Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, 2019 KSAS Masters Ceremony Commencement Speaker

thank you that was wonderful and isn't it amazing to be here I don't know about you I never thought I was going to be a graduate of Johns Hopkins University so as much as you gave tribute to the people who supported you I think there are hundreds of people in the stands who would like to stand up and give you a standing ovation for this incredible achievement so family and friends let's cheer them so before I start I hope you'll allow me a personal digression I was here ten years ago when Ron Daniels was installed as the president of Hopkins and it is so great to be back and see how he and Johns Hopkins have soared over the last 10 years I've been a supreme admirer of Ron Daniels for decades and as a friend I tell you I have been in awe of his brilliance his vision and his courage in immeasurably enhancing every great institution he's ever led towards becoming it's even greater self so it's an enormous honor to be a new graduate of Hopkins it's a particular honor to be a new graduate of Hopkins led by Ron Daniels thank you Ron so back to the graduates a few weeks ago I saw To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway. When I first read the book as a young girl I found it deeply moving reading it again as a lawyer many years later I found it deeply inspiring and seeing it on Broadway a few weeks ago as a judge I found it deeply disturbing the play represents a particular era of injustice in America an era of Cruelty ignorance and intolerance but it also shows what powerful justice weapons decency respect and courage can be how do we hold on to that decency respect and courage and put the brakes on the recent moves all over the world to replace them with fear indifference and extremism you are one of the most important graduating classes in a generation because you're graduating on the edge of a new future one unlike any I've seen in my lifetime it's a future that's very divisive very insensitive and at times very macho that makes it very dangerous and that's why you need to take the knowledge and wisdom you've gained at Hopkins one of the best universities in the world and used both to help restore decency to the world you're the people who hold the future in your hands the people who have to worry not only about how the climate is changing the environment but how the moral climate is changing the world and creating an atmosphere polluted by bombastic anti intellectualism sanctimonious incivility and a moral free-for-all everyone is talking and no one is listening in a few days we'll be commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-day when the Allies landed in Normandy it allowed justice to emerge assertively from the in justices of World War two and led to the miraculous regeneration and luminous moral consensus that resulted in the universal declaration of human rights the Genocide Convention and the Nuremberg trials all created to preserve the conceptual fruits of victory the Allies fought at Normandy for democracy for due process for a free press for an independent judiciary for the protection of minorities and for freedom of religion expression and Association seventy-five years later this is not by any stretch the best of all possible worlds the moral legacies that emerged triumphant from the beaches of Normandy the legacies each and every one of us is descended from are at risk those legacies are democracy human rights and justice and when they are at risk our humanity is at risk world war two was the devastating war that inspired the nations of the world to unite in democratic solidarity and commit themselves to the promotion and protection of values designed to prevent a repetition of the wars unimaginable human rights abuses yet here we are in 2019 more than seven decades later watching that wonderful democratic consensus fragment all over the world we are rolling back hard-fought rights for minorities immigrants refugees workers and as we have heartbreakingly seen in the last few weeks even women we are forgetting our compassion and making the vulnerable more vulnerable in a world that was supposed to have learned the horrendous cost of discrimination so that being different would no longer expose someone to danger we are a world now where too often law and justice are in a dysfunctional relationship and we're as we saw last month at a synagogue in Poway seven months ago at a synagogue in Pittsburgh two months ago in a mosque in New Zealand and a month ago in Sri Lanka a world where prejudice poisons and hate kills democracy is too fragile in too many parts of the globe where too many institutions of democracy and values of democracy are thrown under the bus and we're far too often political expediency victimizes truth too many rights abuses go unrecognized let alone confronted too many governments have interfered with the independence of their judges and media too many people are strident too many people have been killed too many people are poor too many children are hungry and too many people have lost hope we're in danger of a new status quo where anger triumphs over dignity and indignity triumphs over decency and where intolerance is tolerated and tolerance is not too much like the old status quo we fought a world war to fix so why aren't we out there passionately insisting on the democratic values that landed on the beaches of Normandy I know democratic values are no guarantee but they're the best goals we have because without democracy there are no rights without rights there's no tolerance without tolerance there's no justice and without justice there's no hope the world was supposed to have learned three indelible lessons from World War two and the concentration camps of Europe one indifference is injustice as incubator - it's not just what you stand for it's what you stand up for and 3 we must never forget how the world looks to those who are vulnerable to me this is not just theory I am the child of Holocaust survivors my parents who got married in Poland on September the 3rd 1939 the day world war 2 officially started spent four years in concentration camps there two and a half year old son and my brother and my father's parents and three younger brothers were all killed at Treblinka. My father was the only person in his family to survive the war he was 35 when the war ended my mother was 28 as I reached each of those ages I tried to imagine how they felt when they faced an unknown future as survivors of an unimaginable past and as each of our two sons reached the age my brother had been when he was killed I tried to imagine my parents pain in losing a two and a half year old child I couldn't after the war my parents went to Germany where my father a lawyer who graduated with a master's degree in law from Z Bologna on University in Krakow taught himself English the Americans hired him as a defense counsel for displaced persons in the Allied zones in South West Germany in an act that seems to me to be almost incomprehensible in it's breathtaking optimism my parents transcended the inhumanity they had experienced and decided to have two more children I was the first of them born in Stuttgart on July the 1st 1946 a few months after the Nuremberg trials started and I went to Canada with my family in 1950 a few months after the trials ended almost as soon as we got to Canada my father went to the Law Society to see what tests he needed to write to apply to be a lawyer but he was told he was not allowed to practice law because he was not a citizen that's when I decided to become a lawyer I was four years old I had no idea what being a lawyer meant but I felt that if he couldn't be what he wanted to be then I would I call it the Revenge of the refugee I never asked my parents if they took any comfort from the Nuremberg trials which were going on for four of the five years we were in Germany until we got permission to come to Canada I have no idea if they got any consolation from the conviction of dozens of the worst offenders but of this I'm sure they would have preferred by far that the sense of outrage that inspired the Allies to establish the military tribunal of Nuremberg had been aroused many years earlier before the events that led to the Nuremberg Tribunal ever took place they would have preferred I'm sure that the world's reaction to the expulsion of Jewish lawyers and judges from their professions in 1933 to the 1935 nuremberg laws prohibiting social contact with jews or to the brutal rampage of Kristallnacht burning thousands of jewish homes and businesses in 1938 they would have preferred i'm sure that world reaction to any one of those events let alone all of them would have been at the very least public century but there was no such world reaction by the time World War two started on the day my parents got married it was too late and so the vitriolic language and rights abuses unrestrained by anyone turned into the ultimate rights abuse genocide and millions died you cannot be born in the shadow of the Holocaust to two Jews who survived it without an exaggerated commitment to the pursuit of justice you cannot grow up indifferent to a just rule of law when every adult you love experienced the horror of its subversion and you cannot live a life without idealism when the very fact of your birth reflects a tenacious belief by parents whose only son had been one of the war's six million martyrs to injustice that the world would turn fairer my father died a month before I finished law school and never see lived to see his inspiration take flight in his daughter's passion for justice or meet the two grandsons who followed his path and became lawyers but he never for a moment gave up hope because living in a democracy made him feel safe my life started in the country where there had been no democracy no human rights no justice no one with this history does not feel lucky to be alive and free no one with this history takes anything for granted and no one with this history does not feel that we all have a duty to wear our identities with pride and to promise our children that we will do everything humanly possible to keep the world safer for them than it was for their grandparents a world where all children regardless of race color religion or gender can wear their identities with dignity pride and in peace my fellow graduates brilliant and wonderful students you deserve the best of all possible worlds please do everything you can to make it one you'll be proud to say you helped make better when you get your honorary degree thank you [applause]

Channel: Johns Hopkins University

Views: 1,018

Rating: 4.4666667 out of 5

Keywords: johns hopkins university, baltimore, maryland, justice abella

Id: lvYX9beITjI

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2019