David Williams personifies two grand American traditions: selfless service and being a pain in the neck.
The service comes daily in the $144 million monstrosity called the Harold Washington Library Center, as a reference librarian in the social sciences and history division. Besides helping users-sometimes with the disastrous computerized reference system-he is partly responsible for ordering books and periodicals on the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Being a pain in the neck arises from his regular pronouncements that many institutions around him, including the Chicago Public Library system (“the Cook County Hospital of public libraries”), the U.S. government, his professional association and his union, come up short.
In particular, there’s the government and the association-and their views toward Israel.
Williams contends that Israel has gotten away with rampant censorship in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, banning what he claims are nearly 4,000 books, including plays of Shakespeare and fiction by Jack London, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and J.R.R. Tolkien.
That’s why he crafted a resolution, passed at the American Library Association’s 1992 annual meeting in San Francisco, that rebuked Israeli censorship and accused the Israelis of human-rights violations.
It was a notable move. But it was revoked at this year’s convention in New Orleans. The Village Voice, the New York alternative weekly, detailed the attendant hoopla in its July 27 issue, reporting that one Jewish librarian was less than pleasant upon spotting Williams at the convention. “I’d like to kill the little (expletive),” the paper quoted the librarian as saying in a reference to Williams’ parentage.
The association’s members backed a decision by its ruling council to revoke the 1992 resolution. “We were overwhelmed,” said Williams, citing an effective lobbying effort by the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League against what it deemed an unfair, anti-Israeli resolution.
“David Williams is viewed as arrogant, a zealot and an anti-Semite by some,” said one official of the library association who is no fan of Williams. “To others, he’s simply doing what he thinks is right and what he should be doing. It was the will of the membership that we’d been used by one individual to pursue his personal political agenda.”
Williams has similarly been out front in arguing convincingly against a dismal level of funding for the Chicago Public Library and the cutting of library hours, as well as in fending off the Anti-Defamation League’s furor over a library bibliography he assembled on the Palestinian conflict. The list comprised 147 books and drew kudos from academics, including scholars who relied on it at the University of Chicago.
The league was upset, calling the list too pro-Palestinian. For a brief period, the library hierarchy capitulated, telling Williams to add several dozen titles the league desired. Sun-Times columnist Dennis Byrne, a lively and resolute upholder of tradition (some 16th Century), gave the spat some attention, and others joined the fray, siding with Byrne against league pressure. The library relented, though getting Williams to add a few titles to the league’s liking.
Why should anybody have been interested in any of this?
“It’s the first time a large mainstream professional association sharply criticized Israeli policies,” said Williams. “That was taken seriously by the Israeli lobby and the (Anti-Defamation League). This country is giving Israel upwards of $4 billion a year, and they’re denying Palestinians their basic rights.”
“This country is in crisis, with libraries closing and roads decaying, and here we’re giving billions to help run what’s basically an apartheid regime on the West Bank.”
Clearly, Williams, 43, does not fit the stereotype of the bespectacled matron librarian with Stepford Wife smile instructing kiddies about where to find the National Geographic, or of a young nerd librarian dreaming of a soulful evening with a milkshake and Byte magazine.
He’s a native of Janesville, Wis., and of “heterogeneous Midwestern stock-Welsh, French-Canadian, German, English and Scotch-Irish” who recalls being such a precocious reader he digested William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” when he was 8.
He was big in anti-Vietnam War protests at the University of Wisconsin. After graduation, he joined a Marxist group and did political organizing in Atlanta, later earning a master’s degree in history from Georgia State University and a library degree from Emory University.
He’s founder of an annual Midwest Radical Scholars and Activists Conference, held at Loyola University’s Lakeshore campus (the next one is in late October), and started the library system’s “Society in Focus” lecture series. The latter included a symposium on Black Panther Fred Hampton, the title of which was changed, allegedly upon pressure from the city, to “The Death of Fred Hampton” from “The Assassination of Fred Hampton.” His programming activities have been curtailed by his bosses.
Though his unceasing quest to exhibit what he calls “civic courage” includes membership in the New Party of Chicago, an attempt at a new national party, he engages in other pursuits and relationships, albeit with mixed success.
He has been married twice, “briefly, when I was 25 and 35.” Those alliances “were entered into only half-seriously, which was why they didn’t last.” A recent liaison with a “liberal-progressive immigration attorney” went down the tubes, at her initiative, and caused him much emotional pain.
Adding injury to insult, he just returned in physical pain from a climbing accident during a vacation in the Rockies. That’s the peril of being an urban outdoorsman, one who usually rides his bike 8 miles from his Rogers Park apartment to work. He’s even agitating to force the library to let employees park bikes inside so they don’t get stolen.
But lest one think he’s a knee-jerk man of the Left, willing to justify aberrant behavior as the logical result of societal ills, be informed that this true believer can sound as tough as an Israeli cop on the West Bank when it comes to the all-too-prevalent breaking of library rules.
“We have a serious problem with non-returned books and those that are stolen,” he says in an understatement akin to declaring that Somalia has a shortage of fresh produce.
“I’d like to see a system whereby someone with a book delinquent more than six weeks would go into some database whereby they couldn’t get their driver’s license renewed or couldn’t pay their water bill; some more effective enforcement mechanism than we have.”
“I’m tired,” said the seemingly tireless activist, “of telling people that the book that’s supposed to be on the shelf ain’t on the shelf.”
Weinstein’s out of luck
It’s time for Vulture Watch, a check with made-for-TV movie bigshots about what they plan to rip off next from the news:
I assumed the saga of Harvey Weinstein, that ex-Marine-turned-New-York-tuxedo-mogul-turned-buried-alive-kidnap-victim-for-1 3-days-in-an-extortion-scheme, was a no-brainer. Get Martin Landau to play Weinstein, and Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen and Rosie Perez to play the slimeballs who tried to pull off the extortion.
I’m apparently wrong.
“It’s a guy in a hole,” said a Made-for-TV Very Bigshot Thursday. “We’ve had a few inquiries on it. But will it sustain two hours? I doubt it.”
Gilman comes into its own
Jim Tilmon, weatherman for NBC-owned WMAQ-Ch. 5, continued his unintentional geographical quiz Thursday by informing us that bad weather was about to hit Gilman, Ill.
Gilman?
It’s 30 miles south of Kankakee and has 1,900 citizens. Anything else?
“Three truck stops right off the highway,” said Rush Brook, a dispatcher for the Iroquois County sheriff who confirmed that, yes, bad weather was on the way.
