William B. Helmreich

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William Benno Helmreich (born August 25, 1945 in Zurich ; died March 28, 2020 in Great Neck , New York ) was an American Judaist and sociologist . He was Professor of Sociology at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center at the City University of New York .

Life

William B. Helmreich was born as the son of Leo and Sally (née Finkelstein) Helmreich. The parents were able to flee from occupied Belgium via France before the National Socialists . When Helmreich was one year old, the family emigrated to New York City . His father first worked there as a jeweler and later as a diamond dealer .

He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attended an Orthodox yeshiva as a school there. Helmreich first studied at Yeshiva University and earned a doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis .

William B. Helmreich died in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic of the consequences of a SARS-CoV-2 infection in his house in Great Neck at the age of 74. He left a wife, two sons and a daughter. Another son had died in 1998.

Act

Helmreich was the author of 18 books. The subjects and areas of interest he covered have been labeled eclectic, including, for example, racial relations, Orthodox Judaism , urban life, New York, and the Holocaust.

With his 1973 book The Black Crusaders: A Case Study of a Black Militant Organization , he dealt with the militant black group of the Black Crusaders, which was active in the late 1960s. It had been developed from his dissertation .

In The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portrait of Orthodox Judaism (1982) he also addressed his own youth and religious background as an Orthodox Jew.

For his work Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America , William Helmrich received the National Jewish Book Award in 1993. In this work Helmreich examines the group of around 140,000 Jews who survived the Holocaust and settled in the United States and compares them with the Jews who previously lived in the United States. In the book, which is rich in data and supported by numerous interviews, he comes to the conclusion that the immigrant survivors tend to be more professionally successful and satisfied and have more stable marriages. He attributes this to skills learned through survival.

In the book What Was I Thinking ?: The Dumb Things We Do and How to Avoid Them , published in 2011, Helmreich dealt with widespread wrong decisions and the reasons for these mistakes.

In 2013 Helmreich's book The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City was published . In this book, he processed walks to every block of New York City from 2008 to 2012. Helmreich was inspired to write this book through walks with his father. Publishers Weekly found the book came close to the ideal of "delivering everything you wanted to know but didn't know how to ask". The narrative is sometimes very meandering, but this is appropriate because the author wants to describe a Balkanized city. This book was supplemented by The Manhattan Nobody Knows: An Urban Walking Guide and The Brooklyn Nobody Knows 2017, in which he further describes walking in these parts of the city. At the time of his death, Helmreich was finishing the supplementary volume for Staten Island .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g William Helmreich, Sociologist and a Walker in the City, Dies at 74 , New York Times, March 30, 2020.
  2. ↑ a b Uriel Heilman: William Helmreich, sociologist of US Jewry and inveterate New Yorker, dies of coronavirus , Jewish Telegraphic Agency of March 30, 2020.
  3. ^ Chaim I. Waxman, The Black Crusaders: A Case Study of a Black Militant Organization (book review), American Journal of Sociology Volume 81, Number 6 (May 1976).
  4. ^ A b Steve Lipman, William Helmreich, 75, Who Knew New York Block by Block , The New York Jewish Week, March 30, 2020.
  5. ^ Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America , Publishers Weekly, August 31, 1992.
  6. ↑ The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City , Publishers Weekly, October 1, 2013.
  7. ↑ Anna Sturla, A sociologist known for walking every block of New York City has died of coronavirus , CNN April 1, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Helmreich, William B.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Helmreich, William Benno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sociologist and Judaist
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich , Switzerland
DATE OF DEATH March 28, 2020
Place of death Great Neck , New York , United States