This 100-year-old Jewish activist is speaking up again — this time about Gaza
Jules Rabin at home in Vermont. Courtesy of Jeb Wallace-Brodeur/Barre Montpelier Times Argus
Jules Rabin stood at the busiest intersection of Montpelier, Vermont, in early April with snow still on the sidewalks, protesting the war in Gaza. To cope with the 37-degree chill, he wore a scarf, a wool cap and a down vest under his tweed overcoat, accompanied by about 75 friends and family members. Rabin, who was holding a sign that asked, “How could the Nazi genocide of Jews 1933-45 be followed by the Israeli genocide of Palestinians today?” was celebrating his 100th birthday.
Rabin and his wife Helen live 20 miles away in Marshfield, Vermont, population 1,583, where they raised two daughters in a house they helped build. Pioneers in Vermont’s bread-baking renaissance, the Rabins ran a bakery for close to 40 years. Jules Rabin has been protesting Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians for nearly as long.
In a podcast on the nonprofit news site VT Digger, Rabin referred to the tragedy unfolding in Gaza as “a piecemeal Holocaust.”
He told David Goodman, the podcast host, that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza “resembles what Germans did to Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and everywhere else in Europe.” The comparison is legitimate, Rabin said, because the Palestinians have been “ghettoized” and they feel a desperation similar to that of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews. When I asked him whether the Palestinian casualties were really comparable to the Holocaust, Rabin said, “I would stand by that.”
The parallels that Rabin draws between the Holocaust and Gaza are far out of the mainstream of Jewish thought. When I spoke to Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and professor of Jewish studies at American Jewish University, about Rabin’s remarks, he said, “The Gaza war is brutal, difficult and devastating. It is not genocide.” Berenbaum added that the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto took place after 265,000 Jews had been deported to the Treblinka death camp and trains were standing by to bring the 40,000 or so remaining Jews there.
“Every time you make this comparison, you show how much of the history of the Holocaust you don’t know,” Berenbaum said.
“I don’t feel learned in the whole matter of Jewish history,” said Rabin, who claimed that the Jewish presence in the Holy Land has been “attenuated” and that the Jewish claim for restitution after World War II should’ve resulted in the Germans awarding Prussia or Bavaria to the Jewish people. Still, as Rabin said during the podcast interview, “One can’t look the other way when something dreadful is going on.”
So, where does he stand on the war in Ukraine?
“The Russian attack was a brutal act of imperialism,” he said. “Putin’s invasion was atrocious.”
He did demonstrate once against the Russian onslaught but now feels that Ukraine has muddied the waters by getting mixed up with “the sinister geopolitics of NATO.” Rabin, whose political sentiments are shared by his friend Peter Schumann, the director of the Bread and Puppet Theater, who joined the birthday demonstration in Montpelier, likened the possibility of Ukraine being admitted into NATO to Russia having an outpost on America’s border with Canada or Mexico.
“We’re so blind in America in our mightiness, our correctness, that we can’t see the Russian point of view,” Rabin said.
A lifetime of activism
Yehuda Moishe Rabin was the youngest of five children in what he described in a 2019 letter to Vermont representative Peter Welch as “a deeply Jewish household.” His immigrant parents arrived in Boston in 1905, fleeing pogroms and antisemitism in Russia. (Rabin has said the attacks by West Bank settlers on Palestinians in the aftermath of Oct. 7 amount to a reenactment of what his parents were subjected to in Russia.)
“They were timid about engaging with goyim,” Rabin said of his parents. As a child, he said, he “learned to keep away from the topic” of life in the old country.
In some autobiographical notes Rabin penned as he approached 100, he referred to his father as “a slavey” sorting metals in the basements of other men’s junkshops. In the winter, for warmth, his father tied burlap bags around his legs to keep warm at work. Rabin remembers his mother, who lived to the age of 102, pleading in Yiddish, “hob rakhmones af mir” — “have pity on me.”
Rabin attended his first demonstration at the tender age of 8 with his Uncle Harry, who was a communist. They joined a march through the streets of Boston denouncing the planned execution of a Black labor activist named Angelo Herndon who had been convicted of insurrection in Georgia.
During the early 1960s he marched from Indiana to New York protesting against nuclear weapons and then on portions of the march’s route from France to Moscow. He was active opposing the Vietnam War and continued protesting American military interventions in Central America, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rabin met his wife of 48 years, Helen, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, where he worked for a time as a union truck driver. She is not Jewish, but the couple took their two daughters to Passover Seders while they were growing up. Rabin describes himself as a “completely atheistic” Jew who doesn’t go to synagogue but says his ethnicity has helped make him the person he is. “Being Jewish made me bookish,” he told me.
Bookishness wasn’t something that came from his parents. They were barely literate, Rabin said. But he did inherit the Jewish zeal for education, graduating from Boston’s prestigious Latin School, where public school students are required to learn Latin. After high school Rabin went to Harvard but left in 1943 to enlist in the military. Rabin never left the U.S. during World War II. Initially he was assigned to an artillery unit, then served as a translator for French pilots the Air Force was training.
After the war he returned to Harvard on the GI Bill. Rabin moved to New York and studied anthropology at Columbia but didn’t complete his doctoral dissertation. He was able to land a teaching job at Goddard College, an innovative educational institution in Plainfield, Vermont, known for its ties to the burgeoning counterculture.
Rabin was laid off at Goddard in 1977 as part of a major downsizing at the school. He and his wife decided to start a bakery at their home. They hauled 70 tons of stone from nearby fields and built a replica of a 19th-century wood-fired peasant oven. (In a 2014 interview with NPR, Rabin described the home bakery as shmatte technology.) The Rabins’ sourdough bread was so popular that the nearby Plainfield Food Co-Op limited the number of loaves each customer could buy.
The key to a long life
Rabin credits diet and exercise for his longevity. For the last 20 years or so he has eaten a breakfast of whole oats or barley every morning. In the warm weather he cuts firewood with a chainsaw, then hauls it into the house in a wheelbarrow. During the winter months he gets on his “dandy” Vermont-made rowing machine six days a week and works out for 20 minutes.
The Rabins do not have a television set in their home. They stream movies from The Criterion Channel on a large computer screen. The couple decided to cancel their Netflix subscription when the company stopped mailing DVDs.
Evenings are usually spent sitting in their rocking chairs reading. In the VT Digger podcast, when Rabin was asked what advice he had for young people, he responded: “Read a lot.”
“Know about other centuries,” he advised. “Learn about other people, other times.”
Life at 100
In his autobiographical notes, Rabin referred to his “reduced life,” one in which forgetting “becomes more serious by the month.”
Rabin has said he’s most proud of his kids, who are now 55 and 58. His daughter Nessa is an opera singer who works as a wine and beer buyer at a nearby food co-op. Her sister Hannah is a physician who lives 50 miles away. Both of them stood by his side during the protest in Montpelier.
After the United States invaded Iraq Rabin demonstrated in front of a post office in Montpelier every week for nine years. But now, at the age of 100 and feeling a little unsteady on his feet, Rabin says he can’t be in street demonstrations during the cold weather.
But winter is finally over in Vermont and Jules Rabin is now outside demonstrating every week in Montpelier. It’s only for a half-hour but an old Jew still makes the effort to let it be known that something dreadful is going on in the world.
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