Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

The first time I spoke with Hilda Silverman, and the only time we ever had a real conversation, we were walking to the Harvard Faculty Club with Sara Roy and several other people. Hilda told me that Sara’s moving essay “Living with the Holocaust” was originally supposed to be published in both Tikkun and the Journal of Palestine Studies, but Michael Lerner refused to publish it in Tikkun because he felt it was too critical of Israel. We were both outraged by this.

Hilda Silverman

Photo: Linda and Steven Brion-Meisels.

JWA - We Remember - Hilda Silverman, 1938 - 2008

Remembering Hilda Silverman

by Alice Rothchild, Co-chair, Jewish Voice for Peace, Boston

My first memories of Hilda date back to the late 1990s as she climbed the three flights of stairs in my home to join in the formative meetings of a political group that became Jewish Voice for Peace, Boston. Slightly breathless, she was usually in animated conversation with Ruchama Marton, an Israeli psychiatrist doing a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and Elaine Hagopian, Professor Emerita of Sociology from Simmons College and a scholar and activist on Middle East affairs. These three women can best be described as the political mothers and mentors for many of us in the Jewish peace movement.

Hilda quickly distinguished herself as an extremely knowledgeable, thoughtful, moral voice who was able to maintain a strong sense of her own Jewish identity and a painful awareness of the Holocaust while articulating a consistent and powerful critique of Israeli policy. In a 2002 op-ed published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hilda wrote, “I am a Jew with a profound consciousness of Jewish victimization through history. But for me, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed are not mutually exclusive categories.”

As a younger activist trying to find my way in the bewildering maze of history, politics, trauma, and conflicting narratives, Hilda’s voice was a critical part of my education. In the book, Culture and Resistance, Edward Said told this story: “It was in 1988. There was a Tikkun conference in New York…I, and my friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod were on a panel with Michael Walzer. At one point, in a moment of exasperation, Walzer said, ‘All right, you’re going to get your state, so I think it’s important to stop thinking about the past. You go have your state, we’ll have ours, and that’s the end of it.’ At which point, a woman in the audience, who I’ll never forget – her name was Hilda Silverman – got up in a state of rage, railing at Walzer, saying, ‘How dare you tell a Palestinian that he should stop reminding us of the past, when you and I belong to a people that is always reminding the world of how much we suffered, and asking people never to forget? How dare you tell a Palestinian to forget?’”