OUR SAY :PROFESSOR EDWARD ALEXANDER REMEMBERED
Eddie Alexander was an admired and respected and treasured friend. I was always dazzled by his erudition and brilliance and grateful for his unparalleled literary litigation in support of Israel’s historic rights, and against the nation’s hypocritical and venal opponents. rsk
From Rael Jean Isaac:
“With the passing of Edward Alexander, my husband and I have lost one of our oldest and dearest friends, and the Jewish people have lost an irreplaceable champion. Forty years ago, Alexander, then a professor of English at the University of Washington specializing in Victorian literature, shifted his focus to the Jews. From then on he used his erudition and extraordinary literary and polemical talents in service of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. He skewered the villains, both without and within the Jewish fold, from political and academic icons like Bishop Tutu and Edward Said to “Jewish” enemies like Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler and Seymour Hersh. Some of his most devastating critiques were of those Jews who claimed to be “friends of Israel” while undermining her. Indeed one of his books is entitled “With Friends Like These.” Alexander saw himself on a battlefield as the titles of his books reveal: The Jewish Wars; The Holocaust and the War of Ideas; The Jewish Divide Over Israel, Accusers and Defenders; The Jewish Idea and its Enemies. Nor was he hesitant to take on the enemies of Israel within the Jewish state itself, an intelligentsia riddled with moral arrogance and self-hatred. As Alvin Rosenfeld has said, Edward Alexander turned polemical writing into an “effective art form.”
Three years ago, Edward was devastated by the loss of Leah, his wife of sixty years, and spent much time pouring over her letters and other writing, much of which he had never seen and which brought her closer. Rael Isaac
From Stephen Rittenberg, M.D.
I met Eddie in the first semester at Columbia College in 1953. I brought with me arrogant biases from my private school, Fieldston and assumed no one from public school could possibly have had the education I possessed. It was a form of liberal arrogance imbibed as part of ethical culture’s training. And then I met Eddie. We hit it off immediately by talking about baseball, the Yankees (my team) and the Dodgers (his). Eddie was knowledgeable about writers I had barely heard of, and he knew opera and aspects of culture I knew nothing about. He was clearly brilliant. I learned that he had been sports editor of the Tilden high school newspaper and had uncovered a scandal involving Brooklyn high schools stealing players from other districts that made it to the local papers. In recent years we reminisced about the great Brooklyn boys of summer. Eddie and I hit it off and sat together in various classes with Lionel Trilling, Fred Dupee and Mark Van Doren. We developed a late adolescent friendship that lasted all our lives. When we went off to graduate school we wrote letters almost every day and I learned of Eddie’s beautiful romance with Leah. More than friendship, and despite the continent that separated us we loved each other. I think ultimately Eddie not only lived up to the Trilling ego ideal, but surpassed it because, unlike Trilling, he drew strength from his Jewish identity. How we will miss his magnificent voice.
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