Returning to Israel from a visit to the United States a few years ago, Levine wrote in the Jerusalem Post about his surprise at how attitudes toward the Bergson Group had changed. At a conference sponsored by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, he was amazed by what he heard: Prominent Jewish leaders acknowledged that their predecessors had mistreated the Bergson Group. The speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, recalled with pride that her father, a congressman in the 1940s, had been a Bergson supporter. The rabbinical march in Washington, which at the time made some Jews wince with embarrassment, was now widely hailed as a brilliant and effective protest tactic.
“American Jews, you’ve come a long way, baby,” he wrote.
Charley was too modest to acknowledge it, but he himself deserves some of the credit for the change. Those of us who followed him in the field of researching and writing about the Bergson Group owe him a debt for undertaking the difficult but necessary spadework to start talking about a subject from which too many others shied away.
