"A SPECIAL KIND OF EXILE"

 “A SPECIAL KIND OF EXILE”

Earlier this month, Caroline and I went to hear Dr. Alice Rothchild speak at North Decatur Presbyterian Church on the struggles in Israel and Gaza, struggles resulting from the injustices which Palestinians have endured since 1948, the year that Dr. Rothchild was born in Massachusetts.  She indicated that she once heard a speaker refer to Jews who engage in critical activism on Israel/Palestine as entering a “special kind of exile.”  She indicated that she now knows that exile, because she is a central voice asking and working for justice for Palestinian people.  

Dr. Rothchild graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1970 with a BA in psychology and subsequently attended Boston University School of Medicine, class of 1974, followed by a medical internship at Lincoln Hospital in the south Bronx and an obstetrics and gynecology residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, now Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In 1988 she joined the staff of Harvard Community Health Plan, which subsequently became Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates. She served as an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School until November 2013 and is currently retired from clinical medicine, serving as a Corresponding Member of the Faculty of the medical school.

At the gathering at North Decatur, she talked about growing up as a solid member of the “ Jewish tribe” and being a strong adherent of the nation of Israel and very anti-Arab.  During her college years, she began to think more independently, and she recognized a moment when she had her epiphany on the Israel/Palestine relationship.  One of her college friends had a grandfather who had been Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and Dr. Rothchild remembers having indignant arguments with her friend, who indicated that people of Arab descent might be people after all.  During one of these arguments, she realized that she had never actually met an Arab person.  She recognized that she had grown up distrusting and hating an entire group of people that she really knew nothing about.

She decided to change that, and as she read and discussed and discerned, she began to imagine a new way for her to think and act and work.  She discovered that the Palestinian people had suffered a grave injustice in 1948 and that nothing had really been done to ameliorate that.  Because she values Palestinian life as much as Jewish life, she is often seen as a “self-hating Jew,” and she has often been censored or accosted in her many public addresses and speeches.

She is now a public speaker, a novelist, poet, documentarian, and writer of children’s books, the latest being “Finding Melody Sullivan,” about a girl who works through grief over the death of her mother by engaging Palestinian and Israeli cultures.  

She is concerned about the increasing right wing policies of the State of Israel, and she urged us all to speak out and act out for justice for both Israel and the Palestinians, with a special emphasis on developing a ceasefire in Gaza and the movement towards a two state solution.  As we are seeing this week in our country, college campuses are erupting in demonstrations, seeking justice for both the Palestinians and Israel.  There may be movement soon, but as I have indicated earlier this year, this election year of 2024 reminds me so much of the election year of 1968, when campuses were erupting over the prosecution of the Vietnam War.  The seeds of discord sown then led to the election of Richard Nixon as president. We may have the same result this year, though I am loathe to think of Donald Trump as president again. But, these demonstrations must go on – it is time for peace with justice for both Palestinians and Israelis.   President Biden’s leadership on this issue will be crucial not only for Israel and Palestine but for the future of our country as well.