Home / Birthday profiles / Joel Kovel
Portrait of Joel Kovel

Birthday profile

Joel Kovel

Joel Kovel, American scholar and author (died 2018)

Find birthday twinsOpen interactive profile
Born
August 27, 1936
Died
April 30, 2018
Zodiac sign
Virgo
Birth year
1936

About Joel Kovel

Joel Stephen Kovel was an American psychiatrist, scholar, human rights activist, and author known as a founder of eco-socialism. Kovel became a psychoanalyst, but he abandoned psychoanalysis in 1985. His parents, immigrant Jews, were Louis Kovel (an accountant known for the "Kovel Rule") and Rose Farber. From 1980 to 1985, he was an adjunct professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research, as well as a frequent contributor to Dialectical Anthropology, a journal founded by his colleague Stanley Diamond. Kovel became involved in political activism in the 1960s as a result of the Vietnam War.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Joel Kovel timeline

  1. From 1980 to 1985, he was an adjunct professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research, as well as a frequent contributor to Dialectical Anthropology, a journal founded by his colleague Stanley Diamond.
  2. Kovel became a psychoanalyst, but he abandoned psychoanalysis in 1985.

The world when Joel Kovel was born

Joel Kovel was born in 1936. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1936

  • #1 song"The Way You Look Tonight" – Fred Astaire
  • Top movieModern Times (Charlie Chaplin)
  • Top TV showBBC Television Service launches
  • Best-selling bookGone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentJesse Owens wins 4 gold medals at Berlin Olympics
  • Top headlineJesse Owens dominates the Berlin Olympics
  • Technology milestoneBBC launches the world's first regular television service
  • Defining fadSwing dancing
  • Notable inventionSun glasses (mass-produced)
  • World population2.26 billion

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderFranklin D. Roosevelt
  • Sports championNew York Yankees (World Series)
  • U.S. population128.1M

1936 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Joel Kovel's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19362026
Gas$0.19$3.45/gal
Average home$5,100$435,000
Average income$2,900$67,500
Minimum wage$0.25$7.25/hr (federal)
Movie ticket$0.25$11.95
Postage stamp$0.03$0.73
Population128.1M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.