The name of an Old Testament matriarch, Naomi means “my pleasant one” in Hebrew. But since it was the 401st most popular baby name in 1970, keeping all the prominent forty-something Naomis straight is anything but pleasant. Become an OWS authority with this guide to the thinkers and writers involved in the movement. Plus, a couple of red herring Naomis to watch out for!
Naomi Wolf (b. 1962)
Naomi Wolf is an American feminist and political author. She is best known for the The Beauty Myth, feuding with Camille Paglia in The New Republic, and receiving unwanted sexual advances from Harold Bloom as an undergraduate at Yale. Ms. Wolf’s most visible involvement in Occupy Wall Street was getting arrested this week among the protesters outside The Huffington Post Game Changers awards ceremony (to which she was invited) for violating a (likely fictitious, she claims) permit which gave the NYPD the right to police a public sidewalk. She wrote in the Guardian:
In my book Give Me Liberty, a blueprint for how to open up a closing civil society, I have a chapter on permits – which is a crucial subject to understand for anyone involved in protest in the US. In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of “overpermiticisation” – requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment.
Despite identifying with the left, Ms. Wolf is on a bit of a Founding Fathers kick, making her an interesting figure in the comparisons between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.
Naomi Klein (b. 1970)
Naomi Klein is a Canadian anti-corporate globalization activist and author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. On October 6, she addressed the crowd at Zuccotti Park. Her speech, entitled, “The Most Important Thing In the World Now,” began “I love you” and was reprinted in The Nation, where she is a contributor, and The Occupy Wall Street Journal. It praised Occupy Wall Street’s steadfastness, compared to the WTO and G8 protests’ transience, and linked its aims to climate change:
Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.
The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our
water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.
Naomi Watts (b. 1968)
Naomi Watts is an British-Australian actress who attended the same high school as Nicole Kidman and got her big break in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. She is not known to have participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement, but, as she, husband Liev Schreiber and their two sons live in Manhattan, she definitely knows it exists. Don’t rule out a sighting and keep your eyes peeled–an avid urban cyclist, she’ll blend right in.
Naomi Campbell (b. 1970)
Naomi Campbell is a British supermodel and fashion icon of the ’80s and ’90s who later became best known for habitually assaulting her employees with her Blackberry. Her affection for superwealthy businessmen makes an unlikely candidate for involvment in Occupy Wall Street movement. (She now lives in Moscow with Vladislav Doronin, “The Donald Trump of Russia.”) Protesters may take issue with the fact that Ms. Campbell once accepted “dirty-looking” diamonds from the former Liberian president and Sierra Leone civil war warlord Charles Taylor.
Aside from their names and ages, the Naomis have at least one other thing in common. When Google image searched, the search engine auto-filled “hot” after their names. Point Ms. Wolf!
