Richard Levin, President
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut 
May 4, 2003

Dear President Levin:

Thank you for responding, on April 24, to my letter of March 10, 2003, concerning Amiri Baraka’s Yale appearance. I do not seek a response to what follows, but I would hope it might influence your thinking.

Permit me to suggest that your delayed response, and your argument against censorship, bespeaks your avoidance of my argument. I never recommended censorship against which you rightly inveighed, but quite the opposite, asked for the good people of Yale and yourself, to respond to hateful speech with more speech.

Therefore, I have taken the liberty of composing a fantasy letter that I would have wished to receive from you.

“Dear Fellow Alumnus:
I was deeply moved by the pain that the Baraka invitation has obviously caused you and other alumni and students. I sincerely regret that on my watch a Yale Daily News column written by Eli Muller, on February 28, 2003, could begin ‘it has been an unpleasant week to be Jewish at Yale.’ Of course, speech codes and censorship are not the answer to hateful speech, but that does not mean that no response is the appropriate action either.
With this in mind, I met with Dean Pamela George. I reminded her of the important role Jews historically played in the Black struggle for Civil Rights. I specifically mentioned Jack Greenberg, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Division, and the young Mississippi martyrs, Goodman and Schwerner. I further explained that lies such as the Czarist secret police concocted forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” had inspired “Mein Kampf” and that Baraka’s comments were a modern version of this Big Lie.
Moreover, I reminded Dean George that she was Dean for all of Yale and not just African American students. Upon reflection and with my encouragement, Dean George is reaching out to the Jewish community and has planned a trip to Auschwitz and Yad Vashem.
I also realized the eternal wisdom of Edmund Burke’s observation: ‘That the triumph of evil requires only that good people do nothing.’ Therefore, Dean Brodhead and I sent the following letter to the Yale community:

‘We are deeply troubled by the rise of pernicious anti semitism on our own
campus as we are troubled by prejudice against all groups, including Muslim 
students.

There is a two thousand year history of Christian anti-semitism which culminated
in the Holocaust. Regrettably, Yale has its own history of anti semitism 
courageously exposed in Daniel Oren’s ‘Joining the Club.’

Recently, there has been a revival of European anti-semitism, fueled by Holocaust guilt and directed with irrational vehemence at Israel. A new specter of anti--Semitism is also sweeping Arab countries, reversing a long tradition of 
tolerance. While Israeli policies are, of course, fair game for criticism, the
equation of Israelis with Nazis and the call for Yale’s divestment in Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, may be a cover for anti-Semitism. 
I join with Columbia President Lee Bollinger in finding the call for Israel
divestment ‘grotesque.’

I call on the Yale community to re-examine and combat these dangerous trends.’


Yours sincerely,


Stanley S. Heller, M.D.
Yale College, BA ‘56