Talking About My Generation

“I hate Illinois nazis.” Frank Collin leads a march in Chicago’s Marquette Park neighborhood in the middle of the 1970s (frame from the documentary film “Skokie: Invaded But Not Conquered,” produced by the Illinois Holocaust Museum, 2013).

We missed The Sixties. We were around but had more immediately prepubescent concerns than social justice and foreign policy. In the summer of 1969, while the whole world watched Vietnam and Woodstock, I played little league baseball at the Jewish Community Center in the Rogers Park neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. I belong to the Blank Generation and I will always love Richard Hell and the Voidoids for putting us into an anthem…