Hilda (Bernstein) Silverman, Age 69

By Andrew I. Killgore


	Hilda Silverman (Linda Brion-Meisels).

THE GREAT HILDA Silverman, writer, teacher, peace activist and powerful personality, died May 5 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city where she had lived for many years. A dedicated idealist who fought for justice all her life, she campaigned door-to-door for the losing 1972 presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern. In early 1990, Silverman teamed with Rick McDowell to form Act on Conscience, a nationwide campaign to educate Americans on how their tax dollars were being used by Israel to commit human rights violations against the Palestinians. Because Act on Conscience worked out of the Washington Report office, we were able to witness first-hand Hilda’s determination and commitment, and well as enjoy her warmth and generosity.

“I am a Jew with a profound consciousness of Jewish victimization through history,” she once wrote. “But, for me, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed are not mutually exclusive categories.”

Hilda was bothered by the fact that some Jews labeled criticism of Israel as a betrayal of the Jewish state and of Jewish solidarity. Nevertheless, she took what to her was a moral course and from there she did not waver, despite hate mail and death threats.

The distinguished Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies and author of the classic The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, said, “Hilda has been a central figure in the peace activist community. She is highly respected, greatly loved and admired, and consistently sought after as a resource, as a speaker, as a colleague, and as a friend. She cared profoundly about issues of social and political justice, and of course was deeply committed to the Israeli-Palestinian issue and finding a resolution that would allow both peoples to live in peace with each other with a state of their own.”

In his book Culture and Resistance, the late professor and Palestinian-American intellectual Dr. Edward Said wrote of Hilda remonstrating with Michael Walzer, “How dare you tell a Palestinian that he should stop reminding us of the past, when you and I [both Jewish] belong to a people that is always reminding the world of how much we have suffered…”

Hilda Silverman graduated from Radcliffe College in 1960, and earned a master’s degree from Harvard in 1962. She was married for a couple of years while in graduate school, and later to Paul Silverman for several years. They had two children, Jennifer and David Silverman.

She held various positions with the American Civil Liberties Union and with the American Friends Service Committee. Said her son, David, “If she saw something that she didn’t think was right, she felt an obligation to speak out about it, and she did. I don’t think she always perceived how widely her work was appreciated. My mom didn’t do what she did for glory, and she certainly didn’t do it for money.”

Along with countless others throughout the country and around the world, we will greatly miss Hilda Silverman.

Andrew I. Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.