Myron Perlman, Z"L: Working-Class Jewish Radical

http://solidarity-us.org/atc/195/memorial-myron-perlman/
Date Written:  2018-07-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23395

Memorial for Myron Perlman, union carpenter and social justice activist.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Although he was an intellectual with a wide breadth of knowledge and interest - finished college and did a stint in graduate school - Myron's politics were deeply grounded in the immediate and material struggle of daily life. His son Isaac Krantz-Perlman referred to him as a "philosopher carpenter," and there is no sense that for Myron these terms were lived with contradiction. His appreciation for the material world, is the first principle of Marxism - Fanon's dictum that one’s "first truth" must be "one’s realities" - was also born out of his own experience with a distaste for utopian dreaming or elaborate and impractical schemes.

In Yiddish one might refer to Myron’s politics as "doykeit," a radical "hereness," a deeply embedded relationship to the place in which one lives - its language, its textures, its richness of daily life.