On June 21-22, Pete Seeger will perform at the Clearwater Festival, an annual environmental fund-raiser in Croton, New York, which he began more than 30 years ago to help clean up the Hudson River. That is the sort of activism that has defined Seeger’s life. So how could he be connected to Kahane, the right-wing rabbi and agitator?
Seeger was a member of the groundbreaking 40’s era group, the Almanac Singers, with legendary troubadour Woody Guthrie.
Woody’s second wife, Marjorie Guthrie, was a Martha Graham dancer, the daughter of famed Yiddish poet Aviva Greenblatt and the mother of hippie singer songwriter Arlo Guthrie.
Marjorie, eager to give her son a Jewish education, enlisted a young Meir Kahane to act as her son’s Hebrew tutor.
Kahane later founded the extremist Jewish Defense League, eventually moving to Israel to head the Kach party. The party was eventually outlawed and Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990.
El Sayyid Nosair was tried and acquitted of Kahane’s murder, though convicted on related charges such as gun possession. Nosair subsequently received a life sentence in connection with his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
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