Rubin, Jerry

▪ 1995

      U.S. political activist turned businessman (b. July 14, 1938, Cincinnati, Ohio—d. Nov. 28, 1994, Los Angeles, Calif.), gained his widest renown from the anti-Vietnam War protests during the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago and the subsequent "Chicago Seven" trial, in which—after one defendant was removed to be tried separately—he and six others were tried on charges of conspiracy to incite violence and crossing state lines with intent to riot. After a long trial punctuated with taunts and outbursts from the defendants, they were acquitted of conspiracy, but five were convicted of incitement, and all—plus their lawyers—were cited for contempt some 200 times. The convictions were later overturned. Rubin attended Oberlin (Ohio) College, graduated from the University of Cincinnati, and studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem before briefly attending the University of California at Berkeley. Radicalized by the Free Speech Movement and a trip to Cuba, he helped found the Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies, and was one of the leaders of the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon. During the 1968 election campaign, he staged acts of street theatre such as promoting the Yippie candidate—a pig named Pigasus. Rubin moved away from radical politics during the 1970s and turned his attention to the human-potential movement, sampling, for example, yoga, est, meditation, bioenergetics, and Rolfing. In the 1980s he organized networking seminars in New York City for young Wall Street professionals, and he and fellow former Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman engaged in a series of "Yippie Versus Yuppie" debates. In 1991 he moved to Los Angeles to market a nutritional drink that contained bee pollen and ginseng. Rubin died of a heart attack two weeks after being hit by a car while jaywalking.

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