This is the Martin Luther King Jr Day address I delivered at Congregation B’nai Israel in Nothampton, MA on Sunday, January 14, 2024
Delivered at the Congregation B’nai Israel (Northampton,MA)
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Observances
Good morning. I am grateful to join with all of you, and would like to thank my colleague at Mount Holyoke, Joshua Roth, for arranging the invitation to speak with you at the CBI Cafe. I’d also like to acknowledge the presence of my wife, Ellen Schattschneider, who teaches at Brandeis, and who has travelled with me on the journey I am about to share with you.
Mourning and Solidarity
This weekend, we gather across the nation to celebrate what should have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 95th birthday, and reflect on the stony road we’ve travelled in the 56 years since Dr King’s assassination in Memphis. This is an appropriate moment to consider the possibilities and challenges of what might be called “mourning across borders.” In what respects do acts of memorialization powerfully bind us together, across profound differences of faith, history, politics, or race? When, in turn, does it prove enormously difficult to interpolate ourselves into other people’s positions of grief, especially at times when we are so deeply engaged with our own senses of pain and loss that universal mourning seems impossible to imagine? When is mourning across borders feasible, and when is it nearly inconceivable?
I think it fair to say that for all of us gathered here today, these questions have weighed on us heavily during the one hundred days since October 7, 2023 [1]. Progressive Jews have a long shared history of coming to the table, we might say, in acts of shared mourning, seeing reflected in other communities’ tragic experiences of loss a somber mirror of our histories of pain and violation.
Consider one of the most iconic moments in the Black-Jewish alliance, when Dr. King locked arms with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi Maurice Davis, and other Jewish faith leaders, with Black and White Christian clergy, and with John Lewis and many others, in walking together across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 21, 1965, two weeks after the horrors of Bloody Sunday. As is well known, a thousand African American freedom marchers wore yarmulke or kippah, known that day as “freedom caps,” in solidarity with their Jewish allies. At that moment, everyone understood themselves to be participating in a shared act of transcendent collective mourning, honoring the memory of many others across racial divides, among them: murdered civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten at a demonstration in Marion, Alabama; Unitarian minister James Reeb from Massachusetts, killed by racists a few days earlier in Selma; the three dead of Freedom Summer in June 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi—James Chaney, a Black activist from Meridian, Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both Jewish activists from New York City. Also present in many people’s minds were the memories of the Jewish lynch victim, Leo Frank; the innumerable Black men and women struck down in racist mass violence since the end of Reconstruction; and, the six million of the Holocaust. This shared penumbra of mourning for all victims of injustice was the emotional and spiritual foundation of the entire Civil Rights movement. That sense of common purpose, driven by shared grief, was key to the passage soon afterwards of the Voting Rights Act and the other major accomplishments of the era.
October 7 and Beyond
How distant those days seem today, in the shadow of October 7, 2023 and its tragic aftermaths. Many of our Jewish students at Mount Holyoke have shared their complex experiences of anguished ambivalence. How can they publicly grieve for the 1,200 Jews and foreign residents of Israel murdered by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on that day, when many of their fellow students tell them that such mourning pales into insignificance compared to the mass death and suffering of civilians in Gaza in the past three months? The challenge is perhaps especially great for those Jewish students who identify themselves with progressive and social justice causes, yet sense, they may no longer have a home in their familiar circles, when so many fellow students and faculty are failing, as they see it, to denounce anti-semitism in its multitudinous forms? At such moments of agony and fear, how can we find a path back to the shared terrain of common mourning, that at previous moments of crisis was the starting point for the recognition of our shared humanity?
I don’t have easy answers to these enormously difficult and urgent questions. Still, I thought it might be helpful to share how, at other challenging moments, my students and I, in partnership with community members, have found ways to pursue shared acts of mourning, as we have tried to build on the ideal of the Beloved Community, to which Dr. King dedicated his life.
Encounter in a Cemetery
In Fall 2001, I was teaching at Oxford College of Emory University, the original campus of Emory, which had been built, significantly, by enslaved labor from the late 1830s onwards. In the wake of 9-11, we were especially eager to find a shared project that could bring together our Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and non-sectarian students, across the inevitable gulfs of fear and distrust that followed the terrorist attacks. We found ourselves engaging with the local African American community, the descendants of those persons, five generations back, who had constructed the campus while in bondage, and then continued in freedom, to work at the college, under Jim Crow, fully knowing their own children were prohibited from attending the institution.
The local Black community was in particular pain since the city’s historic Black cemetery, which dated back to slavery times, was largely inaccessible due to decades of neglect by the city government. This was due in a curious way to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964; as an “end run” around the public accommodations provision of the Act, the city cemetery had been largely privatized. Public funds were directed through a private Foundation to the upkeep of the white half of the cemetery, where early Emory College presidents, faculty, and white Methodist worthies were interred, but no funding was directed towards the Black half of the burial ground.
So my students came up with the idea of a joint project to restore the cemetery, cutting back privet, re-erecting fallen headstones, and restoring long-covered pathways. They met with the town’s historic Black Methodist and Baptist congregations and we began work together on weekends, in a year long project. My wife Ellen, teaching on the Emory main campus in Atlanta brought along her students who planted a memorial garden, which the city eventually named “Ellen’s Garden.” The students then collaboratively curated an exhibition on the multiracial history of the cemetery, working with descendants of the enslaved and of enslavers. Newspaper coverage followed, and the City of Oxford was eventually prodded into renegotiating the funding stream for the cemetery, providing perpetual care for all graves, Black and white.
As my students later wrote, the most important learning lesson of the entire project came about entirely unexpectedly. On the first workday in the cemetery, we were approached by an elderly white man whom I will call “Rob.” He was, I must admit, a feared figure for many of my students and our Black neighbors. He was known, ever since he came back from Vietnam, to have been deeply embittered; he would fly a Confederate flag sometimes from his porch, and walk up and down the town streets with his two large Dobermans, as Black grandmothers with trepidation sheltered their grandchildren within.
That morning he parked his pick-up truck in the cemetery and strode towards us, and cast a displeased look at 40 students and a couple of faculty members, trying without much success to cut down fallen branches. I glanced nervously at my collaborator JP Godfrey, the lay leader at Rust Chapel United Methodist Church and the leading Black member of the City council. We cautiously went forward to greet Rob. “Looks like you folks really don’t know what you’re doing,” he said after a long silence. “That’s true, Sir,” I said, “We sure are new to this kind of work. We’d welcome any guidance you could give, us.” He thought for a moment and then said, “Well, I tell you, never did sit right with me, the way the city treats these…graves. Those folks deserve the same resting places as anyone else.”
He then left in his truck and came back a half hour later, with two nephews and six chainsaws. They set to work instructing my students on how to clear privet and fallen branches. For the next six months he worked harder than anyone else at clearing the graveyard. One day, regarding him working in the hot sun with several of my students, Annette, an African American matriarch, approvingly quoted an old Black Georgia proverb, “Sweat-producing labor is soul-cleansing labor.”
When Rob was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that spring, those same Black matriarchs who had been fearful of him sent those same grandchildren to walk his dogs. Covered dishes appeared on his porch at sunset. When he died a year later, his final wish was to be buried in the Oxford African American cemetery to which he had devoted the final stretch of his life. His interracial funeral was sometimes said to be the best attended white person’s funeral in the history of Oxford, Georgia.
So this was a lesson that many of my students said they would never forget. They were inclined, as progressive social justice-oriented students, to regard Rob as irredeemable. A white, flag-waving Confederate, driving an old pick-up truck. Yet the work of common mourning, along with “sweat-producing labor” in the cemetery, opened up a window that, allowed, unexpectedly, everyone’s better angels to step forth. Here, under the hot sun, we were able to meet one another, and grasp our shared humanity, precisely through the mystery of mourning across borders.
Teaching through Partnerships
Over the subsequent two decades, my teaching and work as a museum director and curator has often centered on comparable projects of shared grieving that have occasioned joint celebrations of life, transcending diverse divides. In Ellensburg .Washington, my students and I worked with Yakama and other Native American community partners to honor the memory of indigenous ancestors, who had loved and tended to local lands, which had been forcibly alienated from them. We collaboratively designed an indigenous garden on campus, work that my students at Mount Holyoke have emulated. The students and their Native partners have been interested in extending the work of common memorialization beyond the human realm, to aid in the restoration of salmon runs in local rivers and the return of indigenous tubers to proximate marshlands. Here in the Connecticut River Valley, our students, Joshua, and I have been working on developing an exhibition on the history of enslavement in South Hadley, which will involve, we hope, productive dialogue between the descendants of enslaving and enslaved families in the area and lead, in time, to markers honoring enslaved ancestors.
More recently, my students and I have been pursuing other acts of mourning across borders. Last year in my seminar on museums, a group of students became deeply engaged in ongoing memorialization efforts around a brutal mass lynching in 1878, in Mount Vernon, Indiana. Seven Black men were killed over the course of two days, in violent white response to efforts to register Black voters and desegregate the local high school. I had become involved in these efforts through my distant cousin, Ben Uchitelle, whose great grandfather had been a leading Jewish merchant in town during the time of the lynching. Ben partnered with a committee led by one of the few Black young women remaining in the County, Sophie Kloppenburg, who was leading the efforts to erect a memorial on the courthouse square to the murdered men. The committee had not yet had a chance to locate the descendants the lynching victims and asked me and my students to help out.
After months of work, we were able to locate descendants, among them the remarkable African American poet Andre Wilson in the San Francisco Bay area, three of whose ancestors had been killed by white lynchers in 1878. Andre had always heard growing up that one of his ancestors had been burned alive in a railroad car by Klansmen. This aligned, my students and I realized, with an account we’d read that one of the victims had, horrifically, been thrown alive by the white mob into the fire box of a locomotive. Inspired by conversation with Andre and other descendants, the students campaigned successfully for Emory University to recontextualize a photograph of the 1878 lynching, displayed on the library website. The library website now properly identifies by name every one of the Dead.
Partnering with Andre Wilson: “Here in this Train Car“
It has been joyous to develop a friendship with Andre, who is deeply committed to Black-Jewish solidarities. Among other things, his uncle Admiral George Dawson, an African American communist plumber in Los Angeles, fell in love with and married Dawn Chava Goldstein, a woman who had survived Auschwitz. (Dawn was warmly welcomed into Admiral’s extended Black family, although sadly she was ostracized for life by her Jewish family, who couldn’t cope with her marrying a Black man).
Andre and I are now writing together about shared processes of mourning, that revolve around two deadly train cars. My great grandparents, Isaac and Clara Auslander, were deported from Radautz, Bukovina, in northern Romania, in mid October 1941, during Sukkoth, along with their 11 year old grandson Severin Pagis and 1,500 other Jewish residents. They were deported on trains to Transnistria, set up by the fascist regime in collaboration with the Nazi as a site of final solution for Romanian Jews. Many died on the death train, in the camps, and by the guns of the Einsatzgruppen in southern Ukraine.
Severin, who later took on the name Dan Pagis, after the war became one of Israel’s leading poets and literary scholars. He never spoke of what befell him or the family with that sealed cattle train. The only trace is his most famous poem, which many of you may know,
Lines written in pencil in the sealed cattle car
here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i
The poem ends abruptly in silence. It can either be read as the inauguration of a timeless, eternal night, or as a circle, “Tell him that I am …Eve, here in this carload…” and so on, forever.
Significantly, Pagis refuses to situate his narrative in a specific moment or place, and only locates the narrator in the mythic spacetime of Genesis, where we encounter the distant tracings of Eve, the Mother of us all. The phrasing in Hebrew of the line “Cain son of man,” is “ben-Adam,” which means not only Adam, but son of man, Everyman, for we are all Adam’s children. Here is a story of universal tragedy, in which we all mourn, in common. As readers, mercifully, we are not literally confined within a sealed railway car. And yet we find the predicament in the poem uncannily familiar—-for we are all, at the end of the day, metaphorically bound together in a cyclical story of Brother raising his hand against Brother, tied for eternity together, “here in this train car”.
Andre and I find this poem enormously salient to our shared endeavor of interfaith and interracial solidarity, of navigating a course of common grieving for all victims of injustice and intolerance. The two train cars on our minds, in 1878 in Indiana and 1941 in Bukovina, bind not only Blacks and Jews, but everyone community worldwide, in the aftershocks of terror and tragedy. We are consigned forever, it seems to ride together in these death trains, to witness again and again, the worst of what humanity is capable of, while also beholding the best of our human efforts, to create poetry and art, to strike a light of terrible beauty in the darkness.
Cousin Dan Pagis, a co-founder of Peace Now and scholar at Hebrew University died in June 1986. His grandson Amir now is serving in the IDF, along with so many thousands of others. I cannot imagine what Dan would have made of the horrors of October 7, which were simultaneously unthinkable and all too familiar for him and those who lived through the killing fields of the Shoah. Nor can I know what might have befallen the many interfaith friendships he was so committed to amidst the terrors unfolding in Gaza. I do know that for his first cousin, my father Joe Auslander, born the same year, 1930, as Dan, the last three months have been unbearably agonizing, witnessing monstrous suffering on both sides of the border and contemplating a global rise in anti-semitic rhetoric. Dad has supported calls for a ceasefire, and yet wonders at times, how can we pursue the work of Tikkun Olam, of making the world whole, when so many we had taken to be close allies cannot bring themselves to condemn publicly anti-semitism, or even speak out against the Hamas assaults of October 7?
Learning from Hisham Awartani and his Family
Since November 26, my father, Ellen, and I have found great inspiration in the story of Hisham Awartani, whom as many of you know, was one of three young college students of Palestinian descent shot in a hate crime in, of all places, Burlington, Vermont. (Also shot were Kinnan Abdalhamid, who attends Haverford College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Tahseen Ahmed, who attends Connecticut’s Trinity College). Hisham remains paralyzed below the chest, a bullet lodged in his spine. His mind remains as brilliant as ever, and he hopes to return next month to classes at Brown University, in a wheelchair, to continue his advanced studies in mathematics and ancient Near Eastern archaeology.
My Dad is a pure mathematician and his colleague Mary Gray (American University) has taught members of the Awartani family, a family known for their mathematical accomplishments. We were thus able to reach out to the Awartani’s, and in turn have been able to mobilize mathematicians and archaeologists to support Hisham and his family. Ellen and I have regularly visited Hisham during his neurological rehabilitation in Boston. My students at Mount Holyoke feel a particular connection to Hisham, and have been writing to him; a banner card from them, in many languages, hangs prominently in his hospital room. My students have been especially moved by Hisham’s and his family’s insistence that excessive attention should not be given to him and his suffering, but rather his story should alert us to the stories of innumerable other “Hishams” and their families, whose collective suffering in these past months has been beyond all measure.
On his first weekend in the rehab hospital Hisham was visited by the Brown University chaplain, Rabbi Jason Klein. Hisham turned to him, and asked, “Rebbe, would you please bless me in Hebrew?’[Jason notes Hisham is the only Brown student who addresses him as “rebbe”!] It was a beautiful moment, and I have been thinking of all those, many thousands, who have died since October 7, for whom blessings are being said, or left unsaid, on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border, Is there any way we can find in our hearts to follow Hisham’s example, to accept and honor blessings across the great chasms of pain, fear and loss that we all feel at this moment? I fear that at this moment each of us are confined within the private railway cars of our individual agonies, where all the children of Abraham, Brother against Brother, raise their hands against one another, again and again. Might we return from those sealed cattle cars to that Bridge in Selma, led by Dr. King in 1965, where we can once again march, hand in hand, arm in arm, reaching across all faiths, in the common quest for compassion, justice, and righteousness? Can we once again imagine a world in which the yarmulke might again be a Freedom Cap, a shared tabernacle for all of the Lord’s children, in which shared mourning for those lost in the Struggle helps gives us a shared glimpse of a Better place?
The Great Work Ahead
There is nothing easy about any of this. To begin with, we must draw a conceptual distinction between grief and mourning. Grieving in its early, initial stages is impossibly piercing, inconsolable, suffocating, Grief knows no time, only pain that seems beyond all balm, beyond any concievable endpoint. (Here I am an indebted to the insights of my wife Ellen Schattschneider who is psychoanatically trained and writes extensively about mourning and memory work). Only with the passage of time, and only with care and grace, do we learn to live with grief. That gradual, halting process of re-embracing life, without ever fully erasing the pain of loss, is what we term “mourning. “ When early grief is conjoined with fear, steps toward mourning in their deepest sense seem almost inconceivable, so immediate and primal is the terrifying, raging chokehold of anxious grief.
Joshua, Ellen, and I and our many colleagues near and far agree that there has never been a time as challenging as this to teach on college and university campuses. Everywhere we find our students caught in grief, fear, rage. We encounter layers upon layers of pain, all parties navigating the open wounds of mutual betrayal, all of us plagued by the inability to listen charitably to one another. Pleas for shared mourning clearly strike many as impossibly naive in contexts when our respective communities believe themselves fighting for their very survival against daunting odds. When all are convinced they may face potential annihiliation, how can any of us find the space even for fully mourning our own, to say nothing of mourning across borders?
And yet, for those committed to principles of Tikkun Olam and the visions of the Beloved Community, there is no work more important, precisely because it is the hardest thing imaginable. This will surely be sweat-producing labor that, will, we pray, in time be soul-cleansing labor, even if it takes many years (perhaps generations) to accomplish. We must together struggle, together, in Dr. King’s footsteps, to go to the Mountaintop and gaze upon the Promised Land. That great work depends on recalling together those who won’t get there with us in a physical sense, even as we seek to allow them to travel with us in spirit. The is perhaps the greatest gift of mourning, to allow us to detach ourselves from our beloved Dead in a physical sense while allowing the Dead in more complex ways still to travel with us.
The transformation of grief into mourning depends, ultimately, on Love, which for Dr. King was the at the heart of all truely transformative social action. As he wrote in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail,
“Unenforceable obligations are beyond the reach of the laws of society. They concern inner attitudes, genuine person-to-person relations, and expressions of compassion which law books cannot regulate and jails cannot rectify. Such obligations are met by one’s commitment to an inner law, written on the heart.”
The moral compass of social action, ultimately, must be anchored in this inner law, which is simultaneously collective and personal, political and spiritual, engaged in public responsibility while “written on the heart.” As we honor the Lost on all sides, and find a way to listen to the variegated voices of the Dead, may we strive together to fulfill the promise of shared Life and common Love, in their deepest senses, for ourselves and our intertwined posterities.
Thank you.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I am grateful for comments on an early draft of this essay from: Jay Ball, Amila Buturovic, Laurie Kain Hart, Elizabeth Price, Heidi Ravven, Jordan Sand, Ellen Schattschneider, and Rev. Avis Williams.
NOTE 1: I acknowledge that for Palestinians and their allies, an exclusive focus on the events of October 7 is often viewed as problematic, in part because the salient history of Palestinian suffering dates back at least to the 1948 Nakba if not earlier. The enormous suffering and loss of life in Gaza since October 7 also weighs heavily on all these discussions. In turn, many Jewish interlocutors emphasize that October 7 saw the greatest loss of life in a single day by Jews since the Holocaust, and that the long history of Jewish suffering in Europe and across North Africa and the Middle East must also be brought to the table. A necessary precondition for any project of shared mourning across borders is frank and open discussion of these long, partially intertwined histories of suffering, oppression, and injustice.
SUPPORTING HISHAM: To support Hisham Awartani in his long recovery, readers may wish to contribute to the GoFundMe site set up to assist with his medical and rehabilitation costs: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-hishams-recovery
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For Further Reading:
Mark Auslander, The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (University of Georgia Press, 2011): https://ugapress.org/book/9780820340432/the-accidental-slaveowner/
[The book is summarized at: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/remembrance-cemetery-search-accidental-slaveowner/ ]
Mark Auslander’s blog, “Power and Paradox,” is at: https://markauslander.com/mark-auslanders-blog-power-and-paradox/
Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917) Download PDF at:
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf
Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 21 (1940): 125–153. To download PDF:
—Mount Holyoke Student Project on Remembering the 1878 Lynching in Mount Vernon, Indiana:
https://commons.mtholyoke.edu/decolonizingmuseums23/mount-vernon-indiana-lynching/
—Mount Holyoke Student Project on Remembering Enslavement in South Hadly, MA:
https://commons.mtholyoke.edu/decolonizingmuseums23/enslavement-in-south-hadley/
Colum McCann. Apeirogon; a Novel. Random Housem, 2020
Dan Pagis. Variable Directions. North Point, San Francisco 1989, (translator: Stephen Mitchell) [nb. he poem, “Written in Pancil in the Sealed Railway Car” is available at: https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-18706_WRITTEN-IN-PENCIL-IN-THE-SEALED-RAILWAY-CAR ]
Ellen Schattschneider, “Buy Me a Bride: Death and Exchange in Northern Japanese Bride-Doll Marriage,” American Ethnologist 28, no. 4 (2001): 854–880.
Andre Le Mount Wilson, Hauntings. 2023. e-book at: https://newfound.org/shop/andre-le-mont-wilson-hauntings-e-book-copy/
Mark Auslander 