Nathan Glazer
Nathan Glazer was an influential American sociologist, educator, and author, known for his contributions to the study of urban sociology and ethnic groups in America. Born in East Harlem and East Bronx, New York, to Polish Jewish immigrants, Glazer's early life was shaped by a modestly Orthodox upbringing and a household steeped in socialist ideology. He began his academic journey at the City College of New York and later pursued advanced degrees in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.
Glazer's career included teaching at notable institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. He gained governmental experience under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, becoming known for his skeptical views on social engineering and the effectiveness of the Great Society programs. His seminal work, *Beyond the Melting Pot* (1963), challenged the notion of American cultural assimilation, presenting the idea that ethnic groups maintained their cultural identities while also adapting to American society.
Throughout his career, he authored numerous publications addressing various social issues, including affirmative action, poverty, and American culture, reflecting his evolving perspectives. Glazer passed away on January 19, 2019, leaving behind a legacy of critical thought and engagement with contemporary social issues. His work continues to influence discussions about ethnicity, culture, and public policy in America.
Nathan Glazer
- Born: February 25, 1923
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: January 19, 2019
- Place of death: Cambridge, MA
Educator, social reformer, and sociologist
Through his publications, Glazer advanced and clarified thinking about American social problems involving ethnic relations and other issues. A lifelong skeptic, he challenged conventional wisdom by persuasively promoting new perspectives.
Early Life
Nathan Glazer grew up in East Harlem and East Bronx, New York. His father, a sewing machine operator and tailor, and his mother were from Poland and spoke Yiddish at home. Glazer was the youngest of seven children. His father was a lifelong socialist, voting for Norman Thomas, a leading socialist who ran for president six times. The household was Orthodox Jewish but moderately so.
Glazer attended public schools in New York City and then enrolled in 1940 at City College of New York (CCNY), at first majoring in history. He joined a Zionist organization and was chosen as editor of its national newspaper, Avukah Student Action. During lunches, Glazer participated in a discussion group of Marxists who opposed Joseph Stalin’s brutal tyranny in the Soviet Union. He gravitated away from history toward a major in sociology, and he went to the University of Pennsylvania in 1942 to pursue a master’s degree. In early 1944, he received his BA from CCNY and his MA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Glazer enrolled as a doctoral candidate in sociology at Columbia University while on the staff of the Contemporary Jewish Record, a publication of the American Jewish Committee that in 1945 transformed into the well-respected Commentary. From 1953 to 1957, he was an editorial advisor for Anchor Books and then played the same role at Random House. Then he taught urban sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1957–58), Bennington College (1958–59), and Smith College (1959–60), and he obtained grants to complete publications, including studies on ethnic groups in New York City. He had already written and cowritten several major publications by the time he received his PhD in 1962.
He married Ruth Slotkin on September 26, 1943. They had three children and divorced in 1958. In 1963, Glazer married Sulochana Raghavan, a researcher with whom he cowrote Conflicting Images: India and the United States (1990).
Life’s Work
Although primarily known as a tenured faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley (1963–69) and at Harvard University, where he began to teach in 1969 and eventually became a professor emeritus of edcation and social structure, Glazer first had governmental experience as a member of the Housing and Home Finance Agency (now the Department of Housing and Urban Development), under the administration of President John F. Kennedy in 1962. During the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, Glazer was a consultant with the Model Cities Program. However, he was doubtful that the promises of the Great Society, Johnson’s program to eliminate poverty and racial divisions, would ever be fulfilled, and in time he became known as a “neoconservative” skeptic of social engineering.
In his best-known publication, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963), he demonstrated that the groups in the subtitle had not behaved as if America were a melting pot in which all lost their ethnic roots in order to conform to a new American culture. Instead of abandoning their root cultures to adopt American ways, they had in effect become bicultural—adapting traditions of their forebears within ethnic enclaves while also becoming Americanized.
Glazer’s belief that assimilation might be necessary for the advancement of minorities and the maintenance of social peace returned in the form of his book Affirmative Discrimination (1975). He argued strongly against affirmative action on many grounds, but his views were later modified in We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1997). In The Limits of Social Policy, (1988), he argued that the problem of poverty could not be solved by economic programs, since the poor had developed a culture of poverty, in which they had accepted their status as inevitable and reoriented their lives to avoid fleeting and often inconsequential opportunities to advance.
Other of Glazer’s publications dealt with such topics as American communism, American culture, American foreign policy, architecture, campus unrest, criminology, housing, immigration policy, and Jews in Russia and the United States. Each focus resulted from a well-researched intellectualization based on his personal experiences. His final book that he had authored, From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City, was published in 2007. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, he continued to offer insight on contemporary social and ethnic issues, including the state of affirmative action.
Glazer died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 19, 2019, at the age of ninety-five.
Significance
Glazer’s book publications were numerous in a long, productive career. He cofounded an important policy-oriented journal that set a neoconservative agenda, The Public Interest (1965–2003), and became coeditor from 1973 until 2003. His empirical findings and well-supported opinions were in the center of debates on American social issues for most of a half century.
Bibliography
Dorman, Joseph. Arguing the World: New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words. New York: Free Press, 2000. Profiles of four intellectuals whose ideas shaped U.S. policy debates: Glazer, literary critic Irving Howe, political analyst Irving Kristol, and sociologist Daniel Bell.
Gewen, Barry. "Nathan Glazer, Urban Sociologist and Outspoken Intellectual, Dies at 95." The New York Times, 19 Jan. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/obituaries/nathan-glazer-dead.html. Accessed 27 Aug. 2020.
Glazer, Nathan. Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy. New York: Basic Books, 1975. The classic argument against affirmative action.
Glazer, Nathan. The Limits of Social Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Based in part on his experience as an urban sociologist with the federal government, this presents an argument against social engineering. Often considered a classic in neoconservative social thinking.
Glazer, Nathan. We Are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Glazer recants his blanket opposition to multiculturalism in education, as presented in Affirmative Discrimination, finding some value in curricula stressing the contributions of ethnic groups that are still striving to advance.
Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963. A description of the separate realities of five ethnic groups in America’s largest city. Glazer’s coauthor, Daniel Moynihan, wrote the chapter on the Irish. A second edition was published in 1970.