By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
A wealth of yellowed newspaper clippings tell about the remarkable career of the late Israel T. Naamani
For years – decades, even – the unassuming file box had occupied an equally unassuming space in the garage of a home on Louisville’s Wendell Ave. Measuring about a cubic foot, colored a dull avocado green, the plastic box reflected the life and career of Israel Naamani, who chaired the University of Louisville’s political science department from 1972 to 1974 and established the school’s first Jewish Studies program.
Naamani, who died in 1979, was also a renowned scholar of Jewish history and possessed an abiding interest in contemporary Israeli society, particularly the plight of Iraq’s Kurdish minority. Born in the Ukrainian city of Zhytomir on Nov. 3, 1915, he grew up in what was British Mandatory Palestine before immigrating to the U.S., where he earned an undergraduate poli-sci degree from Marquette University in 1935, and ten years later, a Ph.D. from Indiana University.
(After his death, an annual Naamani Memorial Lecture Series was established in his honor. The most recent presentation, this past April, featured Susannah Heschel giving a talk on “Moral Grandeur: The Life and Legacy of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.”)
All this and more is documented within this file box, which was “discovered” last year when Ryan Wallace – the home’s current owner – came upon it while cleaning out a storage space. He mentioned his find to his sister-in-law, Janet Holiday, who emailed me as Community Managing Editor asking if I had any interest in perusing its contents. Not long afterward she strode into the Trager Family JCC, the cube of green plastic tucked under her arm.
Naamani’s wife, Zehava – a pianist and longtime teacher at the Louisville Hebrew School – had died in December of 2017. The bulk of her husband’s papers found their way to his two children, Aviv in Louisville and Roanete in Cincinnati. Roanete deposited her portion in that city’s American Jewish Archives; Aviv, a local musician who lives in what was his parents’ home on Lime Kiln Lane, is exploring options for the materials he now holds.
Meanwhile, that non-descript green has its own stories to tell. There are drafts of articles Israel Naamani wrote for a broad array of publications, aimed at both scholarly and popular readers. Newspaper clippings, fragile and yellowed with age, document travels and milestones, commentaries and his coming to Louisville in 1948 to head the Bureau of Jewish Education, the same organization he’d directed in San Francisco since 1946.
Israel – which had embraced statehood the very year Naamani arrived in Louisville – was always a principal point of focus. “Educator Just Back from Israel Says Big Powers Must Force Treaty” said a headline on Page 8 of the Sept. 2, 1955 edition of The Courier-Journal, with the subhead “Asserts Unrest Aids Communists.”
“The international powers must compel the Arabs and Jews to sit down and negotiate a peace treaty, a Louisville educator said yesterday upon his return from Israel.
“ ‘National feelings separate the Middle Eastern countries. Their differences cannot be resolved without a concerted intervention by the United States, Great Britain and France,’ Dr. Israel T. Naamani said.”
At the time Naamani was directing a six-week graduate workshop at New York University, reflecting interests that ranged widely – thematically and geographically, and spiritually.
“His specialty was geopolitics, particularly in the Middle East, so there was some overlap,” Aviv Naamani says. “He was quite well known in terms of international law. He was invited to sit in with the International Court at The Hague as an interested observer.” Prominent simultaneously as executive director of the Bureau for Jewish Education and a faculty member at U of L, “he drew from one to the other,” his son says.
“But they were two separate careers,” Aviv added, “because when he retired after his first major heart attack in 1966, he only retired from the Bureau, but continued at U of L full time as a professor. And he was the first distinguished professor at U of L, continuing for another 13 years until he passed away” from a subsequent heart attack that proved fatal. Not long afterward, the annual Naamani Memorial Lecture Series was created in his honor.
There was spiritual multiplicity in the Naamani household. “I’d call it a ‘Conservadox’ upbringing,” Aviv says. “We had Shabbat dinner every week, and we went to services. But even though my sister and I went to Sunday school at KI, my dad felt that to go to just one congregation’s services would smack of favoritism – so we went to all of them.”
The status of Iraq’s Kurdish population was an ongoing vexation, particularly within the context of Cold War political gamesmanship. “Kicked-Around Kurds Used As Pawns in Red Gambles” trumpeted a Louisville Times headline on July 22, 1959, topping commentary in which Israel Naamani described the Kurds as “among the freedom-loving, proud, fierce-looking, courageous, hospitable and jovial people in the world.”
Nine years later on July 25, 1968, another Times story described how Naamani “has been in contact for several years with these unconquerable tribesmen who have frustrated so many Iraqi regimes. At the request of Kurd and Israeli leaders, Dr. Naamani at one time discussed with the mountain men possible joint military action against the Arabs.” Alas, “Dr. Naamani foresees no solution to the Iraqi-Kurdish problem, since apparently neither can defeat the other militarily and since economics and ideology stand in the way of political harmony.”
He adopted a considerably more optimistic tone amid an extensive piece on the front of the Sunday, Oct. 15, 1972 Courier-Journal & Times Forum section. Headlined “Israel at 25: Under the surface, a tenacious soul,” Naamani’s retrospective acknowledged the wonders – and myriad challenges — of a nation a mere quarter-century old.
“Israel is a noisy democracy,” he wrote. Its citizens are easily seduced by whiffs of politics. It is not unusual, as the saying goes, to find in that country two Jews with three opinions. But when the syntactic dust is settled, there emerges a rare cooperative art in self-government and astonishing national discipline.”
Compelling as these newspaper clippings are, the most emotionally affecting items in that green plastic box are a number of typed manuscripts, drafts of articles yet to be published.
One of these – part recollection, part rumination – is full of confessional quietude. Its subject is a city; its narrator steeped in the resonance of memory:
“My first night and first day in Jerusalem, after several years of absence, I spent wandering in her streets. I walked through forgotten centuries, way back to the time when her name was Salem and when her ruler welcomed Abraham, maybe 4,000 years ago, as told in the Bible: ‘And Malki-Zedek, King of Salem, brought forth bread and wine, and he was priest of the most-high God.’ (Genesis XIV)
“Every stone, every rock glistening in the brilliant moonlight, flooding ancient ruins and new-fashioned structures told a story of its own. Every vacant lot, each battle-scar from countless struggles for her possession bore witness to contests of sublime ideals and to conflicts in the human spirit. Hour after hour that first night, I walked through the narrow and winding streets of the older sections and the splendid avenues of the new districts; past time-hallowed sanctuaries of many peoples, of many faiths; past modern and magnificent buildings; past groves of age-old, gnarled olive-trees; past ancient meeting places of students listening to the simple and wondrous words of sages, who told them of things as deep as the Valley of Kidron, as fresh as the breeze from the north, as instinct with lofty hopefulness as yonder mountains touching heaven. The night was cool, the air transparent. I was breathing eternity.”
