Dr. Bernie Vigod
Canadian Historian and educator, Dr. Bernie Vigod (1946-1988) was a lifelong advocate of human rights and civil liberties. Born in Winnipeg, he was educated at the University of Manitoba, Carleton University and Queen’s University in Canada. In 1971 he joined the faculty of History at the University of New Brunswick, Canada where he taught for 17 years. An outstanding teacher and scholar, Dr. Vigod was a Professor of History and Associate Dean of the University’s School of Graduate Studies and Research as well as the New Brunswick member of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Dr. Vigod served the cause of human rights with distinction. He spoke and published extensively on human rights issues. Dr. Vigod also acted as an advisor to public officials on human rights issues and took a leading role in organizations dedicated to promoting human rights. This lecture series is dedicated to his memory and features distinguished speakers on a wide range of human rights issues.
An immense void was left when in October of 1988, Dr. Bernie Vigod was killed in a highway accident while on his way to Moncton, New Brunswick to address the Atlantic Jewish Council on combatting anti-Semitism. There was an essential unity to his life and his many activities at the University of New Brunswick, in the City of Fredericton, throughout New Brunswick and across Canada were integrated into a single whole. It was the same Dr. Vigod whether teaching, researching and writing on campus, fighting for French Immersion in the community schools, battling to end bigotry in our society, or striving for understanding and peace in the Middle East.
It is natural that Dr. Vigod was a historian. For him, discerning and grasping the past was the key to understanding the present and shaping the future. Events of the past informed the actions and direction of his life.
For Dr. Vigod, the Holocaust was the central event of our time. This calamity which befell the Jewish people, his people, murdered in their millions, revealed the fragility of western society. After its horrors, could one still hope for a humane, civil culture? Dr. Vigod thought so, and the place to shape that culture was here in Fredericton, in this province of New Brunswick, in this country of Canada, and indeed throughout the world. But a humane society depends on vigilance by each of us in the struggle against fear, ignorance, hatred, bigotry and apathy. These we know were the seedbed of the Holocaust, the most brutal collapse of our civilization.
Dr. Vigod was Jewish, and his vigilance to ensure a vibrant civil society was expressed on two levels, a particularist one and a universalist one. This is reflective of the duality of the Hebrew scriptures themselves, and of Jewish faith and culture as it exists and has existed for so many thousands of years.
At the particularist level, Dr. Vigod was driven by the conviction, earlier expressed by Hannah Arendt, that anti-Semitism is an outrage to common sense. A man of reason and compassion, he felt compelled to respond to that outrage whenever and wherever it threatened. It is his work and efforts in the Atlantic Jewish Council, and the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith which forced New Brunswick society to come to grips with the issue of anti-Semitism resurgent among us. It is thanks to Dr. Vigod that finally we are moving to silence the hate-mongers in our midst. It is thanks to Dr. Vigod that the study of the Holocaust will/has become an integral part of the New Brunswick school curriculum so that the youth of this province will have an opportunity to confront and wrestle with the issue that calamitous event raises.
The fight against fear, ignorance, hatred, bigotry and apathy is not a particularly Jewish one. It is a human and universal one. Dr. Vigod believed that in a society such as ours, built on the language and culture of two peoples, yet open and receptive to that of many peoples, and understanding of, and an openness to those two cultures is an obligation of each citizen. The universalist level of Dr. Vigod’s vigilance was expressed in his commitment to bilingualism and biculturalism. At the University of New Brunswick, and even more strongly within the local school system, Dr. Vigod fought to ensure that future generations of pupils and students would participate naturally and as of right in the wealth of those two cultures, equally in our two languages, English and French.
At both the universalist and the particularist levels, Dr. Vigod was passionate of conviction, uncompromising of principle, articulate of speech. He was a fighter, a formidable foe – but a generous one. For his goal was not to defeat and vanquish for its own sake, but to convince and convert to his vision of a more humane civil society.
In his short study entitled The Historian’s Craft Marc Bloch, an historian, a Frenchman and a Jew, in a striking passage wrote: “I am an historian. Therefore I love life”. Bernie Vigod loved life. The greatest tribute that could be given to him is for each of us to go out and love life as he did.
Several people gathered together after Dr. Bernie Vigod’s untimely death to wrestle with the question of how to go about carrying on Dr. Vigod’s work. They are called the Friends of Bernie Vigod. The instrument they fashioned to keep Dr. Vigod a living presence in our midst was the establishment of the Dr. Bernie Vigod Memorial Lecture Trust Fund. The proceeds of this fund make possible an annual lecture series known as the Dr. Bernie Vigod Memorial Lecture Series in Human Rights organized by the Atlantic Human Rights Centre. The lecture series is intended to further the cause of human rights in our society, the objective to which Dr. Bernie Vigod dedicated so much of his life. It is our tribute to him, and in a mysterious way his legacy to us – for Dr. Vigod continues after his death, as during his life, to galvanize others to action.