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Cohen scholars visit Museum of Tolerance

06/27/2008

Cohen scholars visit Museum of Tolerance

Students at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law
pose outside The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles
with Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bruce R.
Cohen, his wife, Loren, and daughter, Lindsay. They
are (from left), students Alison Atwater, Natalie Graves,
and Amy Coughenour, Lindsay, Bruce and Loren Cohen,
Meghan McCauley, Paul Singleton and Scott Seymann.
Photo by Janie Magruder

     At the dedication of The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles 15 years ago, Federico Mayor, Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, hit the nail on the head:
     “A peaceful future depends on our everyday acts and gestures. Let us educate for tolerance in our schools and communities, in our homes and workplaces and, most of all, in our hearts and minds.”
     It’s a message that was reinforced time and time again for a delegation from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law who recently took a moving guided tour of the museum’s exceptional, multimedia exhibits. The interactive displays, dioramas, recreations and reenactments, featuring archival video, audio, photographs and documents, trace the world’s shameful and violent history of intolerance, from the plight of the suffragettes and the horrors of the Holocaust to America’s civil rights struggles and human-rights violations that plague Bosnia, Rwanda and other places today.
     The visit, on June 6, was a reward from Loren Cohen and Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bruce R. Cohen, an alumnus of the College of Law, who sponsor the Cohen Professionalism Scholars competition at the College of Law. Each year, all first-year students submit essays about integrity for the writing contest, and the Cohens select the best entries, award scholarship money to the winners and organize the Museum trip.
     “Our goal is to plant the seed of consciousness about individual responsibility,” Judge Cohen said. “We don’t impose our values on the students, but we do hope that they will take responsibility for whatever their moral compass tells them.
     “And that’s a difficult thing because we have 20/20 vision when we’re viewing the behavior of others, but we have a real blind spot when it comes to viewing our own,” he continued. “How quickly we grasp the magnifying glass, but how slow we are to pull out a mirror.”
     The scholars were chosen by the Cohens without their knowledge of the authors’ gender, ethnicity or backgrounds. As it happened, the students are a diverse group of freethinkers.
     Meghan McCauley, Amy Coughenour, Alison Atwater and Natalie Greaves, all members of the Class of 2010, and Paul Singleton and Scott Seymann, of the Class of 2009, accompanied the Cohens and their daughter, Lindsay, on the trip.
     In addition to experiencing the somber exhibits, the group was captivated by the brave Morris Price, a Polish Jew who, unlike more than 15 million others, survived the Holocaust. They also were surprised and heartened by the unlikely friendship of Matthew Boger, a gay man, and Tim Zaal, a former neo-Nazi skinhead.
     “The question is, `What do we do with these feelings now, these feelings of fear, discomfort, anger, hopelessness?’” asked Diane Flynn, program facilitator for the museum‘s Tools for Tolerance program, during one of the group’s discussion periods. “We have to try to find the part in ourselves that is more like those in the past who have said, `I’m not going to stand for this.’”
     The students returned to Phoenix wrung out from the emotional experience, yet reflective and hopeful about their future role as lawyers who can contribute greatly to furthering tolerance.
     “Watching Matthew and Tim speak about how they have learned from past mistakes so as to avoid repeating them was inspirational because it showed that the power to change a shameful course of history is within us,” Seymann said.
     The museum experience gave Seymann something to recall when he finds himself in adverse situations, as a new lawyer, and he believes it will help him view adversity more objectively and focus on a more just result.
     “Having said that, I realize that, if we could strip away adversity that easily all the time, well, we could just let it wither and blow away,” Seymann said. “I believe we all have the power to do so. It’s just a matter of having the control. Or, in a more enlightened word, the `tolerance.’”
     Singleton said he won’t soon forget two display cases facing each other in the Holocaust exhibit; one contained a Nazi uniform, decorated with the swastika, Nazi flag, and a German officer’s pistol and rifle, while the other, more-plain display featured a letter detailing Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews and other papers. Upon closer examination, the students learned that the letter had been written by an attorney.
     “As future attorneys, this trip was a good reminder that, as lawyers, we have a tremendous amount of power: the power to do good and the power to do evil,” Singleton said. “When someone is being oppressed, we have three choices: assist those who persecute others, stand by and do nothing, or fight for those who need our help.”
     McCauley, a future officer in the U.S. Air Force, said the museum provided her with a new sense of duty. In addition to upholding justice as an attorney and protecting the principles of her country as a military official, she is now duty-bound to uphold her beliefs.
     “I believe the most profound message of our visit was that, what has occurred in every major discriminatory event in our world’s history was done at the compliance of ordinary people,” she said. “This experience has taught me to always remember to maintain a duty within myself in order to make sure I never comply with intolerance directed at any person.”
     The sense of duty also resounded with Atwater, who called the museum both educational and inspiring.
     “It is important to remember that, just as we owe the tolerance we enjoy today to those who came before us and worked to expand our rights, people who live decades in the future will depend on us to work just as hard to expand those rights to include an even larger spectrum of diversity,” she said.

This is one of the many thought-provoking exhibits in The
Museum of Tolerance, which doesn't sanitize the world's
long history of intolerance, but leaves visitors feeling
hopeful for change. Photo by Janie Magruder

     Coughenour said she was impressed by the museum’s ability to seamlessly integrate the past and present in teaching visitors about the origins and effects of intolerance and their responsibility to take the message out into the world.
     “The impact of Morris Price’s generous gift of his story of survival, followed by Matthew Boger’s and Timothy Zaal’s story of their journey toward understanding and forgiveness, was especially poignant,” Coughenour said. “I gained a new perspective on the human condition and my place in it, and an acute awareness of the dichotomy presented by humanity’s capacity to traumatize, but also to heal.”
     Greaves agreed that seeing and listening to Price, Boger and Zaal was a powerful experience.
     “This reminded me that, as future attorneys, we need to remember that every piece of paper in the mound of paperwork that we deal with on a daily basis affects a real human life somewhere,” she said. “Judge Cohen has stressed taking responsibility, and I think part of that needs to be remembrance of the effect we can have, for good, or for bad, on the lives of real people.”
     Price was only 12, the youngest of six children, when his homeland, Poland, fell under German occupation. Forced to wear a yellow ID badge, he said was he was humiliated by Nazi soldiers for “looking and being” Jewish.
     “But all these things, no matter how bad it was, it wasn’t that bad because we still lived in our home with our family,” said Price, who at age 15 was separated from his parents and most of his siblings and sent to a labor camp.
     At 16, Price escaped from a truck carrying Jews to Birkenau for extermination and worked at another labor camp at Auschwitz, which was within sight of the gas chambers and incinerators. He survived typhoid fever and extreme hunger, drawing on his faith, optimism and determination.
     “I remember it was Yom Kippur, and I was so hungry, and I said to myself, `The reason you are hungry is you are supposed to fast,’” Price said.
     When the war ended, Price found some of his siblings, and in 1949, he became the first member of his family to come to the U.S. He worked as a watch repairman, married and had three children. Today, his portrait hangs with dozens of other survivors in the Witness to Truth exhibit.
     Zaal, a reformed white supremacist, told the Cohens and the students that he wasn’t born racist, nor did he become prejudiced overnight. Rather, it was a gradual process, fueled by poor role-modeling from his father and his older brother, changes in his life and his Southern California community and “the way I perceive things.”
     By the time he was a teenager, Zaal wore a mohawk, tattoos, safety pins in his cheeks, razor blades in the toes of his boots and a horrendous attitude, he said. “If you got in our way, you stood a change of getting slapped,” Zaal said of his gang.
     Boger grew up in Northern California, one of seven children. At age 13, he told his family he was gay; his mom promptly threw him out of the house and never took him back, even after he was arrested and beaten. Boger lived on a piece of cardboard in a park in West Hollywood, living on donations of free food from a hamburger joint across the street.
     One night, he and others were stormed by a gang, beaten and kicked repeatedly by people with boots that had razor blades embedded in the toes. One sliced open his forehead and Boger passed out, thinking, “My Mom won. This is it. I will die in this alley, and no one will know.”
     Boger recovered, however, and after the torture and death of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming, Boger came to the Museum of Tolerance. “I wanted to use my voice to talk about the subject on a much larger scale, what happens when things get out of control,” he said.
     Boger hoped to take his message of tolerance to a school that was rumored to be starting a white supremacy group, but he didn’t know enough about the subject. In 2005, the museum put him in touch a former skinhead, and the pair met for coffee. Zaal recognized Boger’s eyes almost immediately as belonging to the man he’d sliced open in the park years before.
     “I went numb, and I went home,” Boger said.
     In 1997, Zaal had renounced his association with the skinheads for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was seeing his toddler shout a racist expletive at an African American in the supermarket. He apologized to Boger, the pair gradually became friends, and they now travel to schools and other organizations to tell their story of reform and forgiveness.
     “Tim’s that older brother,” Boger said. “When I am down, in need, the first person I call is Tim.”
     The College of Law group discussed the important role parents play in raising their children to be accepting of others and to accept their own responsibility for improving the world. Loren Cohen, who has two children, talked about the painful experience of being exposed to bigotry.
     “The mission for us is to raise our children in a fashion that celebrates and honors diversity, but not to show anger toward others who are intolerant,” she said.
     It isn’t an easy task, Judge Cohen said.
     “People have a right to be ignorant, and they have a right to be intolerant,” he said. “The key is what you exhibit, not endorsing the lawyer or fill-in-the-blank jokes, and recognizing they’re not funny. We have to accept people for where they come from. What we have control over is what we exhibit.”

Judge Bruce R. Cohen's image
is reflected in this photo of
Morris Price, a Holocaust survivor
who told his story to the College
of Law group. Photo by Janie Magruder

Before leaving the museum and returning to Phoenix, the group viewed a display featuring 12 examples of projects that give hope for the future. Included was Project Lemonade, in which residents of Bowerton, Pa., sell lemonade and collect pledges for every minute that the Ku Klux Klan rally and march in the streets of their town. The money is donated to groups that fight bigotry and intolerance.
They also read this quote, circa 1000 A.D., from The Great Peacemaker, founder of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, today known as the Iroquois: “When you sit and counsel for the welfare of the people, think not of yourself or your family or even your generation, but make your decision on behalf of the seventh generation coming.”

Scott Seymann's Essay
Paul Singleton's Essay
Megan McCauley's Essay
Alison Atwater's Essay
Natalie Greaves' Essay

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