If Only You Could Bottle It
Told through essays, memoirs, and other musings, this is the story of a radical Jew, academic, and educator from his birth in Ukraine during the Holocaust through the radical 60s and 70s, to the present day as he fights anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, xenophobia, and hate.
Internationally known in Holocaust, genocide, and Jewish studies, Jack Nusan Porter was born in Maniewicz, Ukraine to Jewish Partisans in the 1940s. Through this engaging and thoughtful memoir, we follow Porter as he recounts his personal journey from a DP camp in Linz, Austria to an idyllic childhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he attended Hebrew day school under Reb Twersk. Porter masterfully details his radicalism in the politically and sociologically turbulent 1960s which would later influence his academic work on genocide, Holocaust studies, and international human rights. Constantly re-inventing himself, readers are treated to engaging anecdotes as they navigate through Porter's highs, lows, and in-betweens.
Jack Nusan Porter founded the Jewish Student Movement in the 1960s and was editor of the classic movement anthology Jewish Radicalism. He is currently an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and a former associate of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute. His run for US Congress in the 12th District of Massachusetts was the subject of a profile in an April 2012 issue of “Talk of the Town” in The New Yorker. In 2015, he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in the prediction and eradication of genocide.