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.