In memoriam: Stephen Feinstein (1943-2008)

Stephen Feinstein, the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, died unexpectedly on 4 March 2008. Steve was speaking at the Jewish Film Festival in the Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins when -- so out of character -- he had difficulty finding words. He was rushed to the hospital where he died of an aortic rupture that resulted in cardiac arrest. He leaves his wife Sue, children Jeremy and Rebecca, and two grandchildren.

Steve was born in Philadelphia and studied economics at Villanova University. In 1971 He received his Ph.D. in Russian History from New York University with a minor field in Art History. For thirty years he taught a wide range of courses at the University of Wisconsin River Falls and served as chairman of the History Department 1991-97. Throughout this period he took colleagues, school teachers, and anyone else who could sign up on legendary educational trips to the Soviet Union and China. He became Professor Emeritus in 1999, but by then he had moved to the University of Minnesota to become director of CHGS, the consuming passion of the last ten years of his life. Along the way he published numerous articles and edited books, many having to do with art and issues of representation of the Holocaust and other genocides.

A conventional academic obituary does not begin to capture the essence of Steve, who was a dear friend, colleague, and co-conspirator on many projects. Steve had an amazingly generous nature and a capacity to get things accomplished that no one had ever conceived or thought was possible. In the 1970s and 1980s he was very active in the campaigns in support of Soviet Jews, and helped bring many of them to Minnesota for resettlement. Steve and Sue did much more than secure the necessary paperwork and other bureaucratic details, as critical as those tasks were. Their home became a veritable transit station and advice center, their car the delivery service for furniture and other important items scoured from garage sales and junk depots. Their son Jeremy has remarked that as a child growing up, he thought everyone in Minnesota had dark hair and spoke Russian.

From its founding in 1997 he built the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies into a premier educational, research, and outreach institution, one that achieved international renown. He ran CHGS as he did everything else -- with verve, passion, commitment, and an unending stream of jokes. (I asked him more than once whether he had contemplated a third career as a stand-up comic.) He was my first and only teacher in, of all things, the ways of bureaucracy. I learned not by having Steve lecture me, that was not his way. I learned by watching and observing. The lesson about bureaucracy was very simple: ignore it. If you have a good idea, just go out and do it, make it happen.

With that approach, so antithetical to the ever-increasing bureaucratic nature of American universities, Steve drove many of us absolutely crazy. Meetings were often replete with raised eyebrows and exchanged glances moving around the room. I don't think Steve ever noticed, and if he did, he certainly never cared. And in the end, neither did we, because we knew that Steve accomplished great things. He built programs, dreamed up great projects, and brought all sorts of people together. In so doing, he brought out the best in all of us.

Countless lectures, teachers' workshops, and conferences have been held at Minnesota in the last ten years thanks to Steve's efforts. All of this often very frenetic activity concerned the most significant issues of our time: the Holocaust, genocides, human rights, Jewish History and Jewish Studies generally. Everything he did was marked by a capacious vision. Among students, colleagues, and the larger community, he sought to develop knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust and also of other atrocities that had affected various peoples around the globe. Always he demonstrated a deep, abiding concern not only for the fate of Jews -- though that was always central to his very being -- but for others as well. He understood and fought for the establishment of human rights and humane ways of living for all peoples. He brought into the curriculum and research and programs of the University of Minnesota the history of the Holocaust, and also the history of the Armenian Genocide, the treatment, historically and in the present, of Native Americans, the analysis of the ongoing humanitarian disasters in East Africa, and on and on. It is the reason why he was revered, even loved, in the Armenian community, to take just one example.

Steve played a critical role in bringing to Minnesota one of the conferences of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and also the Workshop on Armenian Turkish Scholarship. His deep interest in problems of representation led him to support the work of many artists and to consult on countless museum installations. A few years ago he brought to the Twin Cities "Coexistence," an art exhibit dedicated to the idea that people of difference can live together in this world. It was a classic Steve operation, and when I look out my office window, still hanging on one of the University of Minnesota lecture halls is the giant print with the Star of David, Christian Cross, and Muslim Crescent shaped to spell out the word, "coexistence." When he first broached the idea in a meeting -- he had seen the exhibit elsewhere -- all of us in the room looked around: How do you go about installing 40 major works of art in public spaces in Minneapolis and Saint Paul? How do you even transport art from one location to another? We had no idea. Well, in a few weeks, he had drummed up the support of the president of the University, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, the mayor of Minneapolis, the mayor of Saint Paul, and major multinational companies headquartered in Minnesota like the Target Corporation and Allianz of North America, along with a dozen departments at the University that developed classes, lectures, and workshops to go along with the exhibit. He did the same in 2008 with the "Deadly Medicine" exhibit on Nazi eugenics that he helped bring from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to the Science Museum of Minnesota.

That was Steve. He had extraordinary ideas for meaningful projects and he brought all sorts of people and institutions together to make them happen. He also brought many generous donors to the University of Minnesota. It is largely because of him that we have a Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies; a new endowed chair in Jewish history; a chair devoted to issues of atrocity crimes, human rights, and Armenian history and culture; and an endowed lecture series. This list, too, goes on and on.

All of his activities were the result of his sense of being Jewish and of being human -- and the two were, I believe, inextricably intertwined in him. Combined they gave him the belief that one lives in this world, one acts in this world, and one tries to leave the world just a little bit better than the way one found it. And that Steve did. Above all else, Steve 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.

And then he would tell a joke. That, too, was Steve.

Eric D. Weitz University of Minnesota