Steve Ben Israel, a Living Theater Performance Artist, Dies at 74

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NY Times June 16, 2012
Steve Ben Israel, a Living Theater Performance Artist, Dies at 74
By PAUL VITELLO

The young Steve Ben Israel was a longhaired, card-carrying pacifist, 
anarchist, comedian and performance artist who toured during the 1960s 
and ’70s with the Living Theater, an avant-garde repertory group. He had 
leading roles in many of the company’s cheerfully seditious productions, 
including “Paradise Now,” in which the cast, naked, exhorted audience 
members to seize the theater, form anarchist cells and overthrow the 
government.

Making anarchist performance art was a hard way to earn a living even 
back then, when millions of young Americans were dabbling in 
revolutionary ideas. But Mr. Israel, who died of lung cancer on June 4 
in Manhattan at 74, kept at it for the rest of his life, friends said — 
a one-man revolutionary cell delivering jokes, stories and poems aimed 
at undermining capitalist society. He did not advocate overthrowing the 
government much anymore. He was trying, he told people, to foment a mass 
uprising of compassion.

He was in the subway one day, on the No. 1 train, when he announced: 
“Hi, everybody! My name is Steve. And I’m a poet and a performer. I live 
here in New York City. And I’ve got these 17 dollars that I want to give 
out to everybody on this train.”