Nat Hentoff, 91, has died. The jazz critic for the Village Voice, Hentoff described himself as a left-wing Jewish atheist. But he became a pro-life crusader, alienating his fellow liberals for his strong opposition to abortion. Hentoff was a civil libertarian, fiercely devoted to the Constitution, who quit the ACLU because of its support of speech codes.
Hentoff had been called “the last honest liberal” for his consistency in extending the left’s concern for the poor and marginalized to the most poor and marginalized of them all: unborn children.
From Nat Hentoff — noted jazz critic, author and columnist — dead at 91 | cleveland.com (Associated Press):
Nat Hentoff, an eclectic columnist, critic, novelist and agitator dedicated to music, free expression and defying the party line, died Saturday at age 91.
His son, Tom Hentoff, said his father died from natural causes at his Manhattan apartment.
Schooled in the classics and the stories he heard from Duke Ellington and other jazz greats, Nat Hentoff enjoyed a diverse and iconoclastic career, basking in “the freedom to be infuriating on a myriad of subjects.”
He was a bearded, scholarly figure, a kind of secular rabbi, as likely to write a column about fiddler Bob Wills as a dissection of the Patriot Act, to have his name appear in the liberal Village Voice as the far-right WorldNetDaily.com, where his column last appeared in August 2016. . . .
As a columnist, Hentoff focused tirelessly on the Constitution and what he saw as a bipartisan mission to undermine it. He tallied the crimes of Richard Nixon and labeled President Clinton’s anti-terrorism legislation “an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights.” He even parted from other First Amendment advocates, quitting the American Civil Liberties Union because of the ACLU’s support for speech codes in schools and workplaces.
Left-wing enough to merit an FBI file, an activist from age 15 when he organized a union at a Boston candy chain, Hentoff was deeply opposed to abortion, angering many of his colleagues at the Village Voice and elsewhere. In 2008, he turned against the campaign of Barack Obama over what he regarded as the candidate’s extreme views, including rejection of legislation that would have banned partial birth abortions.
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Photo credit: The original uploader was Ed Poor at English Wikipedia (Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by מתניה.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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