Resident of Santa Cruz

On June 18, 2025, Mike Rotkin succumbed to a lengthy illness and died peacefully at home surrounded by his family members and best friend. A celebration of his life is planned for later this year, around the 80th anniversary of his birth. The family asks for privacy at this time.

Michael Eric Rotkin was born in New York City on the Lower East Side on September 17, 1945, to Irving and Esther Rotkin. The family, including younger brother Donnie, later moved to College Park, Maryland, where Irving worked for the Patent Office in D.C. Mike was a straight-A elementary school student and attended a vocational high school (auto shop); he began college as an engineering student but transferred to the liberal arts college at Cornell University.

After two years he failed out of school. (He didn’t attend class and was unsure as to why hewas going to college.) He did construction work for a while and held jobs that included playing blues guitar and bluegrass in D.C. bars, wiring circuit boards, teaching 4th grade, running a nonprofit agency, doing farm work, working as a paid SDS regional organizer, and cleaning up duck poop on a farm (which he claimed was the worst job).

He spent a year in the Domestic Peace Corps (VISTA) working with migrant workers in Florida, where he found his vocation as a community organizer and educator; he went back to Cornell and graduated with Highest Honors with a degree in English Literature (Romantic Poetry –the only major that would take him back after failing out of school). During the 1960s he was active in the student movement and the anti-war movement.

He was arrested multiple times. He turned in his student deferment (he said it felt unfair for him to have one) and was drafted, but he was refused induction into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War as a“security risk to the United States.”

Mike came to Santa Cruz for a summer job doing research on migrant workers in 1969, but never left, and he was active here in all kinds of movements, including feminist, anti-racist, GLBT support, environmental, anti-war, and social justice groups. He was the major organizer of a neighborhood organization on the west side of Santa Cruz and was a former five-time socialist-feminist mayor of the City of Santa Cruz, California, along with serving six terms on the Santa Cruz City Council, and many terms on the Santa Cruz Metro Transit Board and the Regional Transportation Commission.

He taught social theory and community organizing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness Program. He directed the Community Studies Field Program between 1979 and 2011, when he was forced into retirement, and he subsequently was recalled to teach in Merrill College. He was an editor of Socialist Review Magazine for ten years and was a founding member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). He wrote a bi-monthly column in Lookout Santa Cruz.

In 1988 he began living with Madelyn McCaul; they married on his birthday the next year. She worked on his political campaigns, and they amused themselves writing and performing political parody songs at Democratic Party events and songs of appreciation at celebratory roasts for (especially) government department head retirees.

They had fun making public access television shows together and entertaining the residents of nursing homes with their repertoire of blues, folk, reggae, and 30s standards. They loved to travel and found joy in tending their gardens and playing with their cats.

Mike received lifetime achievement awards from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Democratic Party of Santa Cruz County. He served ten years on the Board of the Coastal Watershed Council and was Program Chair of the Democratic Women’s Club of Santa Cruz County. He was on the leadership group of People for Public Banking –a group working to create a Central Coast Public Bank. He worked as an organizer, local and statewide officer, and Chief Negotiator for the UC-AFT, a union representing lecturers and librarians at UC statewide.

Mike was an avid ocean kayaker and bike rider, and he loved to play blues, country, folk, and rock’n’roll guitar. He was a political activist and educator for life. Mike is survived by his wife, Madelyn, his stepson, Jesse Matonak, his step daughter and son-in law, Jarel and Octavio Chavez, his cats, Ming and Galahad, his foster son, Phil Greensite, his close friends Mark Stevens, Jane and Ron Weed-Pomerantz, and Peter Martin, his brother and sister-in-law Donnie and Linda Elfman-Rotkin, his nieces Miriam (Hallie) and Leah, and their children; his political comrades; his government and university colleagues; and the thousands of students whose lives he influenced.

You were too brief, Mike.