WONDERFUL profile of Jamie Raskin by Michael Tomasky in New Republic.

[Grasswire2]

Full article available at link below. No paywall.

[link:https://newrepublic.com/article/164778/jamie-raskin-democracy-defender-profile|


four paragraphs of it:

If Raskin took January 6 a little more personally than most members, it was partly because of his respect for our democratic customs—and partly because the nation’s capital is his hometown. He was born in 1962 in George Washington University Hospital; his Takoma Park home is less than 10 miles away. (His full name is Jamin Ben Raskin; his parents named him after his paternal grandfather Benjamin, who’d been a plumber, playfully reordering the syllables of the first name.) “My dad used to say that everybody wants to fly like a bird or just stand like a tree, and some people are bird people, and some people are tree people,” he said. “I’ve always been a tree person.”

The dad in question was Marcus Raskin, a formidable intellectual who would go on to help found the Institute for Policy Studies, which at its peak was Washington’s top left-leaning think tank. At the time of Jamie’s birth, he was on staff at Kennedy’s National Security Council. “His first day of work was the Bay of Pigs,” Raskin recalled. His mother, Barbara, was a journalist and novelist; her most successful novel, Hot Flashes, spent five months on The New York Times’ bestseller list. His maternal grandfather, Samuel Bellman, was the first Jewish person elected to the Minnesota state legislature (from the St. Louis Park area, famed as the home of Al Franken, Norm Ornstein, Thomas Friedman, and the Coen brothers).

Jamie Raskin grew up in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C., in a house full of politics, books, art, intellectual thrusting and parrying. Dr. Benjamin Spock popped around, and George McGovern and Ralph Nader. As if that weren’t enough, Marcus was also a concert-level pianist. “He taught Philip Glass how to play the piano, which a lot of people say explains everything you need to know about Philip Glass,” Raskin joked.

In 1968, during the Vietnam War, Marcus, who died in 2017, was indicted along with Spock and others for illegally counseling young men to evade the draft. He was acquitted, but the indictment played “a defining a role in the formation of my political consciousness,” Raskin said. It was a time of turmoil in Washington. Jamie was one of two white students in his public school class, and things got a little dicey at school for him after the 1968 riots, so his parents moved him against his wishes to Georgetown Day School, founded in the 1940s as the district’s first integrated school. He went off to Harvard when he was just 16. He laughed: “That was a form of subtle child abuse to get rid of me. When I got there, everybody was off getting drunk and losing their virginity. And I was looking for the chess club with my Star Wars lunch box.”

[crickets]

1. Jamie Raskin is one of the reasons I do not give up hope. nt