December 19, 2008

Naomi Klein: bourgeois vixen?

By: David Polansky

I realize I’m supposed to find Naomi Klein irritating, and am probably obliged to call attention to her economic illiteracy, but what struck me when reading this recent New Yorker profile was how bourgeois this radical maven is (cute too, according to that top photo).

And not just her: the story of the Klein family is like a microcosm of the radical Jewish experience in North America during the last century.

Her paternal grandparents, Anne and Philip, met at the Jack London Club—a leftist artists’ club—in Newark, New Jersey, sometime in the thirties. (Philip’s older brother, Sol, was more committed—he moved to the Soviet Union after the revolution and never came back.) Philip wanted to be a painter, and in 1936 he got a job as an animator for Disney. He worked on “Fantasia” and “Snow White” and “Pinocchio.” Disney animators had been trying to organize themselves in secret since the early thirties, but they didn’t pull it off until after the bonuses they were promised for “Snow White” failed to materialize. In the late spring of 1941, they went on strike. Philip and Anne, ardent believers in the union, lived in a tent across the street from the studio, cooking over open fires and manning the picket line. Their first son, Michael, Naomi’s father, was then three, and lived with them in the tent part of the time. The strike was settled in September, but a few months after that Philip was fired for being an agitator.

And so on. Fascinating, no? Yet now the heir to this radical tradition, well, sells books to the guy from Radiohead and gives speeches on college campuses. Her brother, raised in the same tradition, works on poverty issues for a think tank in British Columbia. Sounds like a nice life. It’s like at some point the whole famly got declawed by an ideological vet or something. Nor are the Kleins unique in this regard, I think.

The Jewish radicals of the early 20th century have become the Jewish left-leaning bourgeoisie of the 21st (and I’m not being facetious when I call this a wholly positive transformation).

Also, not knowing the delightfully-named Larissa MacFarquhar, I can’t say with what degree of irony she writes of the No Logo author’s house that

It is furnished simply, as though on one quick trip to Crate & Barrel.

Nice.