so I always thought there was a natural tie
there,” Mr. Hentoff told the New York Times. “The whole idea of the Bill of
Rights and jazz [is] freedom of expression that nobody, not even the government,
can squelch.”</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights, Mr. Hentoff was most closely
identified with the First, the one that guarantees freedom of speech and of the
press as he derided and denounced what he perceived as efforts at censorship by
the left and the right.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Atop his column in The Post were the words “Sweet Land of Liberty.” Mr.
Hentoff believed in applying the words of the Constitution in the most difficult
of circumstances. Nor was the word “Sweet” to be overlooked. As he saw it, it
was the Constitution that created American life as he knew it and as others
enjoyed it.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>It was also said of him that he freely made use of the freedom that he
cherished to promote causes that might have seemed inconsistent in someone whose
ideas so often seemed to reflect those of American liberalism, or
progressivism.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>One of those for which he was well known was his determined opposition to
abortion, leading him to call himself a member of the antiabortion left. It did
not concern him that many whose views on abortion he shared might have held
diametrically opposed positions on a broad range of issues also dear to Mr.
Hentoff’s heart. He supported the state of Israel and the 2003 invasion of
Iraq.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>He was described in the American Conservative magazine, in recognition of
his individuality, as “the only Jewish atheist pro-life libertarian hawk in
America.”</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>One of his Post columns from 1985 looked askance at opposition that led to
the withdrawal of the proposed commencement speaker at Cornell University’s
medical school. Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, had become known, among other things, for anti-Zionist
views. Chomsky’s views on the Middle East were far more nuanced than that, and
his speech was going to address the arms race. But when Cornell’s president was
chosen as Chomsky’s replacement, Mr. Hentoff wrote, with obvious irony, that the
graduates who had opposed Chomsky could rejoice in “having been rescued from the
possibly infectious presence of a heretic.”</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In recent years, he supported the presidential prospects of Sen. Rand Paul,
the Kentucky Republican who, he told the Times, “knows the Constitution’’ and is
sympathetic with his views on civil liberties issues, including surveillance and
the use of drones. And he noted that President Obama, for all the admiration he
elicited from liberals, “needs watching -- like everybody.”</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston on June 10, 1925, to Jewish
immigrants from Russia, and his father supported the family as a haberdasher and
a traveling salesman. Raised in a Jewish neighborhood, Mr. Hentoff said he
showed signs of rebellion from a young age, often pointing to the time, at age
12, when he sat on his front porch and ate a huge salami sandwich very slowly on
the Sabbath.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Mr. Hentoff displayed a precocious interest in journalism. At 15, he became
an unsalaried reporter for Frances Sweeney, who ran the muckraking and
short-lived Boston City Reporter. Mr. Hentoff covered anti-Semitism as a
beat.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Meanwhile, he graduated from the prestigious Boston Latin School, and from
Northeastern University in 1946. He worked for a series of radio stations,
mostly as a jazz broadcaster.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>He said he was fired from Down Beat in 1957 after pushing too aggressively
for the publication to hire black writers. He then joined the nascent Village
Voice, where he said he lobbied to write about anything but jazz and began to
immerse himself in issues including education, race and, eventually, civil
liberties.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>He wrote and edited books on jazz, and he also wrote novels and essay
collections, among other works.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Mr. Hentoff is survived by his wife, Margot; four children, Jessica,
Miranda, Nick and Thomas; a sister, Janet Krauss of Connecticut; and 10
grandchildren.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Mr. Hentoff acknowledged to the Times that he sometimes came across as a
“gadfly” but that his passions were quite serious. “Without intending to,” he
said, “I learned to be an outsider. I’ve been an outsider all my life, and what
I’ve concluded is t hat you can learn a lot by being there.” 30</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri'; COLOR: #000000"><BR><BR>Bob
Ringwald piano, Solo, Duo, Trio, Quartet, Quintet <BR>Fulton Street Jazz Band
(Dixieland/Swing)<BR>916/ 806-9551<BR>Amateur (ham) Radio Station
K6YBV<BR><BR>Just read that 4,153,237 people got married last year... <BR>I'm
not meaning to cause any trouble,<BR>but shouldn't that be an even
number?</DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>