June, 2008

Saturday 28 June 2008

My friend Dianne Lee and I wrote the following letter….

Dear Friends,

We want to let you know of an amazing initiative a friend of ours is taking.

At the age of 83, Hedy Epstein, a long-time activist for peace and justice in Saint Louis, is going to the Gaza Strip as part of the Free Gaza Movement. This August, internationals like Hedy from around the world are taking a boat from Cyprus to BREAK THE SIEGE Israel has forced on the Gaza Strip, the site of immense human suffering. Israel claims it has left Gaza; nevertheless, it controls the air, the land, and the sea. With this creative nonviolent direct action, Hedy and her companions are hoping to bring attention to the humanitarian catastrophe caused by this strangulation of Gaza.

As a teen-ager, through the Children’s Transport to Great Britain, Hedy was able to flee Germany in 1939. Both her parents were murdered at Auschwitz. These experiences have been the basis of Hedy’s decades-long commitment to social justice and human rights and to speak out against terrible injustices at home and abroad. Her autobiography, which has been published in Germany, is entitled, “Remembering is not Enough.”

Hedy knows that this venture is a risky one. Yet over the past five years, she has made five trips to Israeli-occupied West Bank to accompany and be in solidarity with the Palestinian people as they remain under military occupation by one of the most powerful countries in the world. She would be the first to say that real courage is manifested every hour, day and night, by Palestinians struggling for a dignified existence.

The South African Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written: “Peace and security, we discovered in South Africa, do not come through the barrel of a gun. No, they happen when the inalienable rights of all are recognized and respected. I deplore the bombing attacks on the civilian population of Gaza which is suffering under a cruel siege. Most of the casualties have been civilians, including your children. The targeting of civilians contravenes international law as also does the practice of collective punishment. I also deplore the firing of Qassam rockets on the civilian population of Sderot. Please, please for God’s sake stop this carnage; for the sake of Israel’s children, for the sake of Palestinian children, for the sake of all our children. I support the Boat Convoy in its attempt to bring ongoing humanitarian relief to the people of Gaza.” Others in support of the Free Gaza Movement include Noam Chomsky, the Carter Center, and Jewish Voice for Peace.

The Free Gaza Movement urgently needs our financial support. To make this project happen, boats need to be bought, insured, and registered and Hedy is responsible for paying her own way. Therefore, funding is urgent. On Hedy’s behalf, we ask for your support in the following ways: (1) Send Hedy a letter of support, and, if possible, include a small donation. Mail them to her at 5547 Waterman Boulevard, Saint Louis 63112. (2) Send a tax-deductible donation to: The Free Gaza Movement/405 Vista Heights Road/El Cerrito, CA 94530. (3) Read the postings at www.freegaza.org to learn more about the crisis in Gaza and how the boat to break the siege is faring. (4) Initiate conversations with people you know about what is happening. (5) Join Hedy and her friends on Sunday, July 20th at the Center for Theology and Social Analysis, 1077 S. Newstead, at 12 pm for conversation, refreshments, and a proper send-off as we wish our dear friend “smooth sailing.”

Hi Dr. Chmiel,

I know, it’s been great to keep running into you. And I have to say I have considered it a sign… I found out yesterday I was accepted to Americorps St. Louis. I am thrilled! I know it will be a challenging year of service, but I’m sure I will be surrounded by good people to help me through.

I also wanted to let you know that your class, and especially The Book of Mev, had a huge influence on my decision to decide to do a year of service. I obviously never met Mev, but in reading your book of her I was so inspired to take a leap of faith and do a year of service. As I read the book last year a fire was lit under me, but I was so frustrated in feeling like I couldn’t commit to anything that would make a difference the way Mev did. I was, like most college students, “busy.” The fire died out a bit, but I would often find myself thinking of Mev and her activism in social justice. So around Christmas time, (when I finally accepted the fact that I was going to be graduating) as I began to wonder what the next step in my life would be, I thought maybe I could act on that fire that had been lit. I of course was a little apprehensive, my parents knew nothing of this part of me. But having you and Mev in mind was always reassuring… here were two people that made it work and followed their passion.

It’s a great testament to your love of Mev that you were able to make her work live on through the book, and all the people it inspires.

So thank you.

-Anne

–Anne Schuermann studied in Social Justice in spring of 2006 and graduated from Saint Louis University in 2007 and is now finishing up her year with Americorps.

Thursday 26 June 2008

In this blog I have written here and here about Magan Wiles, a former student, exuberant friend, gutsy activist, adept Shakespearian, and talented actor. She has re-written a play about her experiences in Palestine from two years ago, Beautiful Resistance, and it is being staged at the Saint Louis University Theater in Xavier Hall the weekend of July 11-13. Produced by Playback Workshop Theater, Beautiful Resistance uses audience participation, improvisation, live music, as well as photos and videos shot in the West Bank, to give a new and personal perspective on the complicated issue of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. One of the parts of the play that is both poignant and funny is Magan’s relationship with a young Palestinian woman named Fayrouz.

Friday and Saturday performances are at 8 pm, and the Sunday performance is at 3 pm. Suggested donation of $10; all proceeds will benefit Al-Rowwad Children’s Theatre in Bethlehem. No one will be turned away for lack of funds! For more information, directions, and ticket reservations, call 314.773.2819.

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“But books grant us many possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination. It may be that there is no book, however well written, that can remove an ounce of pain from the tragedy of Iraq or Rwanda, but it may also be that there is no book, however foully written, that does not allow for an epiphany for its destined reader.” Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, 232.

Wednesday 18 June 2008

by Charity Kaiser

I felt that Mev became one of my good friends as I read the book. That is why I cried at her funeral. I truly felt grieved by her death. Her short 30-something years had so much vitality, inspiration, passion and love, yet simplicity and suffering, too. I couldn’t help but put her on a pedestal and long for my life to share some of the qualities that were found in hers.

I love how her passion and vision for a more just world penetrated her life even to the interpersonal level – she seemed to treat a Brasilian campesino with the same respect and dignity as a Vatican official.

I love how she struggled and eventually found a way to combine and put to good use her great passions. The thing I probably love the most about this book is how it paints a picture of Mev that is simultaneously so ordinary and so extraordinary. It gives me hope that my own life is capable of such beautiful complexity.

Charity studied in Social Justice in spring 2008 and is entering her senior year.

Wednesday 18 June 2008

Hi Dr. Chmiel,

How are you? It’s been a while since we’ve talked. I looked for you at Sam’s wedding, but I think I must have missed you.

I wanted to tell you that I (finally!) just finished The Book of Mev. I’m not sure I can find the right words to express to you how touched I am by Mev’s love of life and your love for each other. The way you described and let her describe her passion for change and fight for justice reminds me of everything I learned in your class (already 4 years ago!) and reminds me that I need to do more in my own life for others.

Thank you for having the courage to write and share.

Take care, Amanda

Amanda Roberts studied Social Justice in the Spring of 2004 at Saint Louis University. She received her Master’s in Journalism at Indiana University and is a staff writer with the Illinois Times.

Thursday 12 June 2008

Things I ought to do are innumerable
I vow to not think about them.
So many others need a helping hand
I vow to stay out of it.
There are so many ways to help,
I vow to write an occasional check, no more.
What’s so bad about looking out for yourself,
I vow not to feel guilty.

Recently I learned that Norman Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel and banned from coming there for ten years.

Reading about this, I thought of Antonio Gramsci, a leader of the Italian Communist Party and a member of the Parliament, who had been arrested by Mussolini’s Fascist government in 1926. At his trial, Gramsci’s prosecutor appealed to the judge: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years.”

Norman Finkelstein may not be allowed in Israel, but in doing so the Israeli authorities will have done nothing to keep his brain from functioning during the next decade. He will surely continue championing the justice of the Palestinian cause, exposing stupidity and mendacity, and writing and speaking with great respect for the truth.

The ban will not dampen Finkelstein’s spirits because he will be unable to schmooze with the Israeli literati or enjoy the night life in Tel Aviv. But it will prevent him from seeing old friends in the West Bank who could surely offer him succor, relief, and companionship, no small things, given the amount of abuse and vitriol spewn at him in recent years.

Years ago, I wrote a review of Finkelstein’s The Rise and Fall of Palestine, which was published in The National Catholic Reporter. I post it below.

The End of Palestine?
by Mark Chmiel

Review of Norman G. Finkelstein. The Rise & Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 157 p. $18.95.

Some years back, the political critics Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman coined the expression “worthy and unworthy victims” to refer to the ways in which U.S. propaganda dictates differential and deferential treatment to victims. “Worthy victims” are those victimized by an official enemy of the U.S., and their plight deserves heightened press coverage and our government’s aid, at least rhetorically. “Unworthy victims” are those who suffer under U.S.-backed regimes, and so it is best not to call attention to their misery, especially given the usual provenance of their financial and military backers.

Norman Finkelstein’s most recent book is a preferential option for the perennially unworthy victims, the Palestinians. Emerging out of four trips to Israel and Palestine from 1988 to 1993, the book is a moving eye-witness account of Finkelstein’s growing friendships with Palestinians in the Christian town of Beit Sahour and in a refugee camp outside of Hebron. Herein, he records their dramatic hopes and fears, from the beginning of the intifada to its terminus, with the onset of the so-called peace process, symbolized by the “famous handshake” between Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin.

Finkelstein reports on the evolution of Palestinian attitudes — towards Israel, Arafat, the PLO, their own rebellion, and the future. A gripping and lucid writer, he manages to capture both resilience and the despair, the defiance and the lassitude that characterize his friends and their families and associates who have the unique distinction of being, in Palestinian author Edward Said’s formulation, “the victim of the [Jewish] victims.”

Indeed, Finkelstein’s work is an important contribution for U.S. Christians, given an ecclesial reluctance over the last few decades to criticize the Jewish state, after centuries of Christian contempt for the Jews. As the son of Warsaw Ghetto and death camp survivors, Finkelstein has dared to speak out against Israeli oppression and offer friendship and solidarity to a people that has regularly been demonized as terrorists and Jew-haters. At one point, he writes: “Israel won sympathy and masked its systematic violations of human rights in no small part by exploiting the memory of the Jewish people’s martyrdom. To mute criticism, it claimed to be acting in our name and in the name of our tragedy. Many decent people, Jews and non-Jews, deferred to that claim, turning a blind eye to the suffering of the Palestinians. Jews who chose silence therefore passively collaborated in Israel’s crimes, for their silence left Israel unchallenged and unimpeached.”

Reflecting his own growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, Finkelstein is not hesitant in this work to invoke the Nazi period to make analogies with what is happening in Israel and Palestine in the present. He also occasionally reports on his own tension at being an American Jew among people who might have every reason to be suspicious of both Jews and Americans.

Besides being an empathetic chronicle of solidarity undertaken at some modest personal risk, Finkelstein continues the relentless critique of illusions about Israel that he began in an earlier study, Image and Reality in the Israel-Palestine Conflict. For example, his chapter “A Double Standard in the Application of International law” is an astounding piece of work, showing how the U.S. was so concerned about Iraq’s illegal occupation of Kuwait (which justified the Gulf Slaughter in early 1991) and the U.S. support of Israel’s long-standing occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip. Going point by point, he shows how Israel, too, has been guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. However, the U.S. media and the government are blithely indifferent to these crimes, indeed they reward Israel by honoring it as “the only democracy in the Middle East” or in continuing to provide a munificence annually in the billions of dollars (one wonders, however, how Secretary of State Madeline Albright will tolerate Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s currying of favor with the Jewish fundamentalists who push for a brazen increase in settlements, no matter how much this rightly angers the Palestinians).

In an epilogue that strikes painfully close to home, “The End of Palestine?” Finkelstein considers Palestine in the light of the gradual decimation of the Cherokee nation that also endured a policy of diplomatic treachery and political violence. He quotes U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt as follows: “It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the pleas that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they hold joint ownership.” Roosevelt’s convictions are alive and well in Israelis and Americans who will be content when the Palestinians are pacified in their Bantustans or have altogether fled their homeland.

Both searing testimony and acute political analysis, Finkelstein’s work is an urgent cri de couer and a welcome, though, unsettling corrective to so much commentary on the Middle East which just presumes that if only fundamentalist terrorists would stop disrupting the noble peace process, life would be rosy. As Finkelstein makes clear both with anecdote and analysis, the prospect is grim: “The lesson of Palestine is as old as history: applied without mercy or scruple, force works.”

by Sarah Berry

Mev Puleo was mostly known for her work as a photojournalist and her documentation of the struggle of the poor in Latin America. Her photographs are timeless, captivating pieces of art that touch each and every viewer, who were often moved towards compassion and motivation as a result. Mev would probably not consider herself an academic theologian, even though she earned a Master’s Degree in theology and was in the process of working on a Doctoral program in Worship, Proclamation and the Arts when she passed away (Witness, 4). Mev, a lifelong Catholic and student of Catholic theology, did not feel that the world of academia was the best place to study theology. While others did their theology in classrooms, seminars, and conferences, she chose the people of Latin America as her classroom. The lessons she learned from and with the poor were greater than any lessons she could have learned at an institution. However, Mev was in fact a theologian. Although she did not write volumes about liberation theology, she made her voice known through her photographs and through her interviews with the people of Latin America. She lost her voice to let theirs be heard, and reclaimed her voice through the voices and experiences of others. Even though she died an unexpectedly young death, Mev Puleo contributed much to the practice of liberation theology by living it and communicating it through the medium of photography.

(more…)

Saturday 10 May 2008

One late April evening Melissa Banerjee and I met at Kayak’s coffee shop to do some writing practices. For our first go round, I suggested the topic, “When Becca Gorley is 25.” This is what I wrote.

When Becca Gorley is 25, she will be the most famous poet in America, after the show on Oprah when she reads to enthralled audiences, the jaws drop, the eyes beam, Becca’s light—it just shoots off of her—goes straight to the people assembled in the Chicago studio: poems about Iraqis, poems about Forest Park, poems of tears, poems of unlimited alliteration. Becca Gorley will have 15 or more minutes of fame, and see it for the impermanent dream that it is – Tibetan Buddhist sages say, “Regard all dharmas as dreams,” and being on Oprah is a dream, it’s there then gone, though weeks, months later Becca may still get 20 emails a week (or Facebook messages), communiqués that begin, “I saw you on Oprah, you remind me of my daughter Hannah, I hadn’t spoken to her in four years, but seeing you—you two look so much alike—I had to turn off the TV and call her, and we both cried and I begged her to forgive me…” and similar emails of such a candid nature because Becca Gorley is one candid, tell-you-everything-poet, and she’ll write a poem back to Hannah’s mother and sign off, “Namaste, Zanmni Mother, Namaste and Smiles.”

And after her fame, she’ll retreat to New Mexico, cut off all her hair, get a job washing dishes, listen happily to old Mexican grandfathers, and write a thousand new poems.

–Melissa Banerjee studied Social Justice in spring 2007 and Becca Gorley took Social Justice in fall 2007.