c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Having suffered through a series of commencement addresses, and having delivered a few such talks of my own, I well understand why most are considered boring and forgettable by restless graduates and their proud camera-clicking families.

But last month there was a commencement address in New York City that was historic because of the speaker, her message, the audience and the academic setting.

Dr. Ernestine Schlant Bradley, professor of German and Comparative Literature at the New School of Social Research in Manhattan, addressed the graduates of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, many of them newly ordained rabbis. She was a remarkable choice.

Some prominent European academics, including many Jews, who had fled Nazi Germany in 1933, founded the “University in Exile,” later renamed the New School. Under the current leadership of its president, former Sen. Bob Kerrey, the New School remains a center of both undergraduate and graduate studies.

Bradley, a naturalized American citizen, grew up in Germany during World War II. As a young Lutheran girl, she lived in the “belly of the Nazi beast” where she and her family experienced daily life inside Hitler’s gangster state. But unlike many other Germans of her generation, young Ernestine did not “move on” after 1945 and forget what happened in her native country. Instead, she deposited those horrific events, especially the mass murder of 6 million Jews, in her personal memory bank and psyche.

She came to the United States at age 21 and earned a Ph.D. at Emory University. A mother of two daughters, she soon achieved international recognition as a world-class scholar. Bradley devoted her considerable talents to a continuing study of the Holocaust’s impact on post-war German literature.

Bradley uses literature to take the moral temperature of her native land: “I trust literature rather than the media to tell me in what direction the soul of a country is journeying. Literature shows me … blind spots, traumas,” she has written. “If not literature, then what?”

In 1999, she published “Language of Silence,” one of the most honest and powerful books I have ever read. It is an intellectually searing analysis of how many German writers have yet to face up to the grim reality of the Holocaust.

In her JTS commencement speech, Bradley admitted she is “still struggling with the realization that I come from a people who have perpetrated the most heinous crimes in the history of mankind. … There is only one direction in which I can go, and that is acceptance of what has happened.”

She noted that “despite prognostications that the memory of the Holocaust will fade as (it) recedes into the historic past, there is ample proof to the contrary.”

Bradley poignantly remembered the murdered victims of Nazi Germany, and she spoke directly to the aging group of Holocaust survivors in her audience who “experienced the sense of loss and humiliation (when) my own country decided it longer wanted to recognize (them) as one of its citizens.”

She also offered words of comfort to the children of Holocaust survivors “who were brought up by traumatized parents and who live with the scars of their parents’ survival.”

Bradley was unflinching when she noted that only in recent years has there been “a willingness to confront the past and provide reparations and restitution (that) have replaced an earlier and ubiquitous amnesia and denial” among many Germans.

Bradley reminded the graduates of the extraordinary courage of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, who in 1951 accepted the hand of friendship and cooperation extended to him and the three-year-old Jewish state by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Bradley stressed that the “Special Relationship” between Israel and Germany established by Ben Gurion and Adenauer 56 years ago has greatly strengthened since then.

Receiving an honorary doctorate degree at the JTS commencement ceremonies, Bradley declared: “My standing here … exemplifies most powerfully a reaching out and a hope for healing that will never erase the deep scars, but will allow the wounds to close. … I would say two words: reach out, or another two words: build bridges.”

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

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