The Amazing Life of Joel Kovel

Review of Joel Kovel, The Lost Traveller’s Dream: A Memoir (New York: Autonomedia, 2017), ISBN 978-1-57027-321-6, 376 pages, paperback, $19.95.

Before I read this memoir, I did not know much about Joel Kovel since I had only read his first book, White Racism: A Psychohistory (1970), and the Psychoanalytic Dialogues article “Reflections on White Racism” (2000). From his memoir, I learned that before he wrote this first book, he graduated from medical school, became a psychiatrist, completed his military service as a psychiatrist in Seattle, and came back to New York to begin psychoanalytic training.

Upon his return to New York in September 1967, his life moved along on two tracks. One was for the “orderly pursuit of professional advancement” and the other was for the expression of his rage and guilt about the Vietnam War, and the time he had spent roughly once a week diagnosing a soldier in order to “facilitate his removal from the service for clogging up the war machine” (Lost, 131).

After he decided to write a book, he thought at first that it

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would be about Vietnam, but then realized that he was too far from the action. However, something at closer range that kept coming up was the “race problem” that had been agitating the nation for a decade: “the breakdown of hopes for racial integration, the fury of riots in the black ghettos, and over, above, and through it all, the satanic war being pursued overseas” in which disproportionally high numbers of African American soldiers were fighting against a people perceived as subhuman (Lost, 134; “Reflections,” 579). When his work on the book began, he knew little about social psychology or social theory. By the end he thought it would be a psychohistory, which he understood as a blending of psychology and history. He subsequently realized that his radical urges were pushing him to transform rather than weave together (“Reflections,” 585).

In 1972 a review of White Racism by Chip Sills appeared in a small radical philosophy journal, Telos. That review, according to Kovel, changed his life. It “kindled” in him a passion to read Marx, and he found there his “intellectual home” (“Reflections,” 586).

Kovel’s feelings about the Telos “crowd” began to sour, especially because of a “nauseating nonchalance” to massacres in Central America “engineered by the CIA” (Lost, 187). Kovel traveled to Nicaragua in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1986. He felt that the Sandinista Revolution was largely an expression of “liberation theology” in which Christianity was reinterpreted in terms of class struggle and its goals incorporated as those of socialism (Lost, 192). By the time Kovel returned from Nicaragua in July 1986, the “Regime Change Gang” had pretty much had its way with Nicaragua, mining its harbors, devastating its economy, and “creating the Contras who gave to barbarism a new level of meaning” (Lost, 204).

Meanwhile, at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine where Kovel was a full professor, Herman van Praag had become Chairman of Psychiatry in 1981. Kovel regarded him as a personification of the rampant mind-to-brain reduction of the loudly cheered “biological revolution” in psychiatry. Van Praag clearly meant to shape Einstein psychiatry accordingly. In addition, van Praag introduced himself to the school as follows: “My name is Herman van Praag. I am a Zionist, and I am a psychiatrist.” The presence of van Praag deepened Kovel’s already existing alienation from Zionism and steered him toward thinking of it as a component

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of empire. Once active in all academic decisions at Einstein, Kovel watched his influence vanish, and he eventually decided to end his 28-year medical career (Lost, 208-209).

In 1987 Kovel, who had met Alger Hiss earlier in the 1980s, was delighted to be offered the Alger Hiss Professorship of Social Studies at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley by its president, Leon Botstein. He stayed there until 2009, at which point Kovel’s anti-Zionism clashed with Botstein’s wish to appeal to a “very important part” of Bard’s “support base” by “expressing” his “solidarity with Israel” (Lost, 313).

In addition to traveling to Nicaragua in the mid 1980s, Kovel was in South Africa in August 1989, contributing to a radical psychology conference. Before he returned home Kovel became aware that Mandela sold “his birthright for a mess of cash as he turned the nation over to the International Monetary Fund” (Lost, 242). In the winter of 1994, Kovel participated in the third of a series of Caravans to Cuba that would break the 30-year American blockade (Lost, 247).

From the beginning of the 1990s, Kovel believed that overcoming the ecological crisis required “synthesizing” the “Red” and the “Green;” that is, combining the anti-capitalism of social movements with the many efforts to “contain the damage wrought by civilization on nature” (Lost, 269). In 1998 Kovel ran for the U.S. Senate on the Green Party line, and in 2000 he sought the Green Party’s presidential nomination (Lost, 253).

The last chapter in this amazing memoir can be summed up by its last sentence: “I am grateful to have lived long enough to find this church” (Lost, 366). The church is St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, and the chapter describes his conversion from a non-Jewish Jew to a radical Christian.

The Lost Traveller’s Dream is the amazing memoir of a man who packed enough into his 81 years to have lived two or more lifetimes. He is aptly described by Michael Löwy on the back cover of the paperback edition as both bringing together radical spirituality, Marxist socialism, and ecological cosmovision and being “an unrepentant fighter against ‘the Enemy of Nature’ – and of Humanity: Capitalism.”

I think that the best way to honor Joel Kovel in these troubling Trumpian times is to carry on his legacy of courageously

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fighting injustice wherever we see it.

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