Lenni Brenner (born 1937), formerly known as Leonard Glaser or Lenny Glaser, is an American Trotskyist writer. In the 1960s, Brenner was a prominent civil rights movement activist and vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Since the 1980s, his activism has focused on anti-Zionism. He has published widely on the history of Zionism, in particular asserting that the movement collaborated with the Nazis. Early life Brenner was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1937. He says he developed an early interest in history from reading Hendrik Willem van Loon's The Story of Mankind at age seven, which his brother had received as a bar mitzvah present. He had no interest in Jewish issues until around 1973, since, Brenner has remarked, he hailed from a milieu that frequented the synagogue only until the bar mitzvah rite was completed. Political activity Brenner has recounted that his involvement with the Civil Rights Movement began when he met James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, later the organizer of the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s. He also worked with Bayard Rustin, later the organizer of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Brenner was arrested three times during civil rights sit-ins in the San Francisco Bay Area, In an article in the San Francisco Examiner Brenner, together with Mike Myerson, was identified as a member of the W.E.B. Du Bois youth wing of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) within the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination (AHCED). Berkeley 1964, arrest and imprisonment Brenner, then known as Glaser, came to Berkeley in 1962. A bid to enroll in the orthodox Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party was rejected though he was permitted to join its youth branch, from which he was expelled for ignoring an order that he desist from talking about drug reform at street rallies. In February 1964, he was arrested on a drug charge and put on probation for marijuana possession. Though a non-student, Brenner at UC had become by this time a long-time campus orator, a familiar if solitary figure on the Berkeley campus (UC), where he delivered passionate tirades to passing students while protesting issues like Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the papal opposition to birth control, while also advocating for the legalization of marijuana. On the missile crisis he once delivered a non-stop speech from noon to