Necrology: Charles S. Liebman (1934-2003)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 672–676 Necrology Charles S. Liebman (1934–2003) RIV-ELLEN PRELL CHARLES LIEBMAN, one of the most distinguished social scientists of the Jewish 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 Jewish 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 Jewish 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 Jewish History 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.’’1 1. ‘‘A Perspective on My Studies of American Jews,’’ American Jewish History 80 (summer 1991): 517. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. CHARLES S. LIEBMAN (1934–2003)—PRELL 673 Liebman’s early work was devoted to the study of Orthodox Judaism in America. In articles that appeared in 1964 in Judaism and Tradition, he laid out both an approach to and perspective on Orthodox life in America that were exceptionally significant. In 1965 he expanded these publications into a single article, ‘‘Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life,’’ which became the first of several of his important essays to appear in the American Jewish Year Book. Liebman accomplished two significant things in his work on Orthodoxy . First, he established precise sociological methods for the study of a religious movement. Thus, he focused on the institutional growth of the movement and quantified the number of synagogues that existed and the likely number of Jews who actively participated as Orthodox Jews. Today, these matters are self-evident; in the early 1960s they were not. Liebman demonstrated, among other things, that the Orthodox leadership had made exaggerated claims for the number of Jews who were part of their denomination. More importantly, he demonstrated that Orthodox Judaism, contrary to popular conceptions, was a vital and successful form of American Judaism . He argued, as he did on many other occasions, that Orthodoxy succeeded precisely because it set boundaries between Judaism and the larger American society. Drawing on the classic sociological distinction between church and sect, he asserted that Orthodox Judaism was increasingly sectarian and rejected the churchlike accommodations of pre– World War II American Orthodoxy. Its sectarianism was its strength, but Liebman also noted a concern for the lack of self-criticism that grew out of it. His first major work, therefore, not only mapped and analyzed institutional life in order to explain Jewish religious vitality in the United States but also incorporated a prescient critique of the challenges that Orthodox Judaism would come to face. Liebman developed his analysis of Jewish institutions in additional essays for the American Jewish Year Book on the training...