Jonah Raskin

Jonah Raskin
Jonah Raskin, May 2005; photograph by Daniel Raskin
Born	January 3, 1942 New York City
Occupation	Writer, professor

Jonah Raskin (born January 3, 1942) is an American writer who left an East Coast university teaching position to participate in the 1970s radical counterculture as a free-lance journalist, then returned to the academy in California in the 1980s to write probing studies of Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg and reviews of northern California writers whom he styled as "natives, newcomers, exiles and fugitives." Beginning as a lecturer in English at Sonoma State University in 1981, he moved to chair of the Communications Studies Department from 1988 to 2007, while serving as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. He retired from his teaching position in 2011.

Born in New York City to a secular Jewish family, Raskin was raised in Huntington, Long Island. His parents were Communists in the 1930s and 1940s, but as his father became a successful attorney in the 1950s, they concealed their radical politics and were careful to blend into their middle-class community. Hiding, dissembling, and disguising would become persistent themes in Raskin's writing, along with the personas of the exile and the fugitive. Raskin gave every appearance of being the all-American teenager; he was co-captain of his high school football team, and named to Newsday's All-Suffolk Football Squad in 1958. He also worked as a sports reporter for The Long Islander in his last year of high school.

Raskin attended Columbia College, studying literature with Lionel Trilling, receiving a B.A. degree in 1963, and an M.A. in American Literature in 1964. He taught at Winston-Salem State College in the summer of 1964, then married and moved to England in the fall to study British and American literature at the University of Manchester. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 with a dissertation on the mythology of imperialism in the work of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, and obtained his first full-time teaching position in the English Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1967 to 1972. Raskin turned his Ph.D. thesis into a book entitled The Mythology of Imperialism, which Random House published in 1971. The New York Times called it "Maoist" literary criticism. Edward Said, the author of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, wrote in 1984 that it was "one of the genuinely important handful of books on modern literature published in the last two decades", and that "Raskin's quite unique feat was to have connected the genuine aesthetic power of the novelists to the political power of the culture abroad." The Mythology of Imperialism has since been republished in a new edition by Monthly Review Press, with a new introduction and conclusion by Raskin and a foreword by Columbia literature professor Bruce Robbins.