I was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1950. My parents were non-religious Jews who attended shul on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. My father was a shoe salesman. My mother, a legal secretary, gave up working outside the home to take care of my brother and me. A loving, laissez-faire parent, she enrolled me in what she thought was a Hebrew school to prepare me for my bar mitzvah haftorah. I was a dutiful kid and never missed a class.
My mother – who always signed my public school report cards without looking at my grades – asked whether I was doing my best but never inquired about what I was learning at Hebrew school until a few months before my bar mitzvah. Then, with the rite of passage approaching, she asked me how well my Hebrew was coming along. I told her I wasn’t learning Hebrew.
She investigated further and discovered that, by mistake, she had enrolled me in the Workman’s Circle, an organization committed to socialist doctrine and the Yiddish language. She quickly switched me to the synagogue school, where I hustled to learn my haftorah and a smattering of Hebrew from Rabbi Lipshitz.
I attended Brooklyn College – a commuter school with a fine reputation – because it did not charge any tuition, and I worked 32 hours a week in a clothing store in an Italian neighborhood, owned by two wonderful Jewish brothers-in-law. A large “Army-Navy” store, occupying half a block, it sold dress clothes and work clothes, including Department of Sanitation uniforms, and employed a tailor, Jake Rabinowitz, to hem the open bottoms for “garbagemen” who would swoop in on their lunch breaks and were eager to jump on their trucks and get back to work.
A professor of American history, Abraham Eisenstadt, became a mentor, and I decided I wanted to do what he did. Following his suggestion “Don’t be the Jewish boy who never left New York City,” I applied to and was accepted to Cornell University, located in Ithaca, a small town in upstate New York, for my PhD. In a strange coincidence, the store at which my father worked as a salesman was called Cornell Shoes. I kept in touch with Prof. Eisenstadt, whom I adored, and gave the eulogy at his memorial service.
When I began my doctoral work, I felt that I was less well prepared than my fellow graduate students, who had attended Ivy League institutions as undergraduates. And so, I resolved to read at least 100 pages of something every day. I have kept that vow to this day. It helps explain why I became a book reviewer.
Getting into the book world
MY DISSERTATION and first book was a biography of Andrew D. White, the first president of Cornell, who after his resignation in 1885, served as minister to Russia and criticized pogroms. As I was finishing my PhD, I taught at Ithaca College for a few years before returning to Cornell in 1981 as an administrator (assistant and then associate dean for advising and alumni affairs), and a few years later as a professor of American studies (and a member of the Jewish Studies Program).
In 1991, I was appointed dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions, a position I held for 29 years. I was honored with an endowed chair in 1998. I also served as vice president for University Relations at Cornell. Throughout my long administrative career, I continued to teach, research, write, and serve as an adviser and mentor to undergraduates, some of whom have become like family to me.
In addition to large lecture courses for undergraduates on American history and popular culture (and a seminar on Baseball in American Culture), I have taught many short not-for-credit courses to Cornell alumni on the campus, around the country, and the world (such as theater in New York City and London; a history of Las Vegas and gambling in Las Vegas; rock ‘n’ roll and gospel music in Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee). I also taught a course for alumni on The American-Jewish Experience. I have given lectures in Hong Kong, China, Italy, Russia, and, of course, in Israel (at the University of Haifa and at the US Embassy, then located in Tel Aviv).
I have authored or co-authored 12 books. Some of these books are pretty good, such as All Shook Up: How Rock ‘n’ Roll Changed America; Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the 19th Century; The G.I. Bill: A New Deal for Veterans; Ten Great American Trials; The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn: and An American Story; Cornell: A History, 1940-2015. A few of the others are a lot less so.
I have had the good fortune to spend almost all of my professional career at one of the great universities in the world. When I retired last month, I could honestly say that I did not spend a single day there I did not find enjoyable and fulfilling.
ALMOST TWO decades ago, I began to think that a time would come when I would no longer have the stamina to research and write books. So I decided to write book reviews and began writing for The Jerusalem Post in 2006. I also reviewed books for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, and the New York Observer.
More recently, I have written op-eds on higher education – at first with David Skorton, then-president of Cornell, and later with David Wippman, the president of Hamilton College. In the last five years, I have posted weekly opinion pieces on US politics on a platform called The Hill. To date, I have written around 2,000 reviews and op-eds.
I like classical music, first-rate steakhouses, seeing friends, keeping in touch with former students, watching plays on Broadway and at Niagara-on-the Lake in Canada, and walking 10,000 steps a day.
The writer is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.