Nathan Irving Hentoff (June 10, 1925 – January 7, 2017) was an American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist for United Media.
[1] Following his departure from The Village Voice, Hentoff became a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and continued writing his music column for The Wall Street Journal, which published his works until his death.
He was a staff writer for The New Yorker, and his writings were also published in: The New York Times, Jewish World Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Commonweal, and Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo.
Hentoff was born on June 10, 1925, in Boston, Massachusetts,[2][3] the firstborn child of Simon, a traveling salesman, and Lena (née Katzenberg).
[14] Hentoff began his career in broadcast journalism while hosting a weekly jazz program on Boston radio station WMEX.
[22] In 1960 he served as artists and repertoire (A&R) director for the short-lived jazz label Candid Records, which released albums by Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, and Max Roach.
[22][23] Around the same time, Hentoff began freelance writing for Esquire, Playboy, Harper's, New York Herald Tribune, Commonweal, and The Reporter.
[citation needed] He wrote many articles for The Wall Street Journal and The Village Voice to draw attention to the plight of America's pioneering jazz and blues musicians.
[24][25] Hentoff also wrote many novels for young adults, including I'm Really Dragged But Nothing Gets Me Down (1968), This School is Driving Me Crazy (1976), Blues for Charlie Darwin (1982), and The Day They Came To Arrest The Book (1983).
[26] Writing about the latter for The Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg commented that "One of the useful — or depressing — things about reading Hentoff’s YA polemic, which was published all the way back in 1982, is how similar the novel’s conflicts are to our present debates.
The independent documentary, produced and directed by David L. Lewis,[31] won the Grand Jury prize in the Metropolis competition at the DOC NYC festival[32] and played in theaters across the country.
[3] Hentoff espoused generally liberal views on domestic policy and civil liberties, but in the 1980s, he began articulating more socially conservative positions especially in regard to medical ethics and reproductive rights.
"[7] Although he supported the American Civil Liberties Union for many years, he criticized the organization in 1999 for defending government-enforced speech codes in universities and the workplace.
"[38] After the war's end, Hentoff, Joan Baez, and Ginetta Sagan of Amnesty International repeatedly protested what he called "the horrifying abuses of human rights [committed] by the Vietnamese Communist regime.
[41] He also criticized the Bush administration for "authoritarian" policies such as the Patriot Act and other civil liberties restrictions legislated through invoking the ostensible need for homeland security.
An ardent critic of the G. W. Bush administration's expansion of presidential power, in 2008 Hentoff called for the new president to deal with the "noxious residue of the Bush-Cheney war against terrorism".