Mark Hoolihan passed away on August 24, 2019, at the age of 49. I didn’t know him well. He was an adjunct at Kalamazoo College my senior year. I took one class, an evening seminar in Jewish History.
Winter terms at Kalamazoo were rough. I imagine they still are. The college was on quarters (trimesters); the winter term started the first week of January and ran ten weeks, plus exam week. Spring break came after, followed by the spring term. January and February in Michigan are cold and dark. I can remember a February where it snowed two days out of three and the sun never broke through the overcast.
The winter of 2005 I had to overload and take four classes instead of the usual three. I had a political science course (“Modern liberalism and its critics”), Advanced German, French Revolution, and the Jewish History seminar with Hoolihan, which met in the evenings.
I remember long discussions about Shtetl life in Eastern Europe. We definitely read Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem. Watched half of the 1971 Fiddler on the Roof. Watched the grim The Grey Zone. Had discussions about the Holocaust that started with Hoolihan telling all of us: “No saying, I would have done X. You weren’t there, you don’t know.” He pronounced “blood libel” as “blood liBEL” for some reason. I remember him cautioning people against historical determinism–that just because events played out in a certain didn’t mean that they had to play out that way.
We spent a lot of time at the outset discussing definitions of Judaism, a topic even more complex than I’d realized (and I was a college senior, so of course I knew everything). I think it was from Hoolihan that I learned the word chok, a Hebrew word for commandments that you follow even though they have no rational reason.
I remember learning about Gefilte fish, which I’ve steadfastly avoided ever since. He did bring some to class for those who were game. I remember Hoolihan’s outsized and at times bizarre sense of humor. He maintained a humor website, hoolinet.com. It’s gone now, but the Internet Archive remembers.
As I said, I didn’t know him well. I think the seminar met twice a week, in the evenings, over ten weeks. I didn’t have any contact with him afterwards. I can still picture him and hear his voice, and I learned something from him.
Rest in peace, Mark.