May, 2011

These days I am thinking of two Holocaust survivors.

I met with one today: 86 year-old Hedy Epstein and I had lunch at a local St. Louis café. The other is receiving an honorary doctorate tomorrow at Washington University: 82 year-old Elie Wiesel, who will also give the commencement address.

Mr. Wiesel and Ms. Epstein have in common the central experience of their lives: their families destroyed by the Nazi genocide. He survived the Auschwitz death camp, and she left Germany in 1939 on a Kindertransport to Great Britain.

After the war he moved to France, studied at the Sorbonne, and eventually became a journalist and novelist. After the war, she served as a research analyst for the U.S. government at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi doctors who conducted medical experiments; she then came to the United States.

In the 1990s I spent many hours reading Wiesel’s books and writing a study of his activism in light of his Holocaust experience. In the last decade I have spent many hours with Ms. Epstein: at peace vigils, meetings, demonstrations, and as part of the International Solidarity Movement in Israel’s occupied West Bank in 2003.

Wiesel is an internationally renowned icon, advisor to presidents (Carter, Reagan, and Clinton), guide to Oprah Winfrey at Auschwitz, and author of over forty books. Ms. Epstein has been known locally for decades as a speaker on the Holocaust and also as a grass-roots activist challenging U.S. militarism; more recently, she has become prominent nationally and internationally because of her work for Palestine.

Mr. Wiesel would agree with the working title of Ms. Epstein’s political memoir-in-progress, Remembering Is Not Enough. And I think that Ms. Epstein would agree with the following excerpt from his Nobel lecture in 1986: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.”

Given what Martin Luther King, Jr. once called “the fierce urgency of now,” the crucial moral task is to refuse abstraction and embody such maxims in our specific political, economic, and cultural context.

For example, in the second volume of his 1999 memoirs, Mr. Wiesel admitted, “Indeed, I can say in good faith that I have not remained indifferent to any cause involving the defense of human rights. But, you may ask, what have I done to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians? And here I must confess: I have not done enough. Is an explanation in order? In spite of considerable pressure, I have refused to take a public stand in the Israeli-Arab conflict. I have said it before: since I do not live in Israel, it would be irresponsible for me to do so. But I have never concealed how much the human dimension of the Palestinian tragedy affects me.”

The fact that he did not live in the Soviet Union, Bosnia, or Iraq did not stop him from speaking out about those urgent situations (he was a strong supporter of Bush’s invasion/aggression in Iraq in 2003). There is also the fact that, for over four decades, Mr. Wiesel has made the strongest, most ardent “public stand” of support for Israel, from the 1967 war to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to its response to the intifada in the late 1980s. He forbade himself to criticize in public the Jewish state, but he certainly sang its praises and justified its actions.

Unlike the Nobel Peace laureate, Ms. Epstein has taken a public stand to oppose, not the “plight” of the Palestinians, but their oppression by Israel, steadfastly backed by the United States.

Since 2003 she has made five trips to the West Bank to work with peace, women’s and solidarity groups opposed to the now almost 44year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. In East Jerusalem, Mash’a, Al’ara, Hebron, Qalqilya, and Bil’in, she has joined the Palestinians, along with Israeli activists and other internationals, in nonviolent resistance to Israel’s intensive effort to ghettoize the Palestinians and to expropriate more of their land for Jewish settlers.

She has bore witness to Israel’s massive wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004. She has received a very small but unforgettable taste of what the Palestinians experience every day, from being strip searched, water cannoned, tear gassed and sound bombed, as well as being declared a terrorist and security risk.

She stood face to face with the women, men and children of the West Bank and listened to their stories, memories, anguish, and hope.

In the last three years, she made four unsuccessful attempts to be one on the boats to break Israel’s sadistic siege of Gaza. She is scheduled to join scores of other U.S. citizens on the U.S. boat to Gaza in late June as part of the International Freedom Flotilla II.

By her words, but much more powerfully by her actions, Ms. Epstein is saying to us, Palestine is the center of the universe.

Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

1.

And that claim [to Oregon] is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

–John O’ Sullivan, 1845

2.

…after we become a strong force, as the result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine… The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of Palestine by a Jewish-Arab agreement… The state will have to preserve order not only by preaching morality but by machine guns, if necessary.

–David Ben-Gurion, 1938

3.

Benny Morris:  Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.

Interviewer: And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?

Benny Morris: That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

–Haaretz, 2004

She’s spent four years at SLU

And is moving on

I’ve spent fourteen years at SLU

And am moving on

We had class together fall 2008

Her tender sophomore year

We’ve met ten or twelve times since that class

Invariably in cafes and restaurants

(I never once used the “adjunct office”

For “office hours”)

And there was that spending binge downtown

At Left Bank Books right before Xmas break

I knew that she was a writer

From the student profile she turned in the first day

(Maybe I was too exuberant about it

She sometimes eyed me as if I had a screw loose)

She’d come to my mind when I’d read

What Brooklyn College teacher Allen Ginsberg said

“Older people gain vigor, refreshment, vitality, energy, hopefulness and cheerfulness

From the attentions of the young

And the younger people gain gossip, experience, advice, aid, comfort

Wisdom, knowledges and teachings from their relation with the old”

She wondered if Kerouac meant, “Accept loss forever”

Or “Accept loss forever”

During the 75 minute conversation amid Café Ventana sunshine

We drank champagne

I toasted her with a clink

She took a photo of me from her fancy phone

Sitting there she looked out in the distance as if in a trance

Watching for Ecstasy to come around the corner

I didn’t tell her

That Yeats’ “For Anne Gregory” didn’t apply to her

I said “good for you!” to refuse the Fulbright and instead

To embrace Teach for America and Casey in D.C.

(Love conquers all

Besides, prestige is so overrated)

The word “soteriology” was never mentioned

The word “diarrhea” was used once

Karl Rahner never came up

But Shawn Copeland did

We agreed “women’s ordination” doesn’t go far enough

If it only installs women in hierarchical power position

(Still, I ponder

How many kids & women & men

In Catholic churches may never hear HER

Illuminate Word & World & Wonder)

There’s Marx’s thesis on Feuerbach that the philosophers have interpreted the world

The point, however, is to change it

There’s Jesus’ vision of the brokerless Kingdom of God

A program of free healing & open commensality

Broken Spanish & homesickness

Barbed wire & acrobatic empowerment–all shared

I invited her repeatedly to be guest speaker in social justice classes

For her riveting, no bullshit Nicaragua testimony

In a parallel universe Mev at 25

And  she at 22 would be best pals

She’s soon to move to Washington DC

Accompanying the kiddos

She’s not got mind-reading power yet

But she knows how I am going to end this–

I can’t give her a big official prize for scholastic achievement, GPA, something quantifiable

I can only remind her of this

Alexis Mary Lassus:

“You’re a Genius all the time”