On Feb 22, 2010, at 3:43 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
> I assumed that Klein's background was the Communist Party - am I
> wrong?
Only with a generation's remove. From Wikipedia:
> Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec and brought up in a Jewish family
> with a history of left-wing activism. Her parents moved to Montreal
> from the U.S. in 1967 as war resisters to the Vietnam War.[1] Her
> mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for
> her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story.[2] Her father, Michael
> Klein, is a physician and a member ofPhysicians for Social
> Responsibility. Her brother Seth Klein is director of the British
> Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
>
> Her paternal grandparents were communists who began to turn against
> the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and had abandoned
> communism by 1956. In 1942 her grandfather Phil Klein, an animator
> at Disney, was fired as an agitator after the Disney animators'
> strike,[3] and went to work at a shipyard instead. Klein's father
> grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality,
> but found it "difficult and frightening to be the child of
> Communists," a so-called red diaper baby.[4]
>
> Klein's husband, Avi Lewis, also comes from a leftist background. He
> is a TV journalist and documentary filmmaker. His parents are the
> writer and activist Michele Landsberg and politician and diplomat
> Stephen Lewis, son of David Lewis, one of the founders of the
> Canadian New Democratic Party, son in turn of Moishe Lewis, born
> Losz, a Jewish labour activist of "the Bund" who left Eastern Europe
> for Canada in 1921.[5]
One doesn't have to be familiar with Marx or the Marxist tradition to be a Communist, I suppose, but I don't get the impression from reading her that she knows much of anything about it at all.
Doug