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In the 10 years since Sid’s death, we have lived through many terrible threats to our safety and well-being: a world-wide pandemic which necessitated two years of lockdown, catastrophic turns in climate change that threaten our existence as we have known it, challenges to our democracy, and now the cataclysm in the Middle East. In his November 2014 eulogy Sid’s son David said: “I believe my dad’s deepest identification was his Judaism. He was neither outwardly religious nor a Jewish scholar, but he had an intimate connection to the people and land of Israel. He traveled to Israel more than a dozen times and taught at virtually every university there. Israel was his second home, both professionally and personally. Not surprisingly, his identity as a Jew was bound up in his relationship with a Jewish community.”
In keeping with the idea of face-to-face dialogue, panim al panim, we feel it is important to mention Sid’s love of righteous justice (mitzpat Tzedek). As far back as 1993, in the first Clinton administration, this love of righteous justice led Sid to be upset at the torpedoing of the nomination of Lani Guinier to be attorney general. Civil rights and human rights truly mattered to Sid. We imagine he would have extended that to Palestinians no less to Jews. As we experience these events we have carried Sid forward in our minds, reaffirming his progressive values and commitment to democracy, his dedication to the humanizing and enlightening influence of the arts and humanities, his belief that psychoanalysis is a body of knowledge that can be empirically affirmed and that will survive and flourish through a combination of theory and research. The recent development of the Department of Psychoanalytic Research (DPE) at the American Psychoanalytic Association as well as other developments in the field (Sandler research institute) are inspired by Sid’s tireless efforts in this direction.
We would be remiss if we did not highlight in closing Sid’s tremendous skill as