Walz: Honoring the memory of Stephen Feinstein

Looking through Lexis-Nexis' Congressional Universe, we came across the extension of Representative Walz's March 14 remarks honoring the late Stephen Feinstein, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. They are reproduced below.

When we were small, our parents used Denmark's reaction its Nazi invaders' demand to turn over its citizens of Jewish descent to teach us and our siblings about courage and solidarity.  Our grandfather was a Danish immigrant and our foreign cousins' experience in World War II seemed more vivid for that reason.

But our knowledge of the Holocaust was unusual among school children, in that it wasn't taught in our classes. It wasn't until we went to college in the late 1970s that the subject of the Holocaust was broached.  By then, the American vets who had liberated the camps and those they had liberated were dying, and the deniers had started to come out of the woodwork.

Thus, we have welcomed the development of Holocaust and genocide studies, in the hopes that we can learn how to honor the admonition of "never again." Alas that we do not always remember that harsh lesson, as the world learned in places like Cambodia and Rwanda.

Congressman Walz's thesis for his masters degree was on evaluation of genocide studies, so his words honoring Dr. Feinstein isn't a rote memorial.  This is what he said:

Friday, March 14, 2008

Mr. WALZ of Minnesota. Madam Speaker, I rise in memory of Stephen Feinstein, the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and adjunct professor of history at the University of Minnesota, who died unexpectedly on March 4, 2008. He was 64.

Born in Philadelphia and educated at Villanova and New York Universities, Prof. Feinstein taught for 30 years at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls before joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota. From its founding in 1997, he built the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies into an internationally renowned educational, research, and outreach institution that was engaged with a broad range of human rights issues, including the Armenian Genocide, the treatment of Native Americans, and the humanitarian crises in East Africa. To end genocide, he once said, "we must study it and understand how it works against what we call `civilization'," if possible to develop an "early warning system" to prevent future genocides.

Feinstein was known around the world as an advocate for Holocaust survivors and genocide education, and in particular, for his expertise on artistic expression and genocide. In addition to his CHGS responsibilities and activities, he served as an art consultant and guest curator for numerous museums, universities and art galleries in Minnesota, Florida, New York and Washington, D.C.

"Above all else," said his colleague Eric Weitz, "Stephen Feinstein was a great humanitarian, someone with a profound belief in the value of research and education, a person who truly believed that if we had just one more lecture about Darfur, ran one more outreach session with teachers on the Armenian Genocide, taught one more course on the Holocaust and genocides, it really could make a difference and the world would be a better place for all of us."

Photo: Stephen Feinstein