This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
A sudden rainstorm and high winds struck this afternoon. Beautiful. Also a bit dicey. Walking on the beach, I could only see a few feet in front of me.
I’m in the final stretch of John Cage’s bio. At this point, the early 1950s, he’s just taught some years in the New School for Social Research. The New School’s graduate school began in that fateful year, 1933. The early faculty were mostly refugees from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. This included Eric Fromm, Han Jonas and, of course, Hannah Arendt. Its original name – University in Exile.
As universities regroup for the coming year, it’s interesting to compare what was and what is. We can also compare on the Jewish side. Imagine being a student of Hannah Arendt who had just escaped from Nazi Germany. By all accounts, breakout sessions with her were intense. Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was a real book, not the annotated textbooks marketed today. A few years ago a publisher requested I supply food for thought questions at the end of each chapter. This would make my text would be “reader friendly.” What would Hannah Arendt have said?
You might not be familiar with the wrist bands in evangelical culture that carry the phrase, “What Would Jesus Do?” Obviously no one knows what Jesus would do. We don’t even know what he did. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting question that we can put to different religious and historical figures. Like Muna placed before us: “What would Anne Frank think about what’s happened to Palestinians at the hands of the Jewish state?”
Well, Anne Frank might think more or less, though less philosophically, what Hannah Arendt thought. We could quiz her about the future, too. What Would Hannah Arendt Think About the Jewish Future?”
In a University in Exile we could all think together. We could call it the University of the New Diaspora. This would bring the exiles of the world into a community where the future is discussed. Think about a curriculum in such a university and how it would differ from the Political Science 101 courses taught in universities today.
Whether we emphasize exile or the New Diaspora or combine the two – The University of Exile in the New Diaspora? – we need teachers who have who are on the run. And students who are willing to place themselves in the same exile boat. That is, teachers who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake rather than the syllabi generating glorified High School teachers that fill the universities. As students, didn’t our eyes light up and hair stand on edge when the teacher was obviously on the run from the powers that be?
Some talk about the Jewish intelligence factor when intellectuals are discussed. But what set Jews apart, at least up till now, is that Jews have existed on the margins of the powerful and the normative. Jews were on the run.
Though Jews are all over our modern universities, have you noticed how little real thought they produce today? Instead of being on the run, Jews have settled in. Few Jewish university professors, today, would choose the University in Exile. The status and money flow are too low. Why teach those who will be on the run when you want nothing more than to hob-nob with whatever powerful clique can advance you to the next chair in Jewish Studies?
On the Jewish (re)education front – since the Rabbis for Jewish Rights are so interested in our children after the Zion Square episode – we should send our young ones to a University in Exile. To see how the Other Half lives. Like Mahatma Condi on the run in Lebanon. It was quite an education for her, wasn’t it?
Think of our heroic Henry Schwarzschild, resignation letter and all, sitting at the feet of the Civil Rights giants. That was a University in Exile right here in America. Henry was on the run from the Nazis, then gave his all for African Americans on the run in America. Henry, the exile, saw it all here in America. Sure Henry was in many ways a teacher, but he also had to be a willing student.
In a University in Exile it isn’t always easy to figure out who’s the teacher and who’s the student. That’s the way it is in the classroom of life. That’s the way it should be in our universities.
I was in the same situation in my years at Maryknoll. Students came from all over the world. Once they understood their vocation was with the poor and oppressed rather than the empire, even some of the missionaries were on the run. Though they were sent out from the American empire with an empire religion, they studied the faces of those they baptized. They finally understood that the evangelization they pursued had been reversed. It was they, the missionaries, who had to be evangelized. Rather than teachers,they were the students of those on the run. The peasants and priests of the poor and oppressed were the teachers.
So it is with our Jewish sons and daughters. It’s not for the parents of Zion Square(d) – the ethnic cleansers and those who enable it – to teach our children. They need to go to another school, a school with teachers and students who are on the run.
When the student is ready, yes, the teacher appears. I have a picture of beautiful Hannah, Henry’s daughter, planting an olive tree in the West Bank. She is a teacher – for Jews. But she is also a student – of Palestinian teachers.
I wonder if Henry knew James Baldwin, one of my favorite writers since my youth. Baldwin lived his last years in France. Listen to Baldwin and see if it strikes you as relevant for Jewish students to hear once again, transposing his words into a challenge for Jewish ethics:
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
If we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist or create, the consciousness of others – do not falter in our duty, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!
I took my evening walk on the beach thinking of Baldwin and the University in Exile and the New Diaspora. In my imagination, the relatively conscious whites and Blacks Baldwin wrote about became Jews and Palestinians of Conscience. Ending the racial nightmare became the Holocaust and the Nakba. To achieve our country became a challenge to achieve an Israel/Palestine based on justice and equality. This would change the world.
Walking on a beach after a storm is wonderful. And yes, this evening a rainbow arched over the water. Clouds framed the translucent blue water.
Baldwin’s question remains: the rainbow sign or the fire next time?
