A Passionate Commitment-A Tribute to Franklin Littell

Franklin Littell and I first became acquainted in the late 1960's, when I had just begun my teaching career. He had already established himself as a Christian leader and educator and was beginning his work of challenging both the Christian churches and United Stares society generally about the implications of the Nazi Holocaust. Our lives connected very quickly and, whether he knew it or not, he quickly exercised a great influence on my thinking and writing. There is no question that Franklin brought the challenge of the Holocaust into my own life and writings in a central way. I heard considerable criticism of his passionate critique of the churches during the Nazi era in many Christian circles, including at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where I had studied, but Franklin largely convinced me of the truth of that indictment against church leadership and the professional classes during that period of night. The Holocaust would thus assume a central priority for my work in the field of social ethics as well as interreligious dialogue. Franklin and I worked together on Holocaust issues in many contexts over the years. We participated in a number of inaugural Holocaust conferences across the country, for which Franklin served as a principal organizer, including the groundbreaking conference at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. In all these settings, he minced no words about the perpetrators and collaborators in the Shoah. Phrases such as "technologically competent barbarians" and "Christian apostates" rolled off his tongue in these settings. While this was not my language and I tried to retain appropriate academic nuancing in my analytical work on the Holocaust, I valued Franklin's prophetic language. It brought me back to a remark I heard from Daniel Berrigan during the Vietnam War. Challenged by a television commentator about his harsh criticism of U.S. policy during that war, Berrigan responded that maybe the issues were not as black and white as he was making them. There were so many people saying "yes" to the Vietnam War without qualification that there needed to be voices such as his that said "no" to the war without qualification. So, also, for the Holocaust. So many Christians were trying to whitewash the stances of the churches during the Nazi period that someone had to stand up and say "no, that was not the way it was." For that lifelong witness by Franklin I shall be ever grateful. It has left a permanent imprint on me and provides a continuing challenge to speak decisively whenever religious bodies fail the test of justice. There are other issues related to the Holocaust for which Franklin also served as a genuine inspiration. He was a principal founder of the National Christian Leadership Council for Israel and led many of us in the Christian- Jewish dialogue to raise our voices against distorted and exaggerated attacks on the State of Israel. Franklin did not share the perspectives of today's Christian Zionists, but he felt strongly that Israel needed to receive a fair hearing in the realm of public opinion and that the Christian community should help to insure such a fair hearing. …