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When I was a kid in Boston, it was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the country. If you were living in the ghetto as I was, the Jewish ghetto part of Roxbury, and you went out alone at night, you might be subject to having people attacking you for being a Christ killer.

Nat Hentoff

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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
Columnist
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Historian
Journalist
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Boston
Massachusetts
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Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
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Even though the clock didn't work, we kept the clock because of how we felt about Franklin D. Roosevelt . A lot since then I knew about FDR I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic.
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A.J. [Muste] was a - as he likes to say, a radical pacifist.
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In that respect, Martin Luther King, whom A.J.[Muste] advised in the civil rights movement, was also a radical pacifist.
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A liberal was somebody who expected and hoped that government would help the poor - you know, that whole routine. I did not know then and I've learned since that in an area that means a lot to me, free speech, liberals are as bad as many conservatives in trying to censor speech.
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[Barack] Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to.
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[My father] was very impressed when he saw Death of a Salesman, I must say. He recognized himself to some extent.
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I met [my wife Margot] on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago.
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The habeas corpus business, that's to show that he [Bill Clinton] is not tough on crime.
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I went to the library as soon as I could walk. So the training came from reading all kinds of people, from fairy tales and later on to - I don't know why - Schweitz's Life of Christ.
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If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.
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The immigration bill - the new immigration bill - [Bill Clinton] has stripped the courts, which Congress can do under the leadership of the president, so that people who had a right to asylum or to petition - for asylum who were legal residents are now unable to go through because that part of the bill has been taken out.
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I read like everybody - like every other writer.
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Being pro-life is an essential part of being a writer.
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I don't like to feel intimidated by where I make a living.
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A particular moment - and I'm not, to this day, quite sure how I feel about it - I had always wanted to be in the law books - you know, Hentoff vs. something or other.
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One of the worst elements of Obama's career, which no one talks about, is that he voted twice for a bill that said, if there is a botched abortion, if the child emerges from the womb alive, it should be okay to kill the baby. We have elected a president - twice! - who agrees with infanticide.
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[Søren ] Kierkegaard said it for me a long time ago. He said, `You can't really think yourself into a faith, into a religion. It's something you have to make a leap into faith.' And I've never been able to do that. I wish I could. Then maybe I could believe in an afterlife.
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I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that [Clay] Felker is destroying this paper. And I heard that he was about ready to fire me, but two other people on The Voice interceded and, fortunately, he had a very short attention span, so I wasn't fired.
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