By Rachel Neuwirth
May 3, 2007
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On Oct. 21, 2003, in a corridor on the campus of UCLA, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, the director of UCLA's Hillel chapter, suddenly assaulted me when I merely asked him a reasonable question. He kicked and scratched me while trying to throw me down a flight of nearby stairs. Fortunately, I was saved from possible concussion by several bystanders who pulled him off me in time. When these "good Samaritans" were finally successful in prying the rabbi off me, he attacked me again. He assaulted me three times in the course of several minutes, and each time I had to be rescued by helpful bystanders. There was a wall of students separating him from me when I finally landed on the staircase and the rabbi stormed off screaming and shouting incoherently.
I later learned that after he assaulted me, he also shouted and screamed at another woman, Allyson Rowan Taylor, and had to be physically restrained from attacking her, too.
I suffered physical injuries that required medical treatment. I am still trying to overcome the emotional trauma that I suffered.
This incident occurred within moments after we had run into each other by chance in the corridor, as we both, along with hundreds of other people, were exiting from a lecture hall. We had just heard a speech by the lawyer and Jewish activist Alan Dershowitz. My sole communication with Rabbi Seidler-Feller before the incident occurred was a brief question that I asked him: Was he aware that Sari Nussiebeh, a Palestinian Arab who was scheduled to speak on campus the next evening, as a guest of Hillel, had worked as a spy for Saddam Hussein's Iraqi military during the Gulf War of 1991? Was he aware that Nusseibeh had contacted the Iraqi military suggesting targets in Israel for Saddam Hussein's missile batteries to attack? (Iraq fired tens of missiles into Israel during the war, causing extensive property damage, forcing the entire population to wear gas masks, and causing at least one death).
Rabbi Seidler Feller's only reply to my question was to assault me.
My purpose in recounting this unfortunate event is not to disparage Rabbi Seidler-Feller. He has since apologized for his actions, and I have accepted his apology. Rather I wish to set the record straight after more than three years of unfair and misleading press coverage of this event .This unfair coverage, by blaming me, the victim, for the assault on me, felt like getting beat up all over again. It has greatly increased and prolonged the emotional trauma that this incident has caused me for more than three years after it occurred. Finally, I wish to make some brief observations about the values and unstated assumptions that seem to underlie many of the unfair criticisms of me in the press.
Many of the journalists and academics who publicly commented on this regrettable incident, especially those in the "progressive" camp, seemed to view it in purely political terms. All that mattered to them was that someone whose political views about the Arab-Israel conflict agreed with theirs had behaved in a manner that created a public relations problem for their side of the debate, and that the individual whom he had assaulted was on the other side. Their only concern seemed to be to protect their political ally, and themselves, from embarrassment. The humanitarian and moral issues created by the incident did not appear to concern them. They expressed no concern for the pain and mental anguish that I had endured. They made no effort to get the facts straight, nor to hear, much the less report, both sides of the story. Not one of these writers witnessed the attack on me and not one ever contacted me to hear my side of the story, before publishing a version of events that blamed me for provoking the attack by verbally insulting the rabbi. When publishing this version of events, they also ignored the recollections of numerous other witnesses, whose accounts appeared elsewhere in print, that the attack was in fact unprovoked.
One theme of these inaccurate descriptions of the assault is the claim that I had provoked it by calling Rabbi Seidler-Feller a "capo," an expression referring to concentration camp inmates during World War II who were forced by the Nazi guards to act as overseers over their fellow prisoners. Thus, according to these reporters of, or commentators on, the incident, I was the true aggressor, having provoked the Rabbi "beyond human endurance" by a grave insult. In reality, I had not called Rabbi Seidler-Feller this or any other disparaging name, or indeed made any disparaging or provocative remark to him at all, before he assaulted me. It was only after he grabbed my wrist, dug his nails into it, and called me a "liar" that I have blurted out this word, at a moment when I was in pain and shock as a result of an entirely unexpected assault, and scarcely knew what I was saying. In these circumstances, many people would have used far stronger language.
More than three years later, I received the following letter from Rabbi Seidler -Feller, which was published in the campus newspaper of UCLA, the Daily Bruin, and in the internet edition of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal which stated:
"I am deeply sorry that I hit, kicked and scratched you and called you a liar on October 21, 2003. By taking these unprovoked actions, I have contradicted the pluralism, peace and tolerance about which I so often preach. I also have violated the humanitarian teaching of Judaism regarding kindness and respect for others that I am bound to uphold."
Rabbi Seidler Feller also stated: "I am accepting 100% responsibility for my actions on October 21, 2003. I had no right to do what I did."
On April 29 of this year, I received an apology for the Jerusalem Post's earlier, inaccurate coverage of the incident from the editor of the Post. The Post simultaneously published Rabbi Seidler-Feller's apology in full. And it said to its readers that "The Post is happy to clarify that it has removed [two previous articles about the incident] from its electronic archives and that it retracts those sections of those articles that inaccurately relate to the 2003 incident."
I have also received an apology from four of fifty professors from UCLA who had signed a published letter supporting Rabbi Seidler-Feller and blaming me for the assault.
On the other hand, I have not received apologies or retractions from the Jewish Journal, The Forward, The Jewish Week, or the Jewish Progressive Alliance, all of whom published accounts of this incident that were inaccurate and damaging to me, since Rabbi Seidler-Feller made his apology. My requests for such apologies or retractions to these media or political institutions have so far been ignored. The Forward ran a brief story about the apology but has not published the complete text of the letter. The Jewish Journal published the letter in its internet edition, but Rob Eshman, chief editor, has refused to publish it in its print edition; the Journal even has refused a substantial sum to publish the full text of the apology as an advertisement.
In addition, forty-five of the fifty UCLA professors who published their attack on me have also yet to retract or apologize, even though they have been informed of Rabbi Seidler-Feller's apology.
It is high time that all of the people who published unfair and inaccurate descriptions of the physical assault on me apologize and correct their erroneous reports. What has our internal Jewish political discourse come to? Do fair and balanced reporting and a love for the truth now count for nothing? Has winning the political debate, regardless of the facts and regardless of who is hurt in the process, now become everything?
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