From Ben and Jerry’s to the Mittens and the Dove

From the mid-1970s until the late 1980s I was a member of the Powderhounds, a team of ski ambassadors who were sponsored by a Montreal radio station called CHOM FM. , which gave me the opportunity to ski almost anywhere on the Eastern seaboard without paying for my lift tickets.My favorite ski destinations were in Vermont, most notably Smuggler's Notch, Stowe, Killington and Jay Peak, where we'd thrill to the moguls and powder amidst those gorgeous Green Mountains.Trips from Montréal to the US with my close friends often included stops in Burlington VT, where we had terrific ice cream in a converted gas station, beginning in 1979, served by a couple of dudes named Ben and Jerry.Burlington also boasted a rather famous 'lefty' resident named Bernie Sanders, who was elected Mayor there, and served in that position from April 6, 1981, to April 4, 1989.Bernie's politics were actually tied to our ice cream gurus, a fact we didn't know at the time, but wouldn't have come as any surprise, given what we knew from our ski bum friends about the politics of 1980s Burlington.And we were no strangers to marginal politics, in part because of the lifestyle we had adopted, but also because we grew up in Montréal, which was no stranger to ideas of socialized medicine, alternative lifestyles, sexual liberation, and progressive taxation aimed at maintaining reasonable proximity between the haves and the have-nots in society.We loved hearing that Bernie was a socialist, or communist, or whatever he was, a notable figure who stood far outside the American mainstream.My own pathway led me to and from the US, for my studies as an undergraduate (in Boston), and of course for a multitude of CHOM sponsored ski days.In 1990, I collaborated with Michael Holquist (Comparative Literature at Yale) on a special issue of a journal I'd founded called Discours social / Social Discourse.I decided to send a copy of the issue, called Bakhtin and Otherness, to Noam Chomsky, with whose works I'd become obsessed as an undergraduate.He seemed to speak to me directly about arbitrary authority, the misuses of power, the importance of studying language, and the quest for creativity.I was nervous sending out the package to Noam Chomsky, and I expected that he would be unlikely to reply, given his massive research, teaching and writing agendas.Instead, he wrote back with kindness and generosity: "Many thanks for sending me the fascinating issue on Bakhtin, about whom I know far too little" (March 20 th , 1991).It was a small note, but for me, this seemed like receiving a letter from the likes of Charles Dickens, Mahatma Gandhi, or Albert Einstein.As it turned out, this was the first of hundreds of letters that have passed between us for over thirty years, addressing issues of language theory, US politics, immigration law, travel, friendship, love, loss, and the social responsibility of intellectuals.For me, Chomsky's irreverence for powerful people and institutions for their own sake, his challenges to arbitrary authority, his resolute conviction that people are born with an instinct for freedom and the powers imbued by common sense, and his extraordinary generosity in regards to the sharing of ideas, were and have remained beacons in a world often filled with disappointment, mediocrity, and unthinking obedience.My work on Noam Chomsky and his milieus expanded over the years, as I researched and taught in areas pertaining to NY Jewish intellectuals, the student Zionist organization Avukah, anarchism, and, moreover, the many challenges facing vulnerable migrants, refugees, and homeless persons.Bernie Sanders remained interesting to me, if only because he offered up a vision of what could be possible, even via mainstream politics, in the US.By 2016, I began to be fascinated in Bernie's rise to mainstream US politics, and with the catastrophic election of Trump, I was dragged,

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