April 8, 2011

In the fall of 1999, I sat in the office of the associate dean of admissions at Brandeis University and begged for admittance. I told her how my ninth grade history teacher at a California high school had peppered exams with interrogatives that included, "Tell me how Adolf Hitler inspired Zionism." I told her how I had been hounded for years by an unnamed group of teachers who shredded my writing after I objected to the exams in our school newspaper. I told her how the teachers ran down my grades and refused to teach me 12th grade English. I told her how I was summoned by the principal to explain why Jews were, "so sensitive" about the Holocaust. I told her that I did not have the grades to get into Brandeis, but that I knew it was supposed to be a place that took people like me.

The word refugee never came to me then, but over a decade later, it comes to me quite often. Named for the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis was founded in 1948 as a refuge for people who were turned away from American colleges because of their race, ethnicity, or religious beliefs. It was unique even among refugee camps. It was a explicitly a place within the community for people who were refused an education within the community - often first and second generation Americans who lived in the shadow of the schools that would not take them. Today, the founding mission of Brandeis might best set aside the word refugee for internally displaced persons.

Brandeis accepted me for admission in 2000 and over ten years after my interview I own and operate a small independent bookstore and publishing house a mile from the university. It is a shrine of devotion to the very real notion that the written, printed, physical word, and those who cherish it, are all that cultivate a culture of resistance against the onslaught of human acquiescence to barbarity. It is from this place that I write to protest the threatened deportation of Munther Fahmi, bookseller of Jerusalem.

Born in Jerusalem, Fahmi is inexplicably threatened with being forced to leave Israel for having stayed too long on a tourist visa in the city of his birth. For thirteen years, he alone has carved out an active space in which a small, endangered group of civilized people share their love of ideas in a place known for irrational expressions of both sudden and bureaucratic degradation. He has brokered his land - his bookstore - fostering decency, wonderment, and respect among his patrons in ways that escape the gatherings of even the greatest nations.

A rabbi once wrote that when Moses descended Mount Zion with the Ten Commandments and found Aaron and the Israelites living in orgiastic sin, he could not possibly have delivered the word of God verbally to punish and redeem his people. Practical considerations meant it would have taken too long. Instead, the rabbi said, perhaps he uttered the sound of the Aleph, the first letter of the alphabet, a magnificent rush of sighing air, and all was understood. Or perhaps, said the rabbi, they simply looked upon his face, saw the map of the aleph in the crux of his nose and brow, and understood the story of their people.

Munther Fahmi is the Aleph of Jerusalem. Internally displaced by the ignominy of governance, he is now threatened with exile. If he is cast out, to die in exile from his true home, the people Israel admit a failure indicative of unsettling parallels. In this coming season where we revisit the Great Exile, we lose if Fahmi is banished, just as the vector of the word of human divinity was lost at the gates of the land of redemption. In so doing, we lose our own.

Sign this petition in support of Munther Fahmi.  Contact your elected officials.  Contact us.

Laurence A. Green
Bookseller
Waltham, Massachusetts