Michael Feldberg

Michael Feldberg, an author and historian whose work focused on religious and cultural pluralism in the United States, died on December 4, following injuries from a fall.  He was 81.  He was injured doing exactly what he loved: walking one of his dogs through his community in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Michael was born in Brooklyn in 1943.  He grew up at the intersection of his parents’ old world and post-war America.  Unlike his parents, Michael was born in a hospital, attended kindergarten, and grew up speaking English.  In a secular Jewish village of high-rises around Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway, Michael observed firsthand themes he would study professionally: the complex, ever-changing identities of American Jews.

In Brooklyn, Michael hardly spoke.  1940s biases against his stutter silenced him.  He shed his quiet persona after his family moved East Meadow, Long Island.  Words blossomed into his lifelong strength.  The sarcastic quips that made him infamous in high school, the internal thesaurus that enriched his expansive writing, the drive to toast at any gathering, the habit of completing New York Times crosswords in pen – Michael’s easy facility with words became his hallmark.

When Michael’s mother saw his SAT scores, she applied on his behalf to Cornell University.  Cornell changed his self-conception.  He discovered American history and realized he could become a professor.  He immediately began graduate studies at the University of Rochester.  He had his first experiences with research and archives.  His doctoral thesis would grow into his first published book, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict.  That history of Philadelphia’s public school bible riots launched Michael toward major topics of his work over the next fifty years: religious pluralism and ethical police conduct.

Michael taught at Harvard College, John Jay College, and the University of Massachusetts-Boston, but branched away from fulltime academia.  The 1980s became a period of intellectual versatility.  Michael chaired Boston University Criminal Justice Program; ran a consortium of cultural organizations in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood; trained law enforcement agencies about ethics and the use of force; and co-authored The Vasectomy Book, a decision-making guide for couples.

In 1991, Michael returned to his historical roots.  He became executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society, the nation’s oldest ethnic history organization.  Over the next thirteen years, Michael expanded the archive’s scholarly reach and led AJHS from its home in Massachusetts to the sparkling Center for Jewish History building in Manhattan.  Later, from 2004 to 2008, Michael was AJHS’s director of research.  Then, he began his years-long collaboration with Ambassador John Loeb, starting with the development of The George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom.  When he died, Michael was still the Institute’s executive director.  He never stopped working or writing.  Some projects on the bedrock rights of religious liberty remain, unfinished, on his desk.

Michael married shortly after college.  His first marriage produced a son, Gabriel, in 1970.  After the dissolution of his marriage  in 1977, Michael found his truest love, the former Mary Ruth Malcolmson.  Ruth and Michael married in 1979.  Michael was 36, and suddenly step-father to four adolescent daughters: Tabitha, Sara, Pamela, and Nyssa Matson.  Michael and Ruth established a new family of seven people, seven dogs and cats, and enough plants for a small city’s horticultural society.  Even with a jarring start to being a stepparent, Michael grasped the emotional stakes.  For the next 45 years, his stepdaughters would be his children, and he and Ruth would be each other’s champions.

Michael is survived by Judith, the big sister who understood him best during Michael’s quiet childhood, and five children: Tabitha, Sara, Pamela, and Nyssa Matson; and Gabriel Feldberg.   He had twelve grandchildren – Charlotte, Claudia, Diederik, Elliot, Finn, Lily, Milo, Miranda, Nora, Patrick, Phillip, and Pieter – and three great-grandchildren (Flora, Søren, and Theo).  He played important roles for nieces and nephews, and colleagues who called almost daily.  Ruth Feldberg, the spouse who was the center of his life for 47 years, will remember him always.  Michael Feldberg will be missed.