Samuel C. Heilman
American sociologist of Orthodox Judaism at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. With Menachem M. Friedman he wrote The Rebbe (2010), a critical biography of Menachem Mendel Schneerson that Chabad critics attacked.
| Samuel C. Heilman | |
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| Died | |
| Nationality | American |
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| Occupation | Sociologist; Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Queens College, and Emeritus Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies, Graduate Center, City University of New York |
| Known for | The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (2010, with Menachem M. Friedman); Who Will Lead Us? (2017) |
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| Education | BA, Brandeis University; MA, New School for Social Research; PhD, University of Pennsylvania (all in sociology) |
| Predecessor | |
| Website | samuelheilman.com |
Samuel C. Heilman is an American sociologist of Orthodox and Haredi Judaism. Queens College lists him as "Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College and Emeritus Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies, Graduate Center of the City University of New York".[1] With the Israeli sociologist Menachem M. Friedman he wrote The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Princeton University Press, 2010), a biography of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe.[2] The book won a National Jewish Book Award.[3] It also drew sustained criticism from Chabad-Lubavitch spokesmen and scholars, who disputed both its facts and its overall thesis.[4][5]
Career
Heilman studied sociology at Brandeis University, the New School for Social Research and the University of Pennsylvania.[6] He began teaching at Queens College in 1973. He has said: "Except for sabbaticals and Fulbrights, I've spent basically my entire career at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center."[6] The college's profile describes him as "One of the world's leading sociologists of orthodox Judaism". It records that he edited the journal Contemporary Jewry and received the Marshall Sklare Memorial Award of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry for "a lifetime of scholarship".[6] His visiting posts have included a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem, the Scheinbrun Visiting Professorship of Sociology at the Hebrew University and Fulbright posts in Australia, China and Poland.[7] According to his own website, he retired in 2020 and is now a Library Fellow at the Polonsky Library of the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.[8]
His earlier books deal with synagogue life, Haredi Judaism, mourning and the American Orthodox community. They include Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry (1992), When a Jew Dies (2001) and Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy.[8]
Work on Chabad
The Rebbe (2010)
In the preface to The Rebbe, Heilman and Friedman say the book "actually began in Chicago during the early 1990s". At that time both were working on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Fundamentalism Project, led by Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, and both were "independently researching the Lubavitcher Hasidim and their Rebbe". Their "thoughts came together in Accounting for Fundamentalisms in 1994". In the summer of 2007 they decided to write a joint book.[2] The authors describe a lasting disagreement between them: "One of us was convinced that the Lubavitcher phenomenon needed to be understood as profoundly affected by its American context, the other was no less powerfully persuaded that it needed to be seen through the prism of Jewish and Israeli realities." They wrote the book at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University, in a research group headed by David Assaf.[9]
The book's central argument is that Lubavitcher messianism grew from the fifth Rebbe, through the sixth, to "a climax with the seventh". Schneerson's followers, it says, "also became convinced that their rebbe was the redeemer incarnate".[10] Heilman said that the subject "was not always going to be the rebbe", and that Lubavitchers "just can't accept that he transformed himself".[5] The New York Times reported that the authors "did not have access to Chabad's private archives".[5]
Other work
Who Will Lead Us? The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America (2017) studies leadership and succession in five Hasidic groups. Its last case-study chapter is "ChaBaD Lubavitch: A Rebbe Who Never Dies".[3] Heilman is also one of the eight authors of Hasidism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2018).[11]
Reception and Chabad criticism of The Rebbe
Reviewing the book in the Jewish Journal, Michael Berenbaum called Heilman and Friedman "the two most distinguished sociologists of contemporary Orthodox Judaism" and wrote: "They have done an admirable job."[12] In Modern Judaism, Nehemia Polen was more critical. He argued that the authors had taken apart the personality cult around Schneerson but had neglected his inner religious life.[13]
Chabad's response was hostile. Before publication, Sue Fishkoff reported in J., the Jewish news weekly of Northern California, that "Lubavitchers are ripping into it, disputing its details as well as its overall thesis". Critics said that Schneerson "never trimmed his beard in Europe, he rolled it", and that he "attended synagogue regularly in Berlin".[4] Heilman replied: "We never question the future Rebbe's knowledge of Chabad or even his interest in it ... But as we document, that interest was not always the center of his concerns while he pursued his engineering studies."[4] According to the New York Times, the Lubavitch spokesman Zalman Shmotkin labelled the authors' speculations "psychobabble". He said they had put "themselves in the rebbe's head while ignoring his deeply expressive correspondence and his scholarly approach".[5] The paper also reported that Steven I. Weiss of the Jewish Channel criticised the authors "for not noting outright that Mr. Friedman served as an expert witness against the rebbe during a lawsuit in the 1980s over ownership of the Chabad library". Heilman answered: "We have no ax to grind."[5] (Neither published judgment in that case, Agudas Chasidei Chabad v. Gourary, names Friedman.)[14]
The most detailed Chabad-side critique came from Rabbi Chaim Rapoport. He describes himself as "a disciple of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe".[15] His review first appeared on the Seforim Blog on 14 June 2010. Heilman and Friedman published a response there, and Rapoport a rejoinder.[16] He expanded the exchange into a book, The Afterlife of Scholarship (2011). In it he argues that "the errors in Heilman's and Friedman's work are so fundamental and pervasive that they actually serve to disqualify this work as a serious historical or biographical document".[17]
Use on Powerbase
The Rebbe is a main secondary source for several pages in the Chabad series:
- Menachem Mendel Schneerson
- Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn
- Shalom Dovber Schneersohn
- Chabad messianism
- Chabad-Lubavitch timeline
- the book's own page, The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Where Chabad writers dispute a point, these pages set Rapoport's or Chaim Miller's account beside it and label it Chabad-side. On the Menachem Mendel Schneerson page, for example, Miller's rejection of their reading of the Berlin and Paris years appears next to it.
Works
- Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry. New York: Schocken Books, 1992. ISBN 0-8052-4095-0.
- When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.
- (with Menachem M. Friedman) The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-691-13888-6 (hardback); paperback 2012, ISBN 978-0-691-15442-8.
- Who Will Lead Us? The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-520-27723-6.
- (with David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv and Marcin Wodziński) Hasidism: A New History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018 (published December 2017). ISBN 978-0-691-17515-7.
See also
- Menachem M. Friedman
- The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson
- Chabad messianism
References
- ↑ "Faculty", Jewish Studies Program, Queens College, City University of New York. Institutional source.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Heilman and Friedman, The Rebbe (2010), Preface, p. xvi.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Who Will Lead Us? The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America, University of California Press, book page (table of contents and author note). Publisher's page.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Sue Fishkoff, "Seeking the real rebbe: New books about Schneerson aim to separate man from myth", J. The Jewish News of Northern California, 28 May 2010. Press.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Patricia Cohen, "Rabbi's Biography Disturbs Followers", The New York Times, 14 June 2010 (corrected 17 June 2010). Press.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "Faculty Profile: Samuel Heilman", Queens College Communications & Marketing. Institutional source.
- ↑ "Professor Samuel C. Heilman: Bio and Links", CUNY Academic Commons, 19 October 2018. Self-published (author's own page).
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Samuel C. Heilman — Sociologist & Author", author's website. Self-published.
- ↑ Heilman and Friedman, The Rebbe (2010), Preface, pp. xvi–xvii.
- ↑ Samuel C. Heilman and Menachem M. Friedman, The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010 (paperback 2012), Preface, p. xv.
- ↑ Hasidism: A New History, Princeton University Press, book page. Publisher's page.
- ↑ Michael Berenbaum, "Book Review: The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson", Jewish Journal, 16 July 2010.
- ↑ Nehemia Polen, review of Heilman and Friedman, The Rebbe, Modern Judaism 34:1 (February 2014), p. 123ff. Only the publisher's extract was read.
- ↑ Agudas Chasidei Chabad of United States v. Gourary, 650 F. Supp. 1463 (E.D.N.Y. 6 January 1987), and 833 F.2d 431 (2d Cir. 17 November 1987). Court records; both refer to expert witnesses but do not name them.
- ↑ Rapoport, The Afterlife of Scholarship (2011), Kindle p. 4 of 197. Chabad-side.
- ↑ "Response and Rejoinder to Chaim Rapoport's The Afterlife of Scholarship", the Seforim Blog, 30 June 2010.
- ↑ Chaim Rapoport, The Afterlife of Scholarship: A Critical Review of 'The Rebbe' by Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman, Oporto Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-615-53897-6, Kindle edition, Kindle p. 3 of 197 ("A Note to the Reader"). Chabad-side.