Jules Rabin

Jules Rabin (born April 6, 1924) is an American peace activist, writer, educator, and baker. He is known for his practice of nonviolent resistance during major protest movements spanning more than six decades including protests in favor of reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons, protests in favor of the civil rights movement, and protests in opposition to the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, he moved from New York City to rural Vermont as part of the back-to-the-land movement. He taught at Goddard College for nine years.After leaving Goddard, he and his wife Helen started Upland Bakers, an artisan baker of sourdough bread which is credited with contributing to the renaissance of European-style hearth bread in the United States. In subsequent decades, he has been a noticeable presence in the state capitol of Vermont, protesting in opposition to the Iraq War. He has advocated on behalf of the Palestinians for more than two decades, and has actively participated in public protests in opposition to the Gaza war.

Yehuda Moishe Rabinovitz was born on April 6, 1924, and grew up in Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts, as the youngest of five children. His parents were Lithuanian immigrants. Rabin grew up in poverty in a working class family. His father sorted metal in a junkyard and the family ran a store with the help of their children. His uncle, a Marxist, took him to his first protest—a rally in support of Black labor organizer Angelo Herndon after his conviction for insurrection—when he was eight years old. Rabin recalls that his uncle followed the tradition of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which rejected rabbinic authority.

Rabin attended the Boston Latin School before going on to Harvard. After his first semester, he joined the United States Army. He was trained as a translator in the German language during World War II, but was not deployed. After the end of the war, he returned to Harvard and received his BA in 1946. He initially began working on his undergraduate thesis at Harvard but soon “got tired of it” and gave up on it, graduating cum laude instead. He shortened his name to Rabin soon after. He then attended graduate school at Columbia University where he studied anthropology but did not finish his doctorate nor receive his degree, giving up after declaring his thesis “a foolish theoretical subject”

Rabin has identified as an atheist since at least the early 1960s. He also identifies as culturally Jewish. In Vermont, the Rabins co-founded the Plainfield Community Seder, a Passover celebration ongoing since 1973. Rabin grew up speaking Yiddish with his family, but does not read Hebrew and does not involve himself in issues directly related to the Jewish community. He also speaks French, German, and Spanish.

The Rabins have also been involved as volunteers with the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont. In the 2010s, Rabin was frequently a Sunday morning guest on the “Curse of the Golden Turnip”, a radio show about farming and gardening on WGDR (91.1 FM) community radio.

Rabin leads a disciplined life beginning with a breakfast made from whole oats or barley, followed by cutting firewood, and regular use of a rowing machine. He was able to do 50 push-ups a day until he was 95. At 100 years of age, he is only able to do 10. His wife Helen is an artist who is active with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and is a member of the Raging Grannies. They have two daughters, Hannah and Nessa. Their daughters, along with five of their friends, founded the Children’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1981. They attempted to meet with then-president Ronald Reagan, but the White House allegedly ignored them. Nessa is a union baker and pastry chef.

Rabin originally participated with the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) in the earliest of the American-Soviet Peace Walks known as the “San Francisco to Moscow Walk for Peace” from 1960 to 1961. He began working with the group as a photographer alongside a documentary film crew headed by Hilary Harris, which later released a short documentary film about the movement titled The Walk (1962), for which Rabin received credit. Rabin eventually joined the movement himself. The group marched across the United States calling for nuclear disarmament, traveling to Britain, Belgium, and West Germany. They were permitted to travel to Moscow via East Germany and Poland. The attempt at citizen diplomacy was widely covered by most major media outlets. The Associated Press reported that Rabin and other peace activists had tea with Nina Kukharchuk-Khrushcheva, the First Lady of the Soviet Union, in Moscow, in October 1961. The group discussed disarmament, and asked the First Lady to consider setting a good example for other nations by disarming their weapons. She politely declined.