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Gene Knudsen Hoffman - Quaker, ardent pacifist, and artist - died on July 19, 2010, at home in Santa Barbara, California. She was 91. The daughter of Danish immigrants, Hoffman was encouraged at an early age to pursue her passion for acting, and she held diat career through the 1960s.

She became a committed pacifist in 1951, when, with her husband Hallock, she joined the Orange Grove Quaker Meeting in Pasadena. For the next 60 years, Hoffman was a peacemaker yet not one to mince words: she was regularly embroiled in controversy over her strong anti-war and communitybuilding statements.

Hoffman lost a job due to an article supporting the United Nations published in a newspaper that did not. She protested the loyalty oath in Pasadena, and as a result, the municipality removed it as a requirement for property owners. And she sent her seven children to integrated schools well before desegregation was popular. For this last act, she was given a column in the African- American newspaper, The Amsterdam News, the first white journalist provided this distinction.

Hoffman is most widely known for her development of die tools of "compassionate listening" and the organization she founded around this principle, The Compassionate Listening Project, whose slogan is "An enemy is one whose story we have not heard." She was also an active member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation for over a half-century, working on FOR international outreach projects in both the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, including the Forbidden Faces and the Seeds of Hope projects. She also worked with FOR in 1982 to organize a series of peace activities in New York City during the United Nations' second disarmament conference.

A book of Hoffman's work, Compassionate Listening and Other Writings, edited by Anthony Manousos, was published in 2004...

- Gene Knudsen Hoffman

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