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Deborah Levine
My Cousin Deb:
Response to Pulse article by Rita Crevoshay
I’ve known my cousin Deb since we were in diapers. After all, she’s my first cousin. I should clarify that – Deb was my cousin from Bermuda. I’ve never been there but as a child I regarded it as an outpost of the cultural elite. That was validated by her distinctive British-influenced speech, not exactly a British accent, but nearly so. According to my youthful perception, as an authentic British colonial Bermudian, she had a leg up on us provincial Bostonians.
Deb always conducted herself with a refined tranquility that concealed her brilliance. We were in proximity when she enrolled at Radcliffe (Harvard) at a time when I still lived in Greater Boston. The young woman’s serious approach to her studies distinguished her as a potential future leader, despite her diffident self-presentation.
After years of distance I reconnected with Deb as mature adults. She had reinvented herself as the publisher of the American Diversity Report. This evidenced a maturation of her consciousness as a specialist in the ancient Jewish mandate of Tikkun Olam, our responsibility to repair the world. Diversity and its proliferation and maintenance had only recently arrived on the social agenda of America as a legitimate issue. Deb fashioned a forum in which writers could project their diversity issues into the sphere of public scrutiny. Her determined efforts have since manifested a following of personal, institutional, community, and corporate subscribers. Deb’s management style is quiet and calculating. A casual observer might assume that nothing is happening. Meanwhile she proceeds with thoughtful intent, seeking irrefutable results that override theatrical impressions.
Deb is governed by an elevated sensitivity to ethical justice. The Holocaust and its consequential influence on our generation (boomers) is an obligatory and recurrent theme. Its relevance is permanent. Uncovering her dad’s role in Holocaust discovery and recovery was a revelation to her. During the early stages of participation in World War II, the Unted States government was challenged to create effective intelligence service on both fronts. Camp Ritchie in Maryland was chosen as the venue for training youthful Jewish refugees, to serve as interrogators of Nazi POWs. Deb’s dad, Aaron Levine was a native of the USA and did not have a German speaking background, but had sufficient experience with the language at Harvard to qualify. He brought the perspective and experience of an American Jew and wrote detailed letters about his tour in occupied Germany to his wife, Estelle, but withheld his wartime exploits from others, including his children.
Decades later Deb discovered and read the letters. Aaron’s writing about the liberated concentration camps brought Holocaust reality to life. It brought Deb into intimate contact with the failure of humanity to recognize its most basic obligation to itself – to live and let live. It installed brutality and abandonment of compassion as a human behavioral norm. It awakened her to a duty to expose the public to a reality so horrific that deniability accompanied it. She reinvented herself as a Holocaust witness.
If Holocaust remembrance started to show symptoms of decline and decay by the 2020s, it experienced apocalyptic renewal in 2023. My generation typically viewed the Holocaust as history, a one-off event of the 20th century embedded in a world war. We couldn’t conceive of a replay, not in our lifetime. Deb’s prescience was validated on October 7, 2023, when Hamas duplicated a page from the Nazi playbook and brutally murdered infants, children, elderly, raped and mutilated dozens of women and girls, killed adults, wounded thousands, and captured hundreds of hostages. Hamas had grabbed the Nazi baton and enthusiastically reinitiated the Juden Mord. Deb was present at this moment of reckoning.
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I’m honored by my cousin’s words and motivated more than ever to carry on with all that I do: keynote speaker, opinion columnist with the local newspaper, Editor-in-Chief of the American Diversity Report, author of 20 book with the 21st on the way:
Battlefield Dispatches from the Culture Wars:
Building Bridges through Constructive Conversations
by Carlos E. Cortés and Deborah Levine
- The Pulse Magazine: Interviewing Deborah Levine - September 11, 2026
- Town Square Back with Center Reopened – by Deborah Levine - September 10, 2026
- Veteran Venita Thomas Podcast – Lessons Learned and Shared - September 7, 2026