Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Part 3

Besides writing the book, Busy Dying,

http://www.obenzinger.com/books_busyDying.html

Hilton Obenzinger is a long-time Palestine solidarity activist who now teaches writing at Stanford University. Following is the text of a recent email interview with Busy Dying author Obenzinger. (See below for parts 1 to 2).

In what way is your `Busy Dying’ book different or similar to former Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] chairman Mark Rudd's recently-published book, `Underground’, from both a political and literary point-of-view?

Hilton Obenzinger: I worked with Mark on his book for years, including the first time he attempted to write it in the 80s.

My book is fiction because I began to doubt whether I could ever write a memoir without inventing memories – and it became easier to tell the truth by releasing myself from the memoir format. I spoke with people who were there, such as Mark but also other friends who were part of the Low Library Commune – it’s an interesting thing, doing research on your own life from others’ vantage points – and I used real names when I could, but if I couldn’t contact someone, I used fictional names.

My book has additional, different themes than Mark’s – including coming to terms with the death of my brother and the literary scene at Columbia and in the Lower East Side – and it moves back and forth between students at Columbia back then and the work I do with students at Stanford today.

Mark’s description of Columbia 1968 is from his vantage point, of course, and it’s well done. It’s a welcome addition to the historical understanding of Columbia 1968, and the growing library of Weather Underground literature. The book gained greatly because of the 40th anniversary conference in 2008, and he was able to provide an even broader perspective, particularly on the media distortions of the occupation and strike that created “Mark Rudd,” the Great Revolutionary Leader.

But his biggest struggle was figuring out how to discuss his post-1968 Weather Underground experience. I wrestled with him many times on how to characterize mistakes while historicizing them, and we don’t always agree. It’s a tough job trying to understand one’s own involvement in the 1968 moment and its aftermath in a larger (even worldwide) political, even sociological context.

I think, in the end, he did a fine job in the book. He tried staying honest throughout, tried to be judicious, and he certainly did not romanticize – and it’s well written.

Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Part 2

Besides writing the book, Busy Dying,

http://www.obenzinger.com/books_busyDying.html

Hilton Obenzinger is a long-time Palestine solidarity activist who now teaches writing at Stanford University. Following is the text of a recent email interview with Busy Dying author Obenzinger. (See below for part 1).


Why do you think anti-war students at Columbia University in 1968 did not also protest against the U.S. government's support for Israeli militarism in 1968?

Hilton Obenzinger: When the 1967 war broke out I was very confused and conflicted and ignorant. To illustrate: Edward Said was my teacher but I didn’t know he was a Palestinian – I didn’t know there was such a thing as a Palestinian. I didn’t even know he was an Arab – I thought he was Jewish!

We later became friends and colleagues in terms of literary studies and working on Palestinian rights, and we joked about that moment.

I stayed up one night during the war, upset about it, and in the early dawn sat on the Sundial in the center of the campus to read the NY Times, weeping. Wasn’t Israel sort of socialist? Weren’t they advanced, democratic and progressive? Why did the Arabs want “to push the Jews into the sea”?

My moment of awakening was in 1969 when Moshe Dayan went to Vietnam on a fact-finding tour and offered complete support for the US war. This was cognitive dissonance in a big way – and I either had to be consistent with my principles or begin fudging them out of some sense of ethnic loyalty (and fudging became the process for many progressive, anti-war, pro-civil rights Jews, trying to support their principles while apologizing for Israel – ultimately, an untenable position).

When I taught on the Yurok Indian reservation in 1969-70 I began a process of understanding settler colonial societies. In the 1970s, I studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sympathizing with the Palestinians as a national liberation movement, and I began to speak out.

Then, in the mid Seventies, I was working with the American Indian Movement, and I was going to collaborate with the Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz on a book on how history made it so that we both ended up in California. Simon quickly realized he had to get the hell out of California, and he returned to New Mexico where he wrote a terrific book about his early experiences working in uranium mines.

I ended up writing This Passover or the Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem, a collection of poems and sketches about Jews, Indians, and Palestinians that invokes a Jewish American sensibility free of Zionist assumptions – and that became the basis for my support of Palestinian rights. While writing that book I helped to establish a Jewish group in the Bay Area in order to protest the Israeli occupation and to provide a clear ideological alternative to the Zionist consensus that even held the left in thrall.

The book received the American Book Award, and I was invited to campuses to speak about what it means to be a Jewish American critical of Israel and Zionism. At this point I would be regularly attacked as a “self-hating Jew” and would have my life threatened.

That book appeared in 1980, and in 1981 I was invited to Beirut as part of an American delegation to the PLO to investigate the bombing attack by the Israelis on Fakhani, in downtown Beirut, a prelude to the 1982 invasion.

From that point Palestine became the focus of my political work through the first intifada, and eventually the “Holy Land” and the study of comparative settler colonial societies became the main interest in my scholarly research, which culminated in the cultural and literary study American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania, and continues today with a book I am working on called Melting Pots and Promised Lands: Zionism and the Idea of America.

Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Part 1

Besides writing the book, Busy Dying,

http://www.obenzinger.com/books_busyDying.html

Hilton Obenzinger is a long-time Palestine solidarity activist who now teaches writing at Stanford University. Following is the text of a recent email interview with Busy Dying author Obenzinger.

An interview you did last year about your Busy Dying book that's posted on the video.google site

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5884618881046739147#

mostly just discussed the 1968 Columbia anti-war student protests, but doesn't make much reference to the impact of the Israeli military occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights that happened less than a year before the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt. Would readers of `Busy Dying’ find any indication in the book as to why you later become such a strong supporter of Palestinian human rights?

Hilton Obenzinger [HO]: In 1968 many of us didn’t want to be “Good Germans,” passively accepting genocide and vicious Jim Crow racism. Engaged in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, right after graduating college I taught school on an Indian reservation – and my eyes opened. I began to understand the US more deeply as a settler society, and consequently the similarities between the US and Israel.

I wrote Busy Dying trying to stay within much of the consciousness I had then – and Israel was not a central part of my concerns at the time. It’s an indication of just how un-Zionist many of us were, and how much Israel was on the periphery of our consciousness (although I know I was deeply aware of being Jewish, of my family’s murder at the hands of the Nazis, the narrative of Israel as Jewish redemption after death and persecution).

Rejecting being a “Good German” expanded in time to include other things, such as rejecting silence about Israel’s colonization. So, Columbia 1968 was a decisive, formative experience for me. I got a glimpse of a new world, of the possibilities of change, and of overturning injustice, and that glimpse has kept me going ever since.

`Columbiagate': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 18

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 17)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] colluded with Columbia, asking it to provide a basis for the finding of blight and allowing it to create conditions that could be used to try and establish such a basis.

“ESDC colluded with Columbia in hiring Columbia’s consultant AKRF to perform the blight study, in tailoring with AKRF the methodology of such a study to achieve a predetermined result, and in allowing Columbia to participate in and control the gathering of evidence, and in allowing Columbia to review and direct such a study.

“ESDC engaged in deception in its allegations of the neutrality of Columbia’s consultant AKRF…ESDC engaged in deception in its repeated misrepresentation of what records it possessed in relation to the Columbia Project…

“…The City Planning Commission [CPC]…failed to consider impacts of the threatened use of eminent domain in driving sales to Columbia, and consequent loss of businesses and jobs, and in causing the neglect of building repairs, and in fueling speculative run up of real estate prices in the wider West Harlem area…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 17

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 16)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] failed to prepare a carefully considered plan when it failed to determine the public purposes of the project prior to selection of Columbia for the overwhelming benefit of such a project.

“ESDC failed to prepare a carefully considered plan when it failed to consider any competing proposal to Columbia’s General Project Plan [GPP], including as-of-right development under the Community Board [CB] 9 197 (a) plan.

“ESDC failed to prepare a carefully considered plan when it placed no limitation on Columbia’s GPP…limiting its displacement of current West Harlem business and residents or preventing it from defeating the intent of the community as expressed in the CB 9 197 (a) plan.

“ESDC made no effort to achieve public benefits proportional to the private benefits likely to flow from Columbia’s proposal.

“ESDC, together with NYC Economic Development Corporation [EDC], Department of City Planning [DEP], the Deputy Mayor’s Office for Development, the New York City Law Department and other agencies worked to keep planning secret…and time the project for Columbia’s convenience and political advantage…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 16

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 15)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“…Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] has cooperated in a developer driven project, conceived by Columbia, initiated by Columbia, configured and defined by Columbia to maximize its own private benefit, and timed and directed by Columbia.

“ESDC, together with Economic Development Corporation [EDC] and Department of City Planning [DCP], failed to prepare a carefully considered plan when it showed favoritism to Columbia over other development proposals, cooperating with it in secret to subvert prior public planning commitments, allowing Columbia to choose the dual prong re-zoning and General Project plan [GPP] strategy, and assisting Columbia in developing such a strategy so as to maximize Columbia’s chances of realizing its maximal private benefit…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 15

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 14)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“…Article I, section 7 of the New York State Constitution and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution limit takings to public use. Under the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Kelo v. City of New London, the majority limited the reliance upon economic development as public use, benefit or purpose to projects that are the result of a carefully considered plan. 54 U.S. 469, 478.

“The deciding concurring opinion of Justice Kennedy further required courts to be vigilant against pretextual purposes and favoritism in developer driven development projects…

“The stated public use, benefit or purpose of redeveloping a substandard and insanitary, or blighted, area is null and void because the finding that the Manhattanville industrial area was blighted was made in bad faith, in error of law, and without basis, and what blight-like symptoms are present are overwhelmingly caused, maintained or exacerbated by Columbia with Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC]’s knowledge and consent…