The Youth International Party (YIP) was the most entertaining collection of activists ever to call for fundamental social change. Mixing absurdist comedy with anarchic activism, the Yippies and their theatrics flashed across the headlines and television screens of the 1960s and 1970s. YIP was the one group during those famously activist decades that tried to merge into a single movement the two youthful mass movements of the era: the hippie counterculture and the New Left counter-politics. 

While key Yippies came from many ethnic backgrounds, Jews played an outsize role in the organization, as they did in many of the twentieth century’s left-wing movements. “Yippie!” (as the organization was known, often with an exclamation mark to indicate its joyful ethos) was founded on New York’s Lower East Side on December 31, 1967, by five determined Jewish activists: Anita Hoffman, Nancy Kurshan, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, and Abbie Hoffman. 

Although Yippie soon had a life of its own and YIP groups formed in many cities, the founders’ original intent was not to form a party but rather to stage a “Festival of Life” to protest the Democratic Convention held in Chicago in the summer of 1968. Their plan was to protest the Vietnam War and showcase the then-new counterculture as an alternative to the old-style politics on display at the convention.

After Yippie events during the convention week turned violent (a special national commission called it a “police riot” after the Chicago police repeatedly charged at protesters) and the subsequent heavily publicized Chicago Eight trial of members of YIP and other organizers, the Yippies became as well-known as any of the politically charged era’s activist groups. Their goal was to supplant the established system with an anarchistic, countercultural “New Nation” that would reflect the communal spirit of the hippie movement, with alternative institutions such as food co-ops, free clinics, and underground newspapers. Masses of young people identified with Yippie, organizing collectives and taking to the streets to stop the Vietnam War and confront “attitudes, institutions, and machines whose purpose is the destruction of life, the accumulation of profit” (Blacklisted News, 514). Soon there were Yippie chapters across North America attracting ongoing media attention with their unique mix of militancy and comedy. 

Jewish humor was a well-established tradition by the mid-twentieth century. Its antecedents include the Eastern European (Yiddish) Small-town Jewish community in Eastern Europe.shtetl  tummlers who, in the face of a harsh reality, provided their hardscrabble villages with laughter. The tradition continued in North America. In 1937, for example, the heavily Jewish International Ladies Garment Workers Union presented the well-received Broadway musical-comedy production Pins and Needles. From the beginning, humor was at the core of YIP activism. The five founders of YIP grew up in the postwar years watching Borscht Belt comedians (including Fanny Brice) and reached adulthood just as a tribe of groundbreaking comics (including Elaine May) arrived to take comedy in a new, edgier direction. So when YIP women burned judges’ robes after the Chicago Eight trial verdict, they were, in their own way, following in the tradition of comedians such as Brice and May. It is thus no surprise that Yippie!, alongside its militant street politics, would be steeped in comedic traditions that ridiculed authority and the dominant culture. 

This mixing of radical politics and radical comedy—two ingrained Jewish cultural traditions by the 1960s—came easily to many young North American Jews of the era. Yippies believed fighting for social change could be fun and funny. Their theatrical pranks appealed to rebellious youth of every background and attracted widespread media attention in a way that standing on a street corner handing out leaflets never could. Among their more memorable stunts: the Party’s candidate for United States president in 1968 was an actual pig they named Pigasus; Los Angeles Yippies invaded Disneyland and raised the YIP flag over Tom Sawyer’s Island; New York Yippies tossed dollar bills from the stock exchange gallery onto the trading floor while brokers scrambled for the bills; and Vancouver Yippies invaded the America border town of Blaine, Washington, to protest President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University.

Paul Krassner, founder of the satirical magazine The Realist, came up with the name “Yippie” as a play on “hippie.” Anita Hoffman then coined “Youth International Party (YIP)” to provide media outlets with a formal-sounding organizational name to attach to the Yippies. 

Born Anita Kushner in Baltimore in 1942 and raised in Queens, Hoffman had a master’s degree in psychology from Yeshiva University. Her first protests were in support of the Civil Rights movement, and her first Yippie-style protest was the New York Stock Exchange action. Soon after meeting Abbie Hoffman in 1967, they had a festive hippie wedding in Central Park. As a Yippie activist, Anita Hoffman was an inspired public speaker and a creative organizer with a knack for outrageous theatrics. As Abbie said about Anita: “She was a born rascal” (Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, 91).

The other female co-founder of the Yippies, Nancy Kurshan, was born in Brooklyn in 1944 and grew up in East Williston, Long Island. She began her activism as a teen protesting for the Civil Rights movement on Long Island, attended the first national anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington, D.C., in 1965, and was a seasoned organizer by the time YIP was formed. The first Yippie-style stunt she helped to organize was a highly publicized levitation/exorcism of the Pentagon in 1967. “Out, demons, out,” protesters chanted. As a Yippie, Kurshan was heavily involved in Chicago convention protests and later active in the Kent, Ohio, YIP group. Following her Yippie days, Kurshan spent a lifetime working for prisoners’ rights. Early Yippie Robin Morgan on Kurshan: “If you really want to know what we all need to do in order to succeed, it’s that we need to be like Nancy Kurshan” (Did It!, 127).

Alongside their YIP activism, Kurshan and Hoffman were active in WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), a Yippie-style feminist guerrilla theater group whose “covens” across America were a mix of “theatricality, humor, and activism… totally autonomous, and unhierarchical to the point of anarchy” (Sisterhood is Powerful, 538). At the close of the circus-like trial of the Chicago Eight, Hoffman, Kurshan, and other Witches burned judges’ robes in protest of the guilty verdicts. Defendants Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had earlier mocked the proceedings by wearing the robes into the courtroom. At the time, Los Angeles Yippie Robin Podolsky was in high school watching the Chicago trial antics on television. Podolsky, who later became a rabbi, said: “We adored how these people seized this opportunity for political theater, and we found it, aside from everything else, just really smart. They found a way to get our ideas into the mainstream media” (Interview with the author).

When YIP was founded in the late 1960s, second-wave feminism was in full swing, and the movement’s strength prompted a reckoning for Yippie! and the entire New Left. Many of the young women in Yippie had been drawn to the things that made the group so unique among activists, from its anarchic style and nonhierarchical structure, to its affection for counter-culture and popular culture, to its sense of humor and joyful actions. As feminist ideas quickly spread, many women found that Yippie was as male-dominated as the era’s more conventional left-wing and anti-war organizations. Soon Yippie houses were engaged in late-night criticism/self-criticism sessions over sexism within their collective. Some women, while remaining Yippies, joined in consciousness-raising groups and feminist protests with non-Yippie women. Some participated in Yippie-style all-women offshoots such as WITCH and the Emma Goldman Brigade. Others, like Robin Morgan, left YIP altogether. “We are the women that men warned us about,” Morgan wrote. “We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history” (Dear Sisters, 53).

The embrace of the new feminist consciousness by so many Yippie women and other New Left women had a seismic impact on the activist world of the  1960s and 1970s, and these women played a significant part in the societal change that began in that era regarding attitudes toward gender equality.

Hoffman and Kurshan were just the first of many audacious Jewish women with leadership roles in YIP. Many of these women were also active in other activist groups and in the underground press. In 1970, Kurshan and Judy Clavir Gumbo, born in 1943 and raised in Toronto, were the Youth International Party’s representatives to an antiwar delegation that travelled to North Vietnam. Gumbo was involved in protests during the Chicago convention and helped to collect YIP’s 1968 candidate for president, Pigasus, from a pig farm just outside the city. She was active in many anti-war actions and worked at the Berkeley Barb and Berkeley Tribe underground newspapers. 

Robin Morgan (born in 1941 in Lake Worth, Florida, and raised in New York City), edited Ms. magazine and the classic women’s movement anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, which the New York Public Library named one of the “100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century.” Much earlier, Morgan was a child star of the fledgling network television of the 1940s and 1950s—a regular on the CBS series Mama and costar in dramatic series such as Hallmark Hall of Fame. After leaving YIP, Morgan became active in radical feminist groups. She co-founded WITCH.

Among other notable Yippie Witches were Sharon Krebs and Roz Payne. Krebs, born in 1937 in New Jersey, disrupted a 1968 Hubert Humphrey rally by stripping nude and walking through the crowd with a pig’s head on a tray. She cofounded the Free University of New York and worked at New York’s Rat underground newspaper. Roz Payne, born in Patterson, New Jersey, in 1940, was a member of the renowned filmmaking Newsreel Collective, where she helped to produce films on the Yippies, the Black Panthers, student radicals, and others of the era. She also took thousands of photos of 1960s and 1970s protests. Payne later moved to Vermont, where she helped form the Red Clover, one of the best-known communes in New England. 

WITCH was not the only guerrilla theater-style feminist group formed in the wake of YIP. Yippies Jill Seiden, Coca Crystal and Kathryn Streem brought their comedic ways into the women’s movement via the outrageously theatrical Emma Goldman Brigade, named in honor of the legendary anarchist. “She (Emma Goldman) could have been my grandmother, you know what I mean?” said Bronx-born Jill Seiden. “We all loved Emma Goldman.” In its most notable action, the Brigade fomented considerable chaos by releasing rats during a 1972 banquet in honor of First Lady Pat Nixon at New York’s ornate Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Along with founding the Brigade, Coca Crystal (born Jacqueline Diamond in 1947 Manhattan) hosted the popular weekly cable TV talk show If I Can’t Dance, You Can Keep Your Revolution. Born in Philadelphia in 1951 and raised in Great Neck, New York, Kathryn Streem participated in the Emma Goldman Brigade’s rat action and wrote for the notable underground publications The East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, and The Realist. Streem was a Yippie spokesperson during protests at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. A rival Youth International Party faction, the Zippies, were also protesting that summer in Miami, with Cindy Ornsteen (born in 1946 in Philadelphia) as one of its spokespersons. Ornsteen also wrote for the New York-based Underground Press Syndicate news service. 

Kate Coleman (born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1942) was a well-known activist in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964. She was writing for Newsweek magazine in 1968 when her old Berkeley friend Jerry Rubin recruited her into the Yippies. She helped establish the new group by feeding stories into Newsweek about the impending Yippie events in Chicago. Coleman was an organizer of one of the first Yippie actions, a 1968 “Yip-In” at Grand Central Station. Billed as a countercultural party to celebrate the coming of spring, the Yip-In turned violent when riot police attacked. Coleman went on to be a famed author and journalist for Ramparts magazine and other alternative publications. Susan Carey (New York), Sondra Roth (Philadelphia), Walli Leff (New York), Babs Yohai (Miami), Lori Rosenthal (Vancouver), and Carol Realini (New York) were among the other Jewish women heavily involved in early Yippie groups. 

YIP lost much of its vitality with the decline of the counterculture in the mid-1970s, although it continued to exist into the 1980s. While the 1968 Chicago convention was the most famed of the Yippie events, the group left a considerable activist imprint in many North American cities.