Necrology: Charles S. Liebman (1934-2003)

Abstract

CHARLES LIEBMAN, one of the most distinguished social scientists of the people, died suddenly on September 3, 2003, in his sixtyninth year. Over the last forty years Liebman significantly shaped socialscience inquiry into both American and Israeli Jews and Judaism. He wrote and edited fourteen books and well over a hundred articles. Though this necrology will focus on his contributions to the study of American Jews, his impact was equally profound on the study of Israel and on comparative studies. Liebman was educated in New York and spent his last three years of high school in Israel at the Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv. He completed his B.A. in economics at the University of Miami and received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from the University of Illinois. He began his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960 with an interest in suburban politics. But his interest in life led to a dramatic turn in his career when in 1963 he took a position at Yeshiva University. In 1969 he and his family moved to Israel, where he founded the department of political science at Bar-Ilan University, from which he retired in 2002. He continued to teach intermittently in the United States as a visiting professor at, among other institutions, Yale University, the University of Chicago, Brown University, and the Theological Seminary of America. Liebman became a pioneer in the study of American Jews and Judaism. He worked with Marshall Sklare, his senior colleague and teacher in this enterprise both at Yeshiva University and in establishing the field. In 1991, when the Journal of American Jewvish Hitory devoted a portion of an issue to his scholarship, he declared himself less a scholar of a particular discipline than simply one associated with Jewish studies.'