The 1960s era was a tumultuous time in the United States overall, and Madison was one of flashpoints.
The U.S. was deeply involved in the Vietnam War siding with South Vietnam against the communist North. Anti-war protests were frequent.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison saw students and professors, some of them Jewish, organizing teach-ins and marches, going on strike and confronting recruiters for the military and for companies that were making weapons.
A panel of three distinguished Jewish UW-Madison alumni met at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center in Whitefish Bay on May 21 to recall their experiences on campus during this historic time.
The discussion provided the inaugural event in the “mini-institute” of the Greenfield Summer Institute. The JCC and the UW-Madison’s Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies collaborated on the program.
In 1967, UW-Madison students protested against the Dow Chemical Company, makers of napalm, a chemical substance used in bombs that devastated large sections of Vietnam. Dow representative were visiting the campus that October recruiting students to work for the company.
Jane Brotman, a bilingual psychotherapist in Madison, was a freshman in 1967. On Oct. 18, she had walked from her dorm room to the Memorial Union to buy coffee and to review her notes for an exam.
“At that point in my history, I was still in favor of the Vietnam War,” she said. “I really had a lot of animosity toward anti-war protestors.”
Brotman didn’t know a demonstration had been planned against Dow. She walked up Bascom Hill hearing music in the distance. At the top of the hill, she saw a group of people putting on a mime skit and nearby there was a group of police in riot gear.
She didn’t realize that she was seeing the San Francisco Mime Troup putting on a skit in relation to the anti-war protests, and that she was about to see an attack by police on students.
Police entered what was then the Commerce Building. Brotman watched as police beat people with clubs and threw tear gas. She was close enough to feel the effects.
“There was a very strange scent in the air and my eyes and throat started burning terribly,” she said. “Everyone fled in different directions.”
When she arrived at the Memorial Union, people were passing out pamphlets about a meeting to be held that night and were speaking about a student strike.
“I knew what I had witnessed was wrong,” Brotman said. “And I think I felt, particularly as a Jew, and someone who had the memories of the history of the Holocaust seared in my brain, that I felt I had a special responsibility as a Jew to stand up and say that something was wrong.”
Brotman attended a meeting that night. The next day she participated in the general strike on the campus that brought out some 3,000 students.
“Dow ended up being a transformational moment for me in my life,” Brotman said. “My politics changed dramatically. I got very involved in the anti-war movement on campus.”
Madison Mayor Paul Soglin was a protestor in the thick of this event. Early in his political career, and soon after the Dow demonstration, he had been part of a panel who spoke to citizens about why the demonstration happened.
“Most of them didn’t have a clue why anybody could get so worked up about something going on in Vietnam,” he said.
The last day of the student strike was a Friday, Soglin recalled. The Saturday afterwards, he met with other students to decide if they were going to participate in a peaceful march down State Street, or head to Bascom Hill to occupy a few buildings. A vote was taken and he, along with many others, chose the peaceful path.
Soglin obtained his undergraduate degree from UW-Madison in 1966 and a law degree in 1972. He became mayor of the city in 1973. He served three terms during the 1970s, three more during the 1990s and was elected again in 2011.
Not every 1960s-era Jewish student at UW-Madison was involved in protests.
Accomplished jazz musician, composer, music producer and Jewish music authority Ben Sidran enrolled at UW-Madison in 1960. He had much calmer academic experience.
Sidran’s father, who was born in Poland, chose not to live where other Jews lived where Ben grew up in Racine. “It wasn’t coincidence,” Sidran said. “He did not want to be part of what he thought was a nouveau scene.”
“When I went to high school, there were two Jewish people and one was my sister,” Sidran said. “So I got to learn about anti-Semitism early on. I learned alienation before I was 15 and what I learned is that to the other guy, you are the other guy.”
When Sidran enrolled at Madison, he already understood what it felt like to be on the outside, but he found a welcoming community of other Jewish students on campus that were also active in music.
“The main thing that I got was the sense that I was not alone,” Sidran said. “That there were people in Madison, and so probably elsewhere as well, that loved the kinds of things that I loved… and I felt like I had come home when I came to Madison.”
Sidran said he had long graduated by the time the anti-war protests were in full swing.
Serving as moderator was Michael Bernard-Donals, director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies.
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