L'Affaire Kaplan: Telling Our Stories

I have been reading and rereading and reflecting on [Colleague N]'s beautiful and healing letter.

It sent me back to a line of my own: "The point for me is not that Len is a fellow faculty member, or that I have known him for a long time, or that he is my friend; it is that his account, and that of some of the other students, is so authentic to the person I know, and at least some of the competing accounts are so utterly foreign. "

"So utterly foreign". "Foreign". I meant, and I think I originally typed, "foreign to him", or perhaps "foreign to the Len we know." That sounded redundant, and I trimmed it back. Though a man of many words, I try not to use quite so many more than I need. I usually fail. It ended up "foreign", without the modifiers. And I didn't appreciate the additional resonance of that word in this context. Holy cow! (as we say in Wisconsin).

Len's letter of March 1 includes the following passage: "...I try my best to bring human empathy to bear in my vocation as a teacher. However, this experience and the compounded misunderstandings that have resulted from it reinforce my recognition of the limits of language, as well as law, to bridge certain gulfs. I have come to a new awareness of how the statements I did make could be misunderstood and of the pain that this experience has caused [or could cause]. I acknowledge that pain and regret the part that my own limitations played in contributing to it."

That goes for me too, proactively in this case.

Let's try some more to think about those gulfs.

We all have our stories, and a need to tell them. Let me share some of mine. I apologize in advance to those made uncomfortable by such public confessionals--you may want to stop reading here. For others, I hope the relevance will eventually become clear.

My story is, first and foremost, a Jewish one.

My father's family came to America in the early 1880s, following pogroms in Russia and the Pale of Settlement. My mother's family, about whom I know less, came in the following two decades. My paternal grandfather was a milkman and grocery worker. He never had much, and had multiple periods of unemployment, particularly during the depression. The family moved around dozens of times, when landlords offered a month or two of concessionary rents to new tenants. I've seen a fair number of the spots on childhood and adolescent drives with my father across New York and New Jersey.

My father encountered numerous experiences of antisemitism growing up in his many neighborhoods and schools. A favorite family story occurred many decades later, in South Florida where my family moved after World War II and where I grew up. An apparently strange woman came up to my Dad in a crowd, asked if he were Ralph Weisbard from Brooklyn, and, seemingly out of nowhere, planted a huge kiss on him. It turned out that she was a fellow student in an elementary school class with my father, and remembered his standing up to a teacher (I believe a Mrs. Slattery) making antisemitic cracks and insulting Jewish students some 50 years earlier. She never forgot it, and always regretted not telling him how much it meant to her. Until that day. My father cried when he told us the story.

My Dad was rejected for military service when he tried to volunteer during WWII, due to a serious hearing problem. He went to a physician to camouflage the problem (taking great care to keep this from his mother, who certainly would have killed him for it had she known, before the Nazis could get a shot at him). He eventually got into the army, and was sent to Fort Shelby in Mississippi for basic training. He was a gangly, bespectacled Jewish kid from New York training in the deep South, and the legion of antisemitic stories he could tell of his experiences would curl your hair, as they have mine. He made it through, and it sounds like he held his own. Despite his poor vision (and academic skills), he was assigned to a front line infantry unit: "we want you to be able to see the enemy." He participated in the Battle of the Bulge as an infantry sergeant and bazooka-man, where he was wounded and multiply decorated for his valor in battle. After some investigation, the family, and several veteran groups, are convinced that his Silver Star would have been a Congressional Medal of Honor, if he were named Tom Kelly instead of Ralph Weisbard. His is not the only such case among Jewish veterans.

I can remember, as a young teen, accompanying my father on a drive through a beautiful section of Miami, with overhanging trees and dense foliage. Despite the balmy temperature and lack of snow--and not to put too fine a point on it-- he freaked. He was back in the Ardennes, surrounded, with little visibility and incoming fire. Today, we would probably call it an episode of PTSD. Not then. It was pretty frightening.

My father is now 86, living in an assisted care facility near my brother. Once vigorous and powerful, he is now bent over, suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, and in process of transferring to hospice care. It is heartbreaking.

Don't think this family history didn't weigh heavily, or cause some complicated family dynamics, as I confronted the possibility of the military draft during the Vietnam era and participated in antiwar protests.

My own life as an American Jew has been much easier, and, like many in my generation of American Jews, far more privileged. There have been instances of personally directed antisemitism, particularly during my childhood. Adult instances have been, mostly, more subtle, and perhaps debatable. But the heritage of belonging to a persecuted people, and hearing such immediate family stories, has certainly shaped my consciousness.

There was only one survivor that we know of from the large extended family left in Europe during the War: Miki, a distant cousin of Czechoslovakian Jewish heritage who fought with the partisans as a teenager, eventually made his way to Israel (with help from my father's aunt), and has graciously hosted me (and many other family members) on numerous visits there. I was never successful in getting him to tell me much about that part of his life, and now it is too late. He is now in his 80s, also suffering from Alzheimer's Disease.

I have been Holocaust-obsessed since my teens. I have read many dozens of books, visited museums and sites, and met with survivors. My first true love was the daughter of survivors of Auschwitz and other camps (who had an easier time with the physical manifestations of our developing romance than did my mother). I guess a matter of perspective.

My most abiding intellectual and moral concern has not been with the existence of evil in the world. It has ever been thus, and always will be. It is with the responsibilities of "bystanders". How can decent human beings stand back in the face of the suffering of others? (The great and enduring theme of Levinas.) What can be done to strengthen and embolden our capacities to stand up and fight for what is right? How can we work to overcome our inborn tendencies for passivity and excessive self-regard, and to encourage courage in the face of evil and injustice?

Jewish tradition speaks of a capacity to do good and of a second capacity, typically rendered as a capacity for bad or evil, but which I have come to see more in terms of selfish self-regard. Both are part of our nature as human beings (created in the image of the divine), and both are essential to life in this world. The trick is enhancing that capacity for good, and limiting the second capacity to its necessary realm. Greed is part of human nature, and we cannot overcome it entirely. But it is not our aspirational goal. Greed is not good (pace the economists and Ronald Reagan). Religion works, when it does, in strengthening our ability to summon up those capacities for good, both as individuals and as communities. Law is not very good at this; it can perhaps help us to restrain some of the bad, but it is largely ineffective in achieving the heroic, or the truly just.

Where am I going with all of this? As I have thought about the events of the past two weeks, and reflected on [Colleague N]'s letter, I find myself revisiting my feelings about the proposed Nazi march through Skokie, Illinois, some decades back. I am a strong proponent of free speech and assembly, although not an absolutist. To be perfectly honest, I haven't spent a lot of time or empathetic energy trying to understand, in the most sympathetic light, the goals and values of the American Nazi Movement (or, for that matter, the Klan). I do think the First Amendment accords them rights of free speech, assembly, and expression. But in Skokie, chosen precisely because it was the home of thousands of Holocaust survivors? So that thousands of sick, elderly Jews who survived the horrors of the camps could once again experience the presence of Nazi uniforms, salutes, and slogans in parade through the streets of their community of refuge?

Abstract legal principles. Intense human suffering, and a revisiting of the terrors of the past on an already traumatized community. Can law possibly mediate this gulf?

I do not want to push the analogies too far (if indeed I haven't already done so). I am trying to summon up for myself a set of images and issues that may, in my own context, give me some insight into the experiences of others living with different histories, traditions, and personal and communal experiences and narratives. My great hope for diversity is that we can learn more about ourselves, one another, and our common human predicament by sharing our stories. Thanks again to [Colleage N], and earlier to [Colleage O], and to others for starting us on this road.

May it be a path toward healing.