Nathan Irving Hentoff (June 10, 1925 – January 7, 2017) was an American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist for United Media. Hentoff was a columnist for The Village Voice from 1958 to 2009.[1] Following his departure from The Village Voice, Hentoff became a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and continued writing his music column for The Wall Street Journal, which published his works until his death. He often wrote on First Amendment issues, vigorously defending the freedom of the press.
Hentoff began his career in broadcast journalism while hosting a weekly jazz program on Boston radio station WMEX.[15] In the 1940s, he hosted two radio shows on WMEX: JazzAlbum and From Bach to Bartók.[citation needed] In the early 1950s he continued to present a jazz program on WMEX, and as a Staff Announcer for WMEX, he regularly hosted remote broadcasts[16][17] from the Savoy, and Storyville, two Boston clubs run by George Wein, and during that period was an announcer on the program Evolution of Jazz on WGBH-FM. In 2013, the Evolution of Jazz series was contributed to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting by the University of Maryland's National Public Broadcasting Archives as part of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) collection.[18]
By the late 1950s, he was co-hosting the program The Scope of Jazz on WBAI-FM in New York City.[19] He went on to write many books on jazz and politics.[3]
In 1952, Hentoff joined Down Beat magazine as a columnist.[20] The following year, he moved to New York to become the Chicago-based magazine's New York editor.[6] He was fired in 1957, he alleged, because he attempted to hire an African-American writer.[21]
Hentoff also wrote many novels for young adults, including I'm Really Dragged But Nothing Gets Me Down (1968), This School is Driving Me Crazy (1976), Blues for Charlie Darwin (1982), and The Day They Came To Arrest The Book (1983).[26] Writing about the latter for The Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg commented that "One of the useful — or depressing — things about reading Hentoff’s YA polemic, which was published all the way back in 1982, is how similar the novel’s conflicts are to our present debates."[27]
Beginning in February 2008, Hentoff was a weekly contributing columnist at WorldNetDaily. In January 2009, The Village Voice, which had published his commentary and criticism for fifty years, announced that he had been laid off.[3][28] He then went on to write for United Features, Jewish World Review, and The Wall Street Journal.[3] He joined the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, as a senior fellow in February 2009.[29][30]
In 2013, The Pleasures of Being Out of Step, a biographical film about Hentoff, explored his career in jazz and as a First Amendment advocate. The independent documentary, produced and directed by David L. Lewis,[31] won the Grand Jury prize in the Metropolis competition at the DOC NYC festival[32] and played in theaters across the country.[3]
Political views, commentary, and activism
Hentoff espoused generally liberal views on domestic policy and civil liberties, but in the 1980s, he began articulating more socially conservative positions especially in regard to medical ethics and reproductive rights. He was opposed to abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and the selective medical treatment of severely disabled infants.[33] He believed that a consistent life ethic should be the viewpoint of a genuine civil libertarian, arguing that all human rights are at risk when the rights of one group of people are diminished, that human rights are interconnected, and that people deny others' human rights at their peril.[33]
Although he supported the American Civil Liberties Union for many years, he criticized the organization in 1999 for defending government-enforced speech codes in universities and the workplace.[36] He served on the board of advisors for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, another civil liberties group.[37] His book Free Speech for Me—But Not for Thee outlined his views on free speech and criticized those who favored censorship "in any form."[3]
Hentoff defended the existence of the state of Israel. He criticized Israeli policies such as the absence of due process for Palestinians[39] and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. His opposition to Israel's invasion of Lebanon led three rabbis symbolically to "excommunicate" him from Judaism.[40] He commented, "I would have told them about my life as a heretic, a tradition I keep precisely because I am a Jew."[40] He supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[7][28]
An ardent critic of the G. W. Bush administration's expansion of presidential power, in 2008 Hentoff called for the new president to deal with the "noxious residue of the Bush-Cheney war against terrorism". According to Hentoff, among the casualties of that war have been "survivors, if they can be found, of CIA secret prisons ('black sites'), victims of CIA kidnapping renditions, and American citizens locked up indefinitely as 'unlawful enemy combatants'".[42] He wanted lawyer John Yoo to be prosecuted for war crimes.[43]
Presidential politics
Hentoff stated that while he had been prepared to support Barack Obama enthusiastically in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, his view changed after looking into Obama's voting record on abortion. During President Obama's first year, Hentoff praised him for ending policies of CIA renditions, but criticized him for failing to end George W. Bush's practice of "state torture" of prisoners.[44]
Hentoff grew up attending an Orthodoxsynagogue in Boston. He recalled that as a youth, he would travel around the city with his father during the High Holidays to listen to various cantors and compare notes on their performances. He said cantors made "sacred texts compellingly clear to the heart," and he collected their recordings.[51] In later life, Hentoff was an atheist,[52][35] and sardonically described himself as "a member of the Proud and Ancient Order of Stiff-Necked Jewish Atheists".[28][53] He expressed sympathy for Israel's Peace Now movement.[54]
Hentoff married three times, first to Miriam Sargent in 1950; the marriage was childless and the couple divorced that same year.[55] His second wife was Trudi Bernstein, whom he married on September 2, 1954, and with whom he had two children, Miranda and Jessica.[55] (Jessica Hentoff is the founder of Circus Harmony, a non-profit social circus and circus school in St. Louis, Missouri.[56]) He divorced his second wife in August 1959.[55] On August 15, 1959, he married his third wife, Margot Goodman, with whom he had two children: Nicholas and Thomas.[55] The couple remained together until he died of natural causes at his Manhattan apartment on January 7, 2017, aged 91.[7][57]
Hentoff, Nat; McCarthy, Albert J. (1975). Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of Jazz by Twelve of the World's Foremost Jazz Critics and Scholars (illustrated, reprint ed.). Perseus Books Group. ISBN978-0-306-80002-3.
Hentoff, Nat (2004). The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance (illustrated, reprint ed.). Seven Stories Press. ISBN978-1-58322-658-2.
Hentoff, Nat (2004). American Music is (reprint ed.). Da Capo Press. ISBN978-0-306-81351-1.
^Current Biography Yearbook. Vol. 47. H. W. Wilson Co. 1986. pp. 221–222. Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston, Massachusetts on 10 June 1925, the first-born child of Simon Hentoff, a haberdasher, and Lena [Katzenberg] Hentoff.
^Polner, Murray (1982). American Jewish Biographies (illustrated ed.). Facts on File. p. 168. ISBN9780871964625. Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston to Simon, a traveling salesman, and Lena (Katzenberg) Hentoff.
^"As I've said before, if a loudspeaker goes off and a voice says, 'All Jews gather in Times Square,' it could never surprise me." Amy Wilentz, in "How the War Came Home", New York, February 2012, quoting from a Nat Hentoff column in The Village Voice.
^Nat Hentoff (December 3, 2008). "Obama's First 100 Days". The Village Voice. Archived from the original on November 13, 2011. Retrieved March 3, 2011.
^Nat Hentoff (January 12, 2010). "George W. Obama". The Village Voice. Archived from the original on March 5, 2011. Retrieved March 3, 2011.
^Nat Hentoff, Nat (August 24, 1985), "The Soul Music of the Synagogue", The Wall Street Journal.
^Joyce, Robert W. (Fall 1999). "PLLDF Century Dinner"(PDF). The Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund Newsletter. Archived from the original(PDF) on March 7, 2016. Retrieved March 3, 2016.
^Hentoff, Nat, John Cardinal O'Connor: at the Storm Center of a Changing American Catholic Church, p. 7 (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988)
^"Nat Hentoff," in Murray Polner, American Jewish Biographies (New York: Facts on File, Inc., Lakeville Press, 1982), pp. 168–9.