Nathan Glazer | Biography

Nathan Glazer was born in New York City on February 25, 1923, the youngest of seven children. According to his autobiographical contribution to Authors of Their Own Lives (1990), his parents, Louis (a tailor) and Tillie (Zacharevich) Glazer, reared their children in an environment of Jewish eclecticism: "socialist, but not too socialist; Orthodox, but not too Orthodox, friendly to Palestine, but not a Zionist; Yiddish-speaking, but not a Yaiddishist." Glazer married Ruth Slotkin on September 26, 1943. They had three children, Sarah, Sophie, and Elizabeth, before divorcing in 1958. Glazer's second marriage was to Sulochana Raghavan, a researcher, on October 5, 1963.

In 1940, Glazer entered City College of New York as a history major. During his time there, Glazer joined the student Zionist organization and soon became the editor of its national newspaper Avukah Student Action. Just past twenty, Glazer was deeply affected by this experience. It offered him the opportunity to associate with the intellectual left who regarded social science as the premiere science of socialist thought, and those relationships in turn provided him with the impetus to pursue sociology. Thus, after brief delves into economics and public administration, he settled on sociology and graduated in January, 1944.

In 1942, he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a master's degree in the spring of 1944. Although he received a fellowship to study for his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, he turned it down, fearing that no jobs would be forthcoming. Instead, he worked on his Ph.D. sporadically at Columbia University, spending most of the next two decades as a "wandering semiacademic grantsman, collecting small grants to write one book after another." Working primarily as an editor, instructor, and writer, by the time he completed the requirements for his Ph.D. in 1962, he was already a well-respected intellectual figure.

After turning down the fellowship, Glazer returned to New York where he took a job on the staff of the Contemporary, a publication of the American Jewish Committee. He remained with the magazine until 1953, when he left to become an editorial advisor for the newly formed Anchor Books. Glazer left Anchor Books in 1957 and spent the next five years moving about, working as an instructor of sociology, a writer, and an editorial adviser for Random House Publishing. His teaching sojourn included stints at the University of California-Berkeley (1957-58); Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont (1958-1959); and Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts (1959-1960). After spending a year in Japan, funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Glazer joined the Housing and Home Finance Agency (later renamed Department of Housing and Urban Development) in 1962 as an expert in urban sociology. Although he held great interest in this work, Glazer was invited to join the University of California-Berkeley as a permanent faculty member in the department of sociology. In 1969 he ended his nomadic intellectual life, becoming a professor of education and social structure at Harvard University, where he remains currently.

Known primarily for his work in race relations and urban study, Glazer published several influential books that shaped the course of academic and political discourse. Although his first two books The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Faces in the Crowd (1952) both written with David Riesman, were widely read, he gained further prominence with the publication of Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), a collaboration with Daniel P. Moynihan. Based on a study of ethnic and cultural identity of people in New York City, Glazer concluded that the popular melting-pot U.S. image was misleading because ethnic groups maintained distinct and dynamic identities. Despite this evidence, Glazer maintained that assimilation is still the goal of American culture.