He began his literary life as a jazz critic, but since the late 1950s has sounded off in columns in major national newspapers and in books that have won him awards and applause from fans and critics alike.
Born on June 10, 1925, in Boston, Massachusetts, Hentoff is the only son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He grew up in the Roxbury district of Boston during the 1930s and 1940s when a mood of anti-Semitism swept the country. "There were pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers that spread the inciteful word that Jews were simultaneously in the highest ranks of international communism while also being capitalist bloodsuckers who were draining the very life out of working people," Hentoff recalled in CAAS. This prejudice gave rise to persecution; encounters between Jews and anti-Semites often resulted in violence. The obvious conflict between the promise of the "melting pot" and abundant American racism made Hentoff question authority. "I was an outsider," he noted. "I thought like an outsider; and therefore I learned to be continually skeptical of what insiders with power said they believed." Hentoff further remarked: "As I grew older, the knowledge of what it feels like to be an outcast led me to learn empathy with others of the excluded--blacks, women, homosexuals, and in time, Arab-Americans, Hispanics, [and] Catholics.
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