Remembering Joe Asch: Prof Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College
I first met Elizabeth. We had brought our little daughters to take a ballet class in West Lebanon and we started chatting in the mommy waiting area. Like everyone, I was drawn to her warmth and friendliness. She was familiar to me as a member of the River Valley Club, sometimes called the Dartmouth faculty club, and soon I also came to know Joe in the weight-lifting room. Always overflowing with intellectual curiosity and seeking smart conversation, Joe wanted to hear about the Jewish Studies program, which I chair, and especially about the book I was then writing on Protestant theologians who supported Hitler.
On the Third Reich and World War II, I discovered, Joe was incredibly knowledgeable and always eager to know more. He inspired me to offer an advanced seminar on the historiography of the Holocaust, which he audited. We studied what historians have written about the holocaust, decade by decade, in different countries, considering what archival sources were available to them, what topics intrigued them, how they analyzed what had happened based, in part, on their own cultural and political contexts; we studied historians working in the US, Germany, and Israel. Having Joe in the class was fantastic — he read everything and constantly raised sophisticated and interesting questions that made the seminar a great experience for all of us in the class.
For Joe, the Holocaust was of personal importance, bringing together his own heritage as Jewish and German. Joe loved the class and imbued it with his great intellectual energy, knowledge of history, and insight into human beings. He also gave me valuable advice about pedagogy, for which I remain deeply grateful, and he lightened the mood at the end of each class by distracting us with conversation and even some humor and teasing. I miss his teasing. At the RVC, Joe would see me across the room and call out with a smile and in a loud voice, “aggressor professor!” (I’m the least aggressive person imaginable around those huge muscled weight lifters!)
After my book on the Nazi period, I turned back to my original field, nineteenth-century German Jewish historiography, and started examining Jewish scholars of Islam. I received a year’s fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Germany, an extraordinary Institute for Advanced Study in the gorgeous suburb of Grunewald. Joe and Elizabeth brought their two children, teenagers by then, with them to Berlin and we met and talked about the important historical places and memorials that we were all visiting. Having them come to lunch at the Institute felt like a visit from family members, sharing in this special experience I was having.
My work on Jewish scholars of Islam led me to a fascinating figure, Gottlieb Leitner, an extraordinary philologist and ethnography who helped found the University of the Punjab in Lahore, then in India. I decided to visit the archives of the university, now in Pakistan. I was nervous about traveling so far alone, and Joe offered to accompany me. He was always ready for an adventure! But then we both started asking colleagues about the security risks in Lahore and Joe wisely advised me not to make the trip; it was simply too dangerous. I often think about what it would have been like to explore those archives with Joe and how much his strong presence would have helped me with the inevitable reluctance of archive directors to produce the needed documents. I can’t imagine anyone refusing Joe!
Instead of Lahore, I went to Paris. I was invited to give some lectures and Joe and Elizabeth invited me to stay with them in their gorgeous apartment. I’ll never forget the delicious scrambled eggs with truffles that they made one day nor the incredible view of the Eiffel Tower from their living room window. They came to my talks at the university and at the Jewish Museum and then we went to a wonderful little bistro — and Joe advised me where to go for the very best macarons in Paris, what wine to serve at a dinner, which champagne to buy as a gift; he knew where to find the best of everything. But it was always the conversations with him that I loved and will remember: those were the best.
Joe loved Dartmouth. Every morning, after The New York Times, I read Dartblog and learned what was happening at the College where I worked. Dartblog gave us a voice and the anonymity to express ourselves to our faculty colleagues and to the administration and trustees; it seemed we were all on a big conference call, a communication that ceased with his death. Somehow, Joe knew everything and everyone and he felt like our faculty ombudsman, speaking out on our behalf. He wanted to strengthen community at Dartmouth and urged faculty to get to know one another and introducing us and encouraging us to make contact — which I did.
He would tell me, you have to talk to Andrew Samwick, Russ Muirhead and Doug Irwin, you’ll like them so much. Or, “Call Rick Mills, he needs to hear about this.” He would push us to attend faculty meetings, get involved in governance, take a vocal stance, show courage! We all turned to Joe to express our frustrations over academic politics and he listened and understood, advised us and reassured us. He was a brother to everyone, and I always came away feeling that a big heavy weight had been lifted from my heart. His love of Dartmouth was contagious.
Joe enjoyed the students, too, and he would invite groups of them to his home in Hanover. Indeed, he is the only non-faculty person in Hanover, in my twenty-two years at Dartmouth, who has ever extended an invitation. He would invite me to bring a small group of my students for dinner once a term, and he also is the only Hanover person who took an interest in the many visiting scholars who came to teach in our Jewish Studies program. When I invited Professor Hillel Cohen, director of the Center for the Study of Zionism at Hebrew University and one of the most important scholars of the Israel-Palestine conflict, to teach for a term at Dartmouth four years ago, Joe audited his class (as did I!) and loved it. Our evening at Joe’s home, together with a group of students, was a great event and a wonderful culmination of that spectacular academic term. Joe used to wonder, why do people live in Hanover and not take advantage of the incredible intellectual offerings at the College?
We faculty admired so much about Joe. What I loved was his ability to have a real conversation — to grapple with issues, even when we disagreed. I didn’t agree with Joe about many things, especially affirmative action, but we were always friends. We looked for principles we shared, and we also agreed at times to disagree. I teased him, he teased me, and we stayed friends. He wasn’t going to go along with me in my work on race, gender or postcolonial theory, but I also found that when I talked with him about those topics and steered away from certain buzz words, I would get a “yes” of agreement from him because he was a person who valued fairness and justice above all. I wanted to hear him out, to understand what he believed, and I was open to changing my mind, as was he.
I was very impressed that Joe audited Cornel West’s course on WEB DuBois at Dartmouth two years ago. I could not imagine Joe and Cornel agreeing politically, so I was amazed that they bonded. Joe attended every class session and told me how impressed he was by Cornel in many respects — his ideas, his concern for society, and, especially, he told me, how Cornel handled the ultra-radical students in the course, how he defused their anger and sought to guide them.
The Book of Ecclesiastes proclaims that there is a time for everything — but Joe said no. He was not fatalistic, he simply refused to accept things as they were. Joe was not like the passive Ecclesiastes but like the prophet Amos: there is never a time for complacency. Joe had a voice and a pen, and he used them. He was tenacious: what might seem to most of us an unfortunate injustice or a mild annoyance was to Joe, in his passionate way, an outrage.
The artist Sister Mary Corita (Corita Kent) used to say, “this day is given to us; from it we make life.” Interpreting Genesis 2:7: “And Adam became a living soul,” the Talmud says, this means “the soul that God gave you, keep it alive.” And Joe surely did. He had a zest for life, an enthusiasm for adventure, and he knew how to make others share his joy. His generosity was remarkable — and I mean not only his wonderful wines and dinners, but his spirit — you couldn’t be depressed around Joe, he exuded excitement — every moment was precious to him, never to be wasted, but always transformed into the greatest moment that could ever come to be.
Joe’s death is a darkness at noon. Something of the glory of Dartmouth is diminished, and my own life saddened. I mourn Joe and think of him often, knowing that he would have loved a particular lecture, and wishing I could talk to him about a frustration and consult him about how to handle a problem with a colleague or a student. I will always miss him, though I have him in my heart, and I am grateful for the example of his life lived to the fullest. When my husband and I left the memorial service for Joe at the boathouse on Occam Pond and walked through downtown Hanover, we suddenly saw a glorious rainbow above us in the sky. Was that Joe smiling at us, urging us to keep up our spirits? Perhaps that rainbow was illustrating what the Psalmist said: “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5).
