Please see Prof. Eric Bockstael's eulogy and the obituary from the Detroit Free Press, January 20, 2004 reprinted below
 

OTTO FEINSTEIN: PROFESSOR CHAMPIONED PEACE, JUSTICE

Jeanne May
Edition: METRO FINAL
Page: 5B

Otto Feinstein, who escaped the Nazis to become a professor at Wayne State University and a tireless worker for peace, civil rights and labor justice, died of esophageal cancer Dec. 30 at his apartment on the Wayne State campus in Detroit.

He was 73 and a founder of the university's Center for Peace and Conflict Studies.

"When I was in grad school, I used to work very closely with him," Anthony Perry, a former Wayne State professor, said Monday. "Once, we had been in there 21 days in a row. He said, 'Take a long weekend next weekend, and that will help us recover.'

"We'd all need about 10 lifetimes to do what he did."

Indeed. He was a founder of the Center for Chicano Boricua Studies, the College of Lifelong Learning and the Distance Learning Television Program, all at Wayne State.

When droves of autoworkers lost their jobs in the early 1980s, he created and ran the Communication/Information System for the Unemployed. Under his program, thousands of workers went back to school to learn new skills.

He founded a Wayne State employment project for people released from prisons and won an award for it from the chief justice of the United States in 1986. And he developed the Michigan Ethnic Heritage Studies Center in Detroit.

His reach far exceeded his Detroit campus.

He founded the International Institute for Policy, Practice and Education of Adults, with branches in Detroit and Belgium. He worked for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the Inter-University Centre at Dubrovnik, Croatia, and the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

He also founded and published the Journal of Ethno-Development.

He returned to the United States to serve in the Army during the Korean War.

In 1960, he got a job teaching at Monteith College, an experimental school at Wayne State. The college gathered students who worked together for four years in a community setting. When Monteith closed in 1974, Mr. Feinstein moved to Wayne State's Political Science Department, where he taught until his death.

In 1965, he received a doctorate from the University of Chicago.

Active in Michigan politics, he was a Democratic precinct delegate and Michigan chair for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 1968.

He developed a program to get youth involved in political life, called the Youth Urban Agenda/Civic Literacy Project. Last year, he was cited for the project by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Survivors include two daughters, Sarah and Tamara.

A memorial service will be at 3 p.m. Monday at Wayne State's General Lecture Hall, 5405 Anthony Wayne Drive. More information is on the Web at www.urbanagenda.wayne.edu. Arrangements are by the Ira Kaufman Chapel, Southfield.

The family suggests memorial donations to the Holocaust Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW, Washington, DC 20024.