“From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Goethe’s Faust I took the same message–that life was not in the achieving but in the striving, that value was not in the goal but in the quest for the goal.”īy his junior year that quest led him to drop out of college and hitchhike to Mexico with a friend. He sees his political roots in their romantic vision of the heroic self, which echoed the popularized existentialism of the day. “It was a very Jewish family, pervaded by rules, rules, rules–and there were even rules on how to break the rules.” He remained wrapped up in that culture well into his junior year in high school, when he decided he was an atheist.Īt the University of Buffalo he started out as a math student, though he was also interested in philosophy and attracted by the beat-generation writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

“Religion and business were two things that pervaded all parts of life,” he says. Weinberg grew up in Buffalo, New York, in an apolitical family of immigrant jewelers from Poland. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement was born, giving the New Left student movement of the 1960s a dramatic push forward. Earlier in the day Weinberg had been the first person arrested for violating the university’s new rules restricting the distribution of political literature on campus. For 32 hours they blocked the cops from taking him away and used the roof of the squad car as a speaker’s platform. On October 1, 1964, Jack Weinberg calmly waited in the backseat of a campus-police squad car as thousands of Berkeley students sat down around it.

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