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1929-2024
Leonard Glick—educator, scholar, anthropologist, former psychiatrist, and wit—passed away peacefully at home with his family shortly after turning 94. Len was born and raised in Baltimore, and as son of an honored physician it seemed inevitable that he would be one, too. He received his MD degree at age 23. Some might think that the height of his medical career was when he gave draftee Elvis Presley his physical and psychological examination, but for Len it was his service as an intern at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. There he served indigent patients, many of them people of color.
In 1957 Len left medicine for a field that interested him far more, beginning the study of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and getting his PhD in 1963. He and his wife, Nansi Swayze (a graduate student of anthropology at Bryn Mawr), spent 18 months from 1960 to 1962 among the Gimi people of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. His particular focus and subsequent publication about the Gimi concerned their medical beliefs and practices, but not until 2018 did Nansi and Len publish their beautifully illustrated Among the Gimi: Fieldwork as Personal Experience. (Their first child, Professor Benjamin Glick, was born during their research in the highlands. Noah, Marian, and Jesse Glick were born under less exacting conditions.)
In 1965 Len joined the anthropology department of the University of Wisconsin as assistant professor (later associate professor) and experienced the exciting but turbulent days in Madison, involved closely with concerned students. In 1972 he left to join the faculty of the two-year-old Hampshire College as full professor and dean of social sciences. He taught there for 30 years until retirement in 2002. At Hampshire he taught courses on many topics, including the history of anthropology, human behavioral evolution, island peoples of the Pacific and Caribbean, ethnographic film, ethnicity and ethnic conflict, and the anthropology of religion—focusing particularly on European Jewish history in anthropological perspective. Len was recognized at Hampshire College as a great teacher and colleague, unpretentious and generous with his time and prodigious learning. He is said to have had a major role in building that new institution’s identity and curriculum.
Leonard Glick published two books based on his research on Jewish history and Judaism. Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe recounts the history of Ashkenazi Jewish experience in Western Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, focusing on interactions between Jews and Christians and describing “the evolution of a complex, inherently unequal relationship.” The second, Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America, a history of a central rite and practice of Judaism, drew this compliment from the editorial review by Professor Elliot R. Wolfson: “There have been many studies of circumcision, but Leonard Glick’s is distinguished both by its impressive historical range and its sophisticated commingling of anthropological and textual methodologies.” (He strongly supported Intact America, a national organization dedicated to ending infant circumcision in America.)
Len is best known to historians of anthropology for an article published in 1982 that began a small academic industry. “Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation” has stimulated a good deal of thought and writing about Boas’ relation to Jewishness as well as to assimilation more generally. It is worthwhile noting that both Len and Nansi Glick played important roles in the development of the remarkable National Yiddish Book Center, founded by Len’s student, Aaron Lansky. Len Glick’s contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of that area of Massachusetts will be missed.
(Herbert Lewis and Nansi Swayze Glick)