Sidney Lens

Sidney Lens was born Sidney Okun on January 12, 1912, in Newark, New Jersey, to Charles and Sophie Okun, Jewish immigrants from Russia who had arrived in the United States in 1907. His father, who was a pharmacist, died when Lens was three years old, and he was raised by his single mother who worked long hours in the New York City garment industry. Lens changed his name in the early 1930s. Raised in the Lower East Side neighborhood in New York City, Lens attended Rabbi Jacob Joseph School and DeWitt Clinton High School. He briefly enrolled at New York University night school, but left without a degree. ==Career==

Lens became a socialist in the early 1930s, and joined the American Workers Party (Trotskyist) in 1934. He focused on union organizing as the primary vehicle for revolutionary change. Lens helped organize department store and auto workers in the 1930s, and participated in the Flint sit-down strike in 1936. Among those he was influenced by was the Dutch-American pacifist A.J. Muste. Lens was a contributor to The Progressive and wrote more than twenty books. He ran for public office three times, culminating in 1980 when he was the Citizens Party (United States) candidate for United States Senate in Illinois. Along with his 1977 book The Day Before Doomsday which warned of the dangers of nuclear war, Lens also wrote a history of U.S. intervention abroad, The Forging of the American Empire, originally published in 1974 and republished in 2003 by Haymarket Books with a new introduction by Howard Zinn; and an autobiography, Unrepentant Radical. ==Personal life==

Lens married Chicago public school teacher and fellow progressive Shirley Rubin in 1946. He had no children. ==Death and legacy==

Lens died from melanoma in Chicago on June 18, 1986. His archives are preserved by the Chicago History Museum Research Center. ==Bibliography==