by PATRICK LEJTENYI

When Lillian Robinson, the 65-year-old principal of Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute, died of ovarian cancer last week, Montreal’s activist community felt the loss more keenly than most. A doyenne of Montreal’s left, and a mother-figure to many students, Robinson was one of the few Concordia administrators to back the more radical elements among the university’s often rowdy, and often despised, student population. Her passing, says Chadi Marouf, a Montreal Palestinian-rights activist, “leaves a great space that will be very hard to fill.”

Robinson was born in New York City in 1941 to Jewish immigrant parents and turned to political activism while studying at Brown University. She joined the U.S. civil rights movement, taking part in the March on Washington in 1963, joined the Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia while pursuing graduate studies and demonstrated against the Vietnam War. A noted feminist, Marxist, academic, mystery buff and Wonder Woman fan, her commitments to social justice and human rights, say friends and relations, continued until her death.

In 2000, she, along with Scott Weinstein, Abbie Weizfeld and Bob Silverman, founded the Jewish Alliance Against the Occupation, a group of Montreal Jews who regularly protested Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and participated in the weekly silent vigil outside Israel’s Montreal consulate. “In between [cancer] treatments, she’d come to meetings, go to demos, attend the Friday vigils,” says Weinstein, who says that almost until the very end, she remained aware and interested in politics and gossip.

Although not a Zionist, says Weinstein, Robinson embraced her Jewish heritage. “I had a lot of fun talking about Jewish humour with her,” he says. “At the drop of a hat she’d break into Yiddish and make a joke.”

Robinson’s commitment to her students was also legendary, say those close to her. When Concordia was rocked by the riot sparked by the planned visit of former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in September 2002, Robinson defended the students’ actions and offered them academic refuge after the university’s administration tried to expel them. She’d regularly invite her students into her home, and, says Weinstein, provided a floor for protesters arriving surreptitiously from the U.S. prior to the 2001 anti-FTAA protests in Quebec City.

“Whenever you’d go to the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, she’d always have a smile or give you a hug if you were down,” says David Bernans, who included Robinson as a character in his Concordia-based novel North of 9/11. “If anyone had trouble, they’d go to Lillian and she’d try to help.”

When asked what Robinson’s defining characteristic was, all agree that she loved to talk. And talk. And talk. “Lillian was always happy to give the long version,” says her nephew Greg Robinson, a UQÀM history professor. “But there was more to her than meets the ear.”

At her funeral on Friday dozens of former students and Montreal activists attended to pay their respects. “I wasn’t going to invite anyone, but at the funeral 50 people showed up, on one day’s notice and by word-of-mouth. She was only here for six years,” says Greg Robinson. “I felt a mixture of shock, but it was also very elegiac that here was a visible sense of the legacy she left.”

Robinson is survived by her brother, two sisters, two nephews and her son. Concordia is setting up a Lillian Robinson Scholars Fund to bring distinguished feminist scholars to the university. There will be a memorial service on Nov. 12 at 2p.m. at Concordia’s Loyola Chapel (7141 Sherbrooke W.) For more info call 848-2424 x2370.