Usually, when an academic is awarded the laurels of Distinguished Professor, he or she is on the cusp of retirement. “They might be already dead,” notes Dr. Gerald Sorin with a chuckle. The honoree must at least have reached the level of Full Professor, which typically takes decades, as well as received consistent good evaluations from students. Having published plenty of books and articles is a help, and as Sorin says, “You have to be a good soldier.” The nomination is submitted by a campus-level committee, but in a system like SUNY, the final decision is made at the state level.
Sorin was awarded his Distinguished Professorship in American and Jewish Studies way back in 1994, when Alice Chandler was still president of SUNY New Paltz; he delights in recounting Chandler’s admission that “You now outrank me.” He was by no means ready to give up the university life, however. He’d been teaching at the New Paltz campus since 1965, including a record 11 years as chair of the History Department, and didn’t leave his classroom duties behind until 2000. “They let me teach, and they paid me also,” he says of a career that he clearly loved.
Over the past quarter-century, Sorin has maintained an active relationship with the college as director of the Louis and Mildred Resnick Institute for the Study of Modern Jewish Life, which he founded in 1989 in coordination with SUNY’s Jewish Studies program. Funding for the Institute came in the form of an endowment from Louis Resnick, an Ulster County Democratic Party official and co-owner with his brothers of Channel Master, a highly successful Ellenville-based company known for manufacturing indoor television antennae.
Resnick became a major benefactor of SUNY-New Paltz, and as Sorin tells the tale, “wanted to give money to the college to stimulate Jewish activities. So I wrote up a proposal and he liked it.” The initial gift of $150,000, kept in an endowment fund that could only be drawn down by a small percentage annually, enabled a modest kickoff for the Resnick Institute, with a lecture series that was presented as part of the Jewish Studies curriculum. “He liked what we did the first year. He called me back and asked, ‘What else can I do?’ I wanted to create an endowed chair for Jewish Studies, but when I told him it would cost $1.5 million, he said, ‘Ask me for something else.’ He told me he’d give me another $100,000 to do what I’m doing, only bigger and better.”
More money meant being able to hire guest lecturers with more star power, and the program gradually grew, attracting additional donors. For the first couple of years it was pitched solely to students, but there weren’t enough of them enrolled as Jewish Studies majors to justify the expense, so Sorin flung open the doors to the community. Since then, the Louis and Mildred Resnick Distinguished Lectureship Series has been a free offering each autumn to anyone who wishes to attend, each year with a different theme relative to contemporary Jewish life, thought and culture, but of interest to a much broader public. There’s also an annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture coinciding with Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, in April.
Among the topics featured over the Institute’s 36-year history have been Jewish Identity, Jewish Spirituality, Israel in the World Community, Jewish-American Fiction, Jews in the Global Diaspora, Reimagining the Holocaust, Jews of Color, Jewish Biography, Jewish Communities, The Changing Face of Antisemitism, Jews and Modernism and many more. Notable speakers have included Arthur Hertzberg, Rachel Cowan, Arthur Waskow, Morris Dickstein, Shlomo Avineri, Judith Plaskow, Sydney Schanberg and Francine Prose.
Occasionally the lecturer will be someone “controversial,” such as psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, but Sorin says he picks people who can stand up to a bit of challenging feedback from moderators and attendees. “For that one, the place was packed,” he remembers.
A particularly dramatic circumstance occurred in 2023, when the series theme was Israel at 75. Israeli academic Adi Armon was scheduled to speak over Zoom on the topic of “Benjamin Netanyahu and the Origins of the Israeli Right” on October 9 – two nights after the notorious October 7 Hamas attacks. “He couldn’t do the lecture. Everyone was in hiding. It wasn’t safe,” Sorin recalls. “We had to postpone it and find a second speaker. We got someone who spoke from a bomb shelter. There’s a popular Jewish saying, ‘Man plans and God laughs.’”
Asked about his favorite presentations over the years, Sorin mainly cites arts-related evenings, including theatrical and musical performances. “We’ve had so many good ones. We had an actress, Susan Stein, acting out diary entries from a memoir by a Holocaust survivor named Etty Hillesum,” he recalls. “Then there was Yale Strom’s chamber group performing a beautiful, haunting piece of music, In Memory of….” Another highlight was the world premiere of Sheila Schwartz’s documentary The Children of Izieu, introduced by famed Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld, who famously “slapped the German chancellor,” Sorin notes. “Six hundred people turned out for that.”
As it happens, for the 2025 Fall Lecture Series currently in progress, Jewish Creativity and the Arts is the theme, and Sorin says he’s pleased with the “sweep” of it all: “Almost all the arts are represented in the series. We’ve got a painter, a photographer, song, music, poetry, translation, literature…” Upcoming presentations include “New York Jewish Street Photographers” with Deborah Dash Moore on October 21, “After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace” with Robert Polito on October 28, “Jacob Gordin’s The Yiddish King Lear” with Thomas Olsen on November 4, “Dear Yiddish: A Poetry Reading” with Richard Fein on November 11, and “Saul Bellow and the Post-War American Jewish Writers” with Sorin himself on November 18.
All this autumn’s events begin on Tuesday evenings at 7:30 p.m. and are presented over Zoom, as they have been since the COVID pandemic in 2020. “The size of the audience pretty much doubled, so we stuck with it,” Sorin says. “I miss the social part of the live version. I got to know people on other campuses and in other fields. But there are advantages to doing it virtually. We get people from as far away as California and Israel now. We can plug into so many places. Plus, our audience is mostly over 60, and a lot of them don’t want to drive to campus at night.”
The talk on Saul Bellow that Sorin will be giving on November 18 will be his “swan song” with the Fall Lecture Series, he says, though he’s planning a program at one more Holocaust commemoration next spring. “Come July I’ll be gone,” he says. “It’s been a rich experience all the way through.” Taking over as head of the Resnick Institute in 2026 will be Dror Abend-David, an Israeli-born lecturer in the Language Department at SUNY-New Paltz, which now administers the Jewish Studies program.
Nobel laureate Bellow, whom Sorin considers “a neglected writer” nowadays, was the subject of his most recent “labor of love,” Saul Bellow: “I Was a Jew and an American and a Writer,” published in 2024 by Indiana University Press. Sorin’s earlier biographies, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (2003) and Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane (2012), both won him the National Jewish Book Award. He credits working on the Fast biography for getting him through the aftermath of a serious accident in 2005 that left him in chronic pain and impacted his mobility. “It saved me,” he says.
Sorin, whose 85th birthday arrives this week, still has at least one book left in him, his tenth. “The tentative title is Toward a More Perfect Union: Jews and Blacks Pursue Justice and Racial Equality. It’s almost done. It’s a theme that has rung through all my work,” he says.
Given his lucidity and undiminished enthusiasm, it seems unlikely that Sorin is going to run out of projects anytime soon, though he’ll no longer be solely responsible for the Institute. “I don’t have to do anything anymore. I’m 85. I can do anything I want,” he says. “It really is a salvation to be active. Life is with people.”
For more information on the Louis and Mildred Resnick Institute for the Study of Modern Jewish Life and its spring and fall lectures, visit www.newpaltz.edu/resnickinstitute.
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