Hal Draper (born Harold Dubinsky; September 19, 1914 – January 26, 1990) was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California, Free Speech Movement.
Harold Dubinsky was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1914, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire.
[2] His mother, Annie Kornblatt Dubinsky, ran a candy store to make ends meet following her husband's death.
[1] When Hal was eighteen, his mother insisted upon changing the family name to the "American-sounding" name "Draper" to shield the children from anti-Semitism as they entered their careers.
In 1940, that faction, led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham, and Martin Abern, split from the SWP to form the Workers Party.
With a shrinking membership (although its youth work was buoyant), the ISL leadership around Shachtman decided that the time had come to join forces with the Socialist Party of America, which occurred in 1958.
In 1964, Draper was heavily involved in the Free Speech Movement, an important precursor of that decade's New Left, on the Berkeley campus.
Besides his overtly political writings, Draper wrote the short story Ms Fnd in a Lbry, a satire of the information age, in 1961.