Remembering Richard L. Rubenstein (memorial)

Before and after the field of psychohistory began, numerous scholars have contributed to understanding “the why of history” through the prism of psychodynamic interpretation and explanation, but they have not identified with or professionally labeled themselves as psychohistorians or as “doing psychohistory.” They might not even have been “claimed” by many psychohistorians. One such person is the late Richard L. Rubenstein (1924-2021), who died on May 16, 2021, at age 97. Once, in 1978, he attended the International Psychohistorical Association conference.

Richard Rubenstein, a prodigious scholar and prolific writer, used psychoanalytic perspectives in virtually all of his writing. His pioneering first book, After Auschwitz (1966), explored the meaning of Jewish life and the impossibility of an omnipotent, covenantal God, of divine election (chosenness), and theodicy after Auschwitz. Rubenstein was a rabbi, university professor, theologian, philosopher, frequent guest lecturer, college president (University of Bridgeport), and in my undergraduate years at the University of Pittsburgh (1963-1967), a mentor. A brilliant and formidable lecturer in university courses, he directed the university Hillel and was a regular guest rabbi at the synagogue I attended in Pittsburgh.

I will never forget a spellbinding talk Rubenstein gave on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). He stood before the class, eyes tightly shut, and delivered an hour or so long lecture that was at once profound and virtuosic replete with long, exact quotations, delivered in a reverberating baritone (if I remember correctly) voice. His intense focus and concentration were inspiring, and his incisive critique was as exhaustive as his explication.

Rubenstein’s legacy includes such books as After Auschwitz, The Cunning of History: Mass Death and the American Future (1975), My Brother Paul (1972), Power Struggle (1974), The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (1983), and Jihad and Genocide (2011). As an implicit psychohistorian, Richard Rubenstein deserves to be widely read as psychohistory.

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His life and work are a blessing to us all.

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