Professor Hillel Levine sits at a desk in his spacious office on Bay State Road. A window in the center of the room overlooks the Charles River, and bars of midday sunlight cast shadows on the round table at the end of the room. Packed bookcases line the walls, and papers are piled on the dark wooden table.
Levine thinks carefully about what he says and annunciates very clearly, as if to match the proper collared shirt and sweater-vest he wears. A reserved and soft-spoken man, Levine’s small stature matches his easy demeanor. His curly black hair is lined with streaks of silver.
Levine is talking about one of his classes last semester, when, as a final project, he instructed students to create business plans on how to stop genocide. Responses ranged from using the media to tapping into popular culture to educating younger students in schools.
“We all have a personal interest in ending genocide, just as we all have a personal interest in doing the right thing,” he says. “It’s just that we’re all so busy sometimes with ephemeral matters, pressures of day-to-day life become more important than the things we know are most important.”
In 1993, Levine was invited by the Boston Globe to explore the tumultuous situation in Yugoslavia, where people were allegedly impounded in concentration camps. Levine says the people at the Globe didn’t think stories about camps would amount to anything substantial.
“No one could believe that after the Holocaust anyone could use the word ‘concentration camp’ again,” he laments. “No one thought that it was real … but it was real.”
While in Yugoslavia at a refugee camp, Levine recalls speaking with a woman who lost her family. She told him, “In the morning we sipped coffee with our neighbors and in the afternoon those neighbors returned and hacked my husband and children to pieces.”
After hearing that statement, Levine was shocked.
“I never thought that with my own ears I would ever hear anything like that,” he says. “I realized that our whole perception of the world after the Holocaust was wrong, and we had to work a little harder to understand the lessons of the Holocaust and to make sure that these terrible instances of genocide would not be repeated.”
TAKING ACTION
Levine, a Jewish studies professor and part-time peacemaker, grew up in a Jewish family in New York. Although he did not lose any family in the Holocaust, Levine says he began thinking about the tragedy as a young person.
“I was born while the ashes of Auschwitz were still warm,” he says. “From the youngest age I wondered how anything like this could possibly happen.”
Levine says he thought the Holocaust would “raise human beings to a new standard and warn them about the dangers of genocide and mass murder.” He felt disappointed when he realized that wasn’t the case.
“[I believed] the Holocaust was so terrible that it drew the outer line of what people can do to other people,” he says quietly, gazing at his hands. “I believed the response to the Holocaust would be firm commitment of all people never to allow anything like that to happen. I really, really believed that. And as I grew older and every few years there was another incident of perfectly awful things, I was quite shocked. It made it all the more difficult to understand.”
A natural interest in groups of people and their interactions led Levine to study sociology at Harvard University. He says much of his work originates in Jewish history, but that it can be applied to religious and other conflicts between different groups of people all over the world.
“Ultimately, all people are the same,” he says. “All people want first is dignity. They want to be able to provide for their people … pride, continuity, accomplishments, preservation of cultures. It is a struggle. This is a struggle that Jewish people often had.”
Levine studied human interaction from his home in Brookline, and wrote a book with Lawrence Harman in 1992 called The Death of an American Jewish Community, about changing neighborhoods in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. Levine also travels to countries such as Congo, Rwanda, East Africa, Israel, China and throughout Eastern Europe as a teacher and mediator. As a mediator, he speaks with different people to learn about the causes of tension and tries to foster understanding and encourage dialogue between conflicting groups.
“I meet with lots of people on both sides,” he says. “Sometimes I am involved with trying to understand the other side, trying to speak to the other side. A sense of common experience, a sense of empathy can develop from dealing with the most horrible memories.”
EDUCATING A
FUTURE GENERATION
Levine has taught Jewish studies at Boston University for 25 years, although he has spent time teaching at different universities around the world as well. He even taught Jewish studies at a Christian theological seminary in Japan, where Christians are a smaller minority than Jews are in the United States.
A common shock to students everywhere, Levine says, is the idea that even when the mass murder of the Holocaust was going on, no direct action was taken. Students have a hard time coming to terms with that idea, he says.
“The Holocaust was responded to with extreme indifference,” he says. “Even in our wonderful country.”
Levine warns that reaction has not really changed much since the 1940s.
“It’s not only history, it’s what’s happening now,” he says. “We think we’re so much more aware and so much more concerned.”
But that’s not the case.
Levine points to the current situation in Darfur as an example of how situations of mass murder and genocide are overlooked by many people. Recently, he spoke to students who analyzed how frequently the media mentioned Darfur in recent years. On some television stations, the number of mentions was in the single digits over an entire year.
LOVE HIM OR HATE HIM
BU Philosophy Professor Emeritus Robert Cohen, Levine’s close friend and former colleague, says Levine is beloved among many students. However, Cohen says he is sure there are also students who don’t like his brand of teaching.
“He has a certain charm,” Cohen says. “It sort of alienates people who don’t like it. He can polarize. Not everyone is his cup of tea. He has strong opinions … and stands up for them.”
College of Arts and Sciences senior Steven Sultan says he enjoyed Levine’s class on anti-Semitism last semester because he was able to study something that he was extremely interested in.
“We only met as a class a few times,” Sultan says. Other times, the students would meet at Levine’s home to discuss books they were reading or talk individually in his office.
Although Sultan liked the freedom Levine’s class offered, he says some students would have liked a more structured environment. Still, Sultan says he respects Levine for treating each student as an individual and encouraging the pursuit of personal interests.
“There are certain issues that he deals with that are usually dealt with in very black and white shades,” Sultan says. “He made us all realize that something like anti-Semitism or racism can take on a lot of very different forms. He was able to complexify what is generally seen as a black and white issue.”
Although his students can either love him or hate him, Levine possesses a broad range of experiences in the subjects he teaches that could never be found in a classroom. He draws from conflicts that he has seen firsthand and enlightens students with his hands-on interactions.
However, Levine tries to keep his personal politics outside of the classroom.
“I’m a teacher and it’s my responsibility to teach,” he says, but the door to his house is always open to students who want to talk about current events or anything at all.
DIALOGUE IS PARAMOUNT
Ideally, by mediating conflicts in countries around the world, Levine hopes to emphasize similarities between groups and to move on from past events.
“If these bad experiences are explored … a sense of common experience, a sense of empathy can be developed,” he says.
Cohen says Levine’s recent work has been to foster understanding between all cultures.
“He has turned in recent years to understanding and attempting to mediate between very basic conflicts. Maybe his model is what happened in South Africa. Is it possible to overcome deep racial conflicts? I think Hillel’s hope is to have understanding. And he’s explored that from a Jewish point of view and from a non-Jewish point of view.”
By understanding the present, Levine hopes his students can try to change the future.
“BU students, like students everywhere, can be major peacemakers,” Levine says. “BU is blessed with a high proportion of foreign students from regions that are divided and in conflict, regions from which there is great tension. Yet when they come to BU, [cultural boundaries disappear]. If those students could deepen their dialogue and share what they feel as foreign students in America, they can plant the seeds of future dialogue.”