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Adam Rubin is the son of sixties radical Jerry Rubin, and he recently wrote an op-ed for the Times of Israel where he stated:

The “anti-Zionist” protests on college campuses promote violence, undermining the principles of genuine antiwar activism championed by figures like my father, Jerry Rubin

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/genuine-antiwar-activism-vs-violent-extremism/

The whole article here here: This is definitely not my dad’s antiwar protest

It is understandable that a son would want to defend his father, But I’ve got my own story of Jerry Rubin, and my mother, the nascent peace activist. Here it is:

In late November of 1994, 56-year-old Jerry Rubin died of injuries he received when a car struck him on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.  No driver was charged in the incident and the press reports at the time note that he was jaywalking, so Rubin was busy defying the law to the very end. By this time, he had become quite rich, and not the scruffy Vietnam war protestor of my memory. He died in Westwood, which was a very nice part of town adjacent to UCLA.

I was also doing quite a bit of walking in LA at that same time. In November of 1994, I was renting a room right off Hollywood Boulevard, at Courtney Ave. My car had broken down on the way back from Las Vegas earlier in the month, and it needed a new transmission. While I waited for it to get fixed, I had to walk to my job at Cinesite which was at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Las Palmas. The path from Santa Monica Boulevard west to my place at Courtney and Hollywood Boulevard took me right through the grimmest part of Hollywood where bums, street people, drug dealers, and other oddballs collected. Many tried to talk to me on those few late-night walks I had to take, but I didn’t speak to them, and I didn’t cross the busy streets in anything but the crosswalk, with the light. I survived that November on the streets of Los Angeles, Jerry Rubin did not.

We were only about 7 miles from each other that November, but we had been much closer 23 years earlier. In May of 1971, my mother was a graduate student in psychology at the University of West Florida, and, I think, a late comer to the countercultural revolution. She was married with two children, but still interested in revolutionary politics, and as such, must have heard about the planned visit of one of the famous or infamous Chicago 7 to her campus. She was not going to miss that rally, and either by choice or because she had no choice, she took me to a rally at UWF where Rubin spoke.

Boy oh boy, how I recall this rally, even though we couldn’t have been there more than an hour and I was, in May of 1971, 7 years old. UWF was still a graduate school only and so the students were a hairy, hippy, but somber lot on most days. I would wander around that campus, free range, while my mother was in class. The big rally where Rubin spoke was different. It was loud and raucous. Who else spoke, I don’t know. In press accounts I’ve located about that day, it says that the Allman Brothers performed the event as well, but I don’t remember that either.

What I vividly recall was Rubin talking and the cheering from the students pressed against the stage. I was standing with my mom to the left side of the stage, about 30 feet back. Rubin was shaggy and, in my way of feeling, scary. The sound of the crowd was scary. At some point, he rolled out or held up a Yippie flag, and this flag forms the heart of my memory of that day. Yippie comes from the YIP, or Youth International Party.

The Yippie flag was nothing like the flags I was familiar with. I knew the American flag, in the red, white, and blue, with its stars and white and red stripes. I might have known the Florida flag, with it’s orange X and the great seal with the native women in the center. I would have doubtlessly been passingly familiar with the Confederate battle flag, still commonly seen in Pensacola in that day. But the yippie flag was black, red, and green.

Holding a microphone in his hand, Rubin pointed at the black portion of the flag, and stated that it stood for anarchy. There was a huge cry of approval from the assembled students. I didn’t know what anarchy was.

Then he pointed at the red part of the flag and said it stood for communism. I may have known what communism was, given that this was in the middle of the Cold War, and I lived in a military town. My dad was a Korean War veteran, sent overseas to fight communism. At the time Rubin was speaking, we were engaged in the war in Vietnam, also to stop the spread of communism, and it was said if we lost, South Vietnam would fall and its people would be viciously oppressed, which is exactly what happened.

Finally, Rubin pointed to the big five-pointed marijuana leaf in the middle of the flag and said, “And you know what this is for!” Another huge cry went up, the loudest yet. I’m sure I didn’t know what I was looking at and am reasonably sure my mom would not have been high or smoking pot in that day.

And so, that is my full memory. My mother finished her degree, taught school, and was a high school guidance counselor for the next 25 years until she retired in the early 1990s. She was a Democrat, but everyone was a Democrat in the South back then. She became a more liberal Democrat as the years wore on, and I was, like her, a liberal Democrat in those days, and was right through the 1992 election where I was finally able to vote for a presidential candidate that won, which was Bill Clinton.

It was at Cinesite, sometime right after Jerry Rubin died that a real political change came over me. I was issued a paper check back then, and there was a guy who would walk around and hand them out on Fridays. On a particular Friday around that time, I received my check, and I opened it. Right on the check stub was a list of the taxes I was paying, and it struck me as particularly depressing that the money had been taken out before I even received my check, in part because replacing the transmission on my car had been so expensive.

I noticed that the final entry on my stub for taxes was the California state income tax, and it had a percentage by the number, which was 2 percent. For seemingly no reason at all, other than I was thinking about my busted transmission, I wondered if the state was taking their 2 percent from the gross, before the federal government had their bite, or the net, after the federal government had taken its bite.

So, I picked up a calculator to figure that out, and that was what started the turn. With my calculator, I figured out the total percentage that had been taken out of my check before it ever even reached my hands, and it was 30 percent. That seemed like an outrageous amount of money! I needed to get my car repaired! I wanted to go out to dinner more often! I wanted to go on dates and have fun, and I reasoned, that would be good for the businesses that wanted me to go out, have fun, and have a new transmission. The years of Democrat programming that started when I was young was shed, and I became a conservative.

In an odd turn of fate, the same thing happened to Jerry Rubin. After George McGovern lost in a landslide to the most hated man in politics at that time, (long before Trump) Richard Nixon, Rubin declared himself out of politics, and then a strange transformation happened. He began to look inside himself, and he must not have liked what he saw. He began to investigate EST, one of the many psychological movements of the time, and he began to come to completely different conclusions about American society.

Rubin embraced capitalism, and he was an early investor in Apple Computer which alone would have solved any financial problems he would have had. It also explains why he was hit by a car in wealthy Westwood, not Hollywood where I lived. He went on to form a new social movement, one that is inextricably tied up in the eighties, known as the Yuppies. Yuppie culture was known for driving BMWs (Beamers) and cultivating new ways to make things more expensive. He wrote a book that extended his revolutionary days called, incredibly, Growing Up at Thirty-Seven. The title alone reveals that he thought the earlier version of himself, the one I found so scary in 1971, was not grown up. A grown-up man knows that capital formation and superior products drive innovation which drives wealth. Essentially, in the same way I left the deep south Democrat orbit of my birth, Jerry Rubin left the counterculture, at least in part, and embraced a version of the United States more like the one I was busy embracing by late 1994. We had just barely missed each other philosophically.

I try not to be angry with my mother for passing along to me the low-quality ideas that came from the entire hippy era. She was born into a poor, and highly religious family and was searching for further horizons, and other things she did set me up for success long after I had failed with the same ideas that, in the end, she mostly abandoned. She and Jerry Rubin were the same age, and so when I saw in him 1971, he was like her, a late arrival on the hippie scene. He was not a Boomer, like me. Rather, he was, like my mother, born just before World War Two, and trying, in a flawed way, to make place in a difficult world and an America which was rapidly changing. So, Adam Rubin is wrong, the counterculture promoted by Jerry Rubin was just as toxic as today’s protestors, and they championed the Vet Cong, that was killing Americans and Vietnamese civilians, but Jerry and I, we changed. He became not so scary, and I grew up to be happy and proud of my country and flag. I even picked up two graduate degrees from UWF myself, in a far different era.