Stanley J. Rabinowitz (1945-2024)

I just learned of the sudden passing, last weekend, of Stanley J. Rabinowitz, the Henry Steele Commager Professor of Russian at Amherst College, where I went to school from 1980 to 1984.

Stanley was an impressive professor who delivered commanding lectures. He was up there with Professors George Kateb, Austin Sarat, Benjamin DeMott, and William Kennick. During my time at Amherst, the first three (Rabinowitz, Kateb, and Sarat) were the “rock stars” of the Red Room in Converse Hall, the only room big enough to accommodate all of their “fans”.

Stanley Rabinowitz had a prodigious memory. He delivered memorable lectures on the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was also the only professor who called me by my full name, and pronounced my given name with a hard occlusive “g,” as it should be said. Not many people in the mainland United States, then, or since then, have managed this admittedly difficult feat.

Stanley was the single most important professor at Amherst for me. He led me to the Academic life.

I remember a conversation about graduate school. It was Wintertime and we were walking past Robert Frost Library, going up the hill, towards Johnson Chapel. I shared with him my doubts about having anything to say that would justify going to graduate school. He told me a short version of his life story: his humble background in Brooklyn, and his degrees from Harvard. “If I can do it, so can you,” he said.

No professor at Amherst had shared a personal story like that with me. It made me dare to apply to graduate school two years later.

When I heard about Stanley’s passing, I thought about him as part of a group of male professors at Amherst who had a lasting impact on the way I came to think about masculinity.

I remember a conversation about Thomas Hobbes in Professor Kateb’s office, where I mentioned I liked the Leviathan (an overwhelming and powerful political metaphor that could have been also a figure for masculinity). Professor Kateb gently tried to caution me against this political philosophy. Professor Sarat’s energy and quirky sayings, “best x since sliced bread,” redefined what it was to show excitement about ideas, something that went against the proverbial man who speaks softly and carries a big stick. Professor DeMott made pronouncements that assigned different values to cultural icons: “Bruce Springsteen is a great American poet.” He made me re-think my cultural heroes. Professor Kennick brought to class his wound-up tin toys to talk about the mechanical philosophy of Descartes. Could a man tap into his inner child?

And Stanley, assigned queer novels, like Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, which took me far beyond the limits of what I had come to think of as the literary patriarchs of World Literature.

These professors were all singular teachers. And I learned something important from every one of them. They were also very different examples of masculinity. Of all of them, Stanley was the only one who dared to be vulnerable in the classroom.

In an interview from 2019, Stanley said that he tried to show his students that he was “available” and “accessible” to them: “that they can come and talk to me without feeling embarrassed or humiliated.” That was certainly the way I felt around Stanley.

It was thanks to Stanley’s open disposition that I went on to a career teaching literature. He taught me not to be afraid of bringing my vulnerable humanity into the classroom. I will miss him dearly.