The Life Experience and Scholarly Achievement of J. Lee Shneidman (June 20, 1929-July 29, 2008)

Jerome Lee Shneidman died on July 29, 2008 after a courageous struggle with ill health, starting with the cancers he had as a young child and ending with the one that ultimately killed him. The latter was diagnosed late in 2007, only nine months following the sudden loss of his beloved wife Conalee Levine-Shneidman, to whom he was married since 1961. Dr. Shneidman was an accomplished medieval Spanish and early-American historian with a wide range of interests and publications in various fields. In the course of his academic career, Professor Shneidman published over 100 articles, chapters of books, and book reviews on many diverse subjects. He taught at five different colleges and universities in various positions, and dedicated many hours to forwarding psychohistory in several different groups.

A word about names will be a helpful guide to this complex man. As a colleague and friend of over 30 years, I always knew him as Lee, as did most people from the 1960s and 1970s, but I eventually discovered that as a child he was called Jerome and within the immediate family Roma for short. High school friends called him Jerry. In this he was like his father, who was called four different names, based upon the preferred language of the people who knew him —English, Polish, Russian, or Yiddish.

Jerome Lee Shneidman was born as the elder of two sons on June 20, 1929 in New York City to a family of Jewish immigrants from the borderlands of the Tsarist Russian Empire who lived in the Bronx and then moved to the Upper West Side when he was 13, where he would spend the rest of his life. His father Bernard was a dedicated Marxist who reported (his son only believed what he could verify with documentary evidence or through personal experience) to have gone back to Europe to fight as a Red Army officer in the Russian Civil War under Trotsky until becoming disillusioned by a decision to ally with an anti-Semitic Ukrainian anarchist. Back in America, Bernard married Fanya Raskin, a beautiful, theatrical woman from Vilnius (Vilnia), endeavoring to support her

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family by opening a laundry. Lee reported that there “was always enough money for books, magazines, and the right [left-wing] causes,” but often not enough money for clothes or doctors.

A central issue of Jerome Lee Shneidman’s life was cancer, beginning with the melanoma on the groin, diagnosed when he was about six months old. A major skin graft rearranged elements of his body. The hated hospital dominated his existence for the next 13 years. Twice his parents were told he would not live until morning, and athletics and other physical activity were prohibited. His parents scrounged money for the doctors, his father resenting so much attention being devoted to his elder son. After Roma returned home from one failed operation to remove a tumor, it quickly returned, exploding with pus. The doctor in the emergency ward would not operate without getting a fee of $25, which Bernard collected from relatives in small increments. The boy came to distrust doctors as greedy and incompetent. Over 60 years later, without evident signs of humor, Lee told me, “MD stands for medically deranged” and his son Jack remembers his saying “MD stands for mentally deranged.”

The doctors said that if the boy lived he either would not be able to walk or would walk with a pronounced limp and a cane, but Shneidman walked normally until his later 60s, when he began to have great trouble perambulating because of the medical interventions of his childhood. His nerves and veins had been rearranged and his skin pulled incredibly tight from the operations, one of which involved 300 stitches that he had trouble healing from. His skin was so scarred that it was hard for physicians to read an MRI. Since about age 70, he went to physical therapy twice a week to help with his back pain and walking difficulties.

Confined to a hospital ward without privacy or a radio, and often ignored behind a curtain, the boy read a great deal, turning to history to keep his mind active by fantasizing he was among the historical people in the books he read. Through the life of the mind, he moved beyond his Bronx hospital bed as he absorbed the content of newspapers and National Geographic magazines, and

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studied history through stamp collecting. As a teenager he went to a museum exhibit on Mexico City, where the guide assumed he had toured the Mexican capital because he knew the details of its entire layout from studying it so extensively as a child in the children’s charity ward.

In a hospital bed at about age eight, thinking of medieval Aragonese kings as “my friends” and doodling maps as he would for the rest of his life, Roma decided he would become a history teacher. Beyond his home education in radical ideas and selfeducation in history, Shneidman was educated in the New York City public schools, graduating from Stuyvesant High School prior to attending the Heights Campus of New York University (BA 1951), New York University (MA 1952), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (PhD 1957). He would have liked to earn a doctoral degree in medieval Russian history, but that was not available at a decisive moment in his education, so he turned to the medieval history of Catalonia, a region which had come to his attention as a child hearing about the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Shneidman did postdoctoral study as a Research Candidate at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where they strictly forbade him to have contact with patients because he was not a medical doctor, and then at the Reuben Fine Psychoanalytic Institute where the instructors eventually insisted he see living patients. Eventually he dropped out because “I only wanted to analyze dead people.” Lee Shneidman relished such ironies and inconsistencies in the world.

Dr. Jerome Lee Shneidman was an extremely erudite scholar, known to many as a contrarian and debunker. His intellectual life was shaped by his illness and competitive relationship with his father, who was engaged in “a power struggle” with him “from my [his] earliest memories.” Bernard believed in education and the highest ideals of communism but, as Lee wrote, while taking a “hidden pleasure in my academic progress…had a vested interest in demonstrating my stupidity.” Unable to compete with his father in other areas because of his elder’s claims of extraordinary accom-

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plishment and his own cancer-ridden body, Lee sought to outpace Bernard intellectually. Any claim of his father was checked and double-checked, so that Lee knew his father’s arguments better than his father did. This led to Jerome becoming an excellent debater who won various awards. His “scholarship is thorough but polemical” with an unusual number of footnotes since he anticipated being challenged, as he always was by his father.

Young Jerome accepted the ideals of communism, but found the reality in Soviet Russia to be as far from these ideals as were the “greedy incompetent doctors” from their Hippocratic ideal, and as was his competitive father from his own humanitarian ideals. After the Soviet Union signed the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with its archenemy Nazi Germany, Jerome lost faith in Stalin and Soviet communism, to whose ultimate goodness his father clung. Bernard wanted to remake the world into a perfect communist society, while trying to rule his son by an “imperialcapricious system,” while the son’s commitment was to liberal reform working for incremental change, serving as a New York County Democratic Committeeman starting in 1970. His political advocacy was in English and Yiddish. As a consequence of his relationship with “the hospital” and his father, Lee reported having enormous authority problems that shaped many decisions of his life and strengthened his commitment to democratic constitutionalism, relationships, and society.

One of the legacies of the near-death experiences and physical disability of his early years, and being surrounded by children in the hospital who died, was that Professor Shneidman never wanted to write about societies in decline. In speaking at a 1987 Psychohistory Forum Work-In-Progress seminar, “Psychological Factors in the Development of an Historian,” he told us that some of his friends thought he was counterphobic when it came to death and decline. Thus, his research energies went into the growth of the Catalan kingdom, the early American Republic, and the promise of the Kennedy administration (his co-author wrote about JFK’s failures and death). He steered the Communism: The Dream that

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Failed Research Group toward the origins of this movement, rather than the reasons for its failure, which I would have preferred focusing upon. As a devoted believer in participatory democracy, Lee insisted that the Psychohistory Forum’s research group meeting at his home be one based upon consensus, rather than have a formal leadership structure. His interest in Russian history was based on his parents’ origins in the Russian Empire, his father’s devotion to the communist experiment in Russia, and the language of his home being Russian along with English and Yiddish.

Behind the Professor’s intellectualism and contrarian tendencies was a warm, generous human being who formed many friendships. The Shneidmans had a most active cultural life as they enjoyed the ballet, museums, music recitals, opera, and theatre of their city. They also had a rich variety of friends whom they loved to entertain. The atheism of his left-wing upbringing did not keep Lee from being quite an active member of his synagogue. Throughout their marriage of four and one-half decades, Lee and Connie shared yearly travel to Central and South America, many countries in different parts of Europe, North Africa, China, Malaysia, Thailand, and India where Lee delighted in going to the Taj Mahal that he had dreamt about as a boy in the hospital. Weekends from Memorial Day through October, as well as during their August vacation, they mostly enjoyed at their Fire Island retreat. Despite the geographic distance, the Shneidmans of New York City maintained a very close relationship with his brother Daniel in Milwaukee and his family.

The Shneidmans had an impressive ability to make adjustments to the limitations that came with advancing years and declining health. Hosting the Psychohistory Forum meetings made it possible for Lee to participate even when he could not readily go elsewhere, especially early in the day since his body did not work as well in the mornings as it did later in the day. In their 70s the Shneidmans increasingly traveled on small cruise ships, which minimized having to walk any distances or go on and off conveyances.

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Lee was a passionate stamp collector who also wrote numerous articles for the American Philatelist and a variety of other stamp journals. He delighted in the stamps that came from our members in the U.S. and around the world, insisting that no stamp was too commonplace, since he would send duplicates on to wounded veterans and others who found themselves hospitalized, so that they might be encouraged to develop the hobby, which did so much to broaden his own bedridden childhood perspective.

Connie and Lee had a close marriage. He and his family assumed he would die before his beloved spouse because of his lifelong health problems. At her sudden death on January 22, 2007, he was utterly shocked and bereaved. Though devastated by this terrible loss, he put on a brave face, continuing to host the Forum’s Research Group for as long as he could, finishing his manuscript on Jefferson’s foreign policy, and beginning the search for a publisher. His sons, brother, extended family, and friends rallied around him.

He greatly enjoyed smoking a pipe, and when the dangers of all secondhand smoke became quite apparent, Lee mostly restricted his pipe smoking to a narrow office, lined to the high ceiling with books and manuscripts. There he spent countless hours working on manuscripts, articles, and stamps, while the smoke he inhaled formed a cancer in his lungs. Although in his last months his energy waned quite quickly, he welcomed visits from family and friends.

Professor Shneidman had many varied interests in scholarship and became an accomplished and respected scholar. Among his over 100 various publications were such diverse subjects as Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, Karl Marx’s alienation, Catherine De Medici, Ivan the Terrible, his own motivation and patterns as a historian, historical philately, Jewish history, and psychohistorical methodology. Some of his psychobiographical work was co-authored by his clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst wife, Conalee Levine-Shneidman, who raised questions a historian would not necessarily ask. Their most acclaimed and cited joint article was “Suicide or Murder? The Burr-Hamilton Duel” in the Fall 1980

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issue of the Journal of Psychohistory. Lee did almost all of the actual writing in longhand or on a typewriter. (After years of resisting the use of a word processor with complaints that the words disappeared at the end of the line, he finally embraced it in his final years.) Among the numerous journals in which his articles appeared are the American Historical Review, American Philatelist, Annuale Medievale, Clio’s Psyche, Hispania, Historica Judaica, and the Journal of Psychohistory. He was a member of about 20 different professional organizations including the Board of Collaborators of the Indice Historico Español of the University of Barcelona since 1965 and the Aaron Burr Association. His books are The Rise of the Aragonese-Catalan Empire: 1200-1350 (2 volumes, 1970, translated into Calalan); Spain & Franco: Quest for International Acceptance, 1949-1959 (1973); John F. Kennedy (1974, with Peter Schwab) and Leading from Weakness: Jefferson’s Overt and Covert Relations with Spain and the Barbary States: 1801-1807 (completed and in need of a publisher).

Dr. Shneidman had a distinguished academic career at Adelphi University for 40 years, after having taught at Brooklyn College, the College of New York, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the University of Maryland at Frankfurt A/M in Germany and Libya. In 2001 he became emeritus at Adelphi, although he continued to teach a historical methodology course for some time afterwards. He relished teaching, especially his many international and immigrant students. In 1965 he joined the “Seminar in the History of Legal and Political Thought and Institutions” of Columbia University, serving as chair from 1985 to 2002. In 1973 and 1975 Lee served as a Scholar-Diplomat for the United States Department of State. Among his numerous honors was being an “Invited Participant” of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium on “Problems of the Psychoanalytic Theory of Aggression” from 1979 to 1996.

For a number of years, beginning in 1986, Shneidman edited the Bulletin of the International Psychohistorical Association. Lee Shneidman joined the Psychohistory Forum as one of our earli-

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est members, becoming an important contributor to our intellectual community. In 1991, when we created the Psychohistory Forum’s Communism: The Dream That Failed Research Group, Drs. Shneidman insisted upon hosting it in their elegant home on West 86^th Street. They were the most gracious of hosts, providing a delightful spread purchased around the corner at Barney Greengrass—“the Sturgeon King”—a landmark New York Jewish delicatessen/ restaurant. Holding his pipe, Lee held forth at the head of the table, sharing his great erudition and strongly held opinions. When after the subjects of the origins and main personalities of communism were exhausted, this group turned its attention to autobiography and psychobiography.

Over 100 people attended a most moving memorial tribute to him at the Riverside Chapel at 76^th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. As Lee would have liked, in a beautiful setting his family and friends lovingly mentioned his foibles as well as his impressive accomplishments and humanity.

We at the Psychohistory Forum would like to express our condolences to his sons Jack and Philip of Manhattan, Daniel and Doris Shneidman of Milwaukee, his extended family, colleagues, and numerous friends. We are all the poorer for this terrible loss.

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