Gordon Fellman

By Andrea Barron

Dr. Gordon Fellman, Chairman of the Sociology Department of Brandeis University and Co-chair of New Jewish Agenda's Mideast Task Force for the last four years, has never confined himself to an ivory tower.

For 30 years Gordy—as his friends call him—has combined intellectual inquiry with social activism. As a graduate student at Harvard University in the late-1950s, he demonstrated in front of a Woolworth's department store to express sympathy for Blacks who were demanding that Woolworth's integrate its lunch counters in the South. Inside the classroom, meanwhile, Gordy studied Marx and Freud. In 1964 he joined the faculty of Brandeis University, where he became active in the anti-Vietnam war movement.

However, it was not until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that Gordy became interested in the Middle East. Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, Gordy belonged to an Orthodox synagogue, and he had been active in various Jewish social groups. However, he had not been exposed to Zionism, and at the time, he did not feel that the establishment of the state of Israel was a particularly important event in his life. However, after the 1967 war, Dr. Fellman was emotionally devastated when he realized that Israel could have been destroyed. In 1971, feeling that he had ignored the Middle East for too long, Gordy visited Israel for two weeks, and he was so fascinated that he ended up spending both his 1972-73 and 1979-80 sabbatical years there.

The young American scholar was excited about Israel's victory in the Six Day War because he thought the war "turned on its head the idea that Jews are always weak, always the victim." But he also realized Israel was paying a high price for its victory: the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip had left Israel ruling more than a million Palestinians against their will.

New Jewish Agenda provided Gordy with the perfect vehicle to express his views on the Middle East. Founded in Washington, DC in 1980 as a "progressive voice among Jews and a Jewish voice among progressives," NJA now has more than 3,000 members in 40 chapters across the nation. It has national task forces on Feminism, Central America, Disarmament, Economic and Social Justice, and, of course, the Middle East.

Gordy was asked to chair Agenda's Mideast task force in 1982, after he publicly condemned Israel's invasion of Lebanon as a tragedy for both Jews and Arabs, and declared that "the historical mission of a battered people is not to batter others but to work towards the end of all kinds of human domination."

Since then, Dr. Fellman has become a leader in Agenda's national effort to help the American Jewish community to understand that mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians is the only way Israel will ever achieve peace with its Arab neighbors. Gordy helped write Agenda's Mideast platform, which supports self-determination for both peoples and calls for "direct negotiations between Israel and legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people, including the PLO."

Gordy believes the main purpose of Agenda's Middle East work is to "raise the consciousness" of the American Jewish community. In 1984, Agenda sponsored an extremely successful national tour—a "historic dialogue," in Dr. Fellman's words—between Mohammed Milhelm, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, and Mordechai Bar-On, a Peace Now activist.

Gordy himself has published opinion articles in the Jewish Advocate, Boston's weekly Jewish newspaper, advocating a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has also led three Agenda-sponsored tours to Israel to meet with representatives of virtually the entire political spectrum.

Gordy believes, however, that American Jews aren't the only ones who need to have their consciousness raised on the Middle East. "Much of the left still has a very simplistic, unsophisticated view of Jewish history," he maintains. "They think that because a wrong was done to the Palestinians, Israel shouldn't exist. The creation of Israel was partly a reaction to 2,000 years of anti-Semitism in Europe. Practically all of the European countries have thrown out Jews at one time or another.

Gordy thinks Agenda's Mideast Task force has basically two long-term goals. The first is to let Israelis know that there is a significant body of American Jews who support peace forces in Israel. "We want to overturn the Israeli government propaganda which tries to make people believe that all Jews in the US support Israel's policies towards the Palestinians," he explains.

"Agenda's second goal is to develop a large enough constituency to lobby in Washington. This lobby could pressure President Reagan to pressure Israel to come to terms with the Palestinians."

Would such a lobby make a difference in US Middle East policy? "Well," says Dr. Fellman, "let's just say that if we ever get to the point where there are 10,000 American Jews demonstrating in front of the Israeli Embassy against the occupation (of the West Bank and Gaza), someone will sit up and take notice.