Meet Dean Henry Abramson
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Meet Dean Henry Abramson

And his journey from Canada to Israel to Florida to Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Touro University

Dean Henry Abramson
Dean Henry Abramson

When you first see Dr. Henry Abramson of Fair Lawn, dean of Touro University’s Lander College for Men, on a Zoom call, you think you know who you’re going to be talking to.

Black kippah? Check. Black suit? Big white beard? Check and check. Serious glasses. Check again. Because it’s a Zoom call, you can’t see his tzitzit, but you know they’re there.

You expect a serious scholar, a deeply committed academic, and a frum Jew, and you’re right. You are sitting across a screen from exactly such a person.

You might or might not expect warmth — that’s not part of the stereotype either way — but it’s palpably there.

Probably unfairly, you wouldn’t expect an active sense of humor, but very soon you’d find it.

And you — okay, to be fair, this “you” probably should be “I” — wouldn’t expect the wild, unexpected, engaging, and deeply moving life story you’re about to hear.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Henry Abramson comes from serious Canada. Not Montreal or Toronto, places with large Jewish communities that are not so far north of our border as to seem foreign (although yes, of course, they are) but the frozen  north. He was born in 1961, an only child, and the only Jewish child, in Ansonville, Ontario, a minuscule town that merged with another, only slightly larger, town called Iroquois Falls in 1969. “Look it up on Wikipedia,” Dr. Abramson said. “The entry is almost bigger than the town itself. And look at the list of notable people from the town! I’m at the top of the list.

“Of course, the list is alphabetic,” he added. “And almost everyone else on it” — there are eight people in all — “is a hockey player.” (He’s eliding over the soprano, the documentarian, and the curler.)

The town is so far north that “it’s 150 miles away from the outer range of polar bears,” Dr. Abramson said.

Although he was a lone Jew surrounded by Anglophone Protestants and Francophone Catholics — the town wasn’t far from the border with Quebec — his roots in town were deep. “My grandparents all were Lithuanian, and my father’s parents moved up there in 1905,” he said. “My zayde didn’t want to fight the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war — the Russians were conscripting everybody, and it was horrific — so he took advantage of the Canadian land grant for Baltic farmers.”

Dr. Abramson talks with premed student Yaakov Kalikstein, psychology professor Rabbi Asi Kent and pre-dental student Ari Ancselovics as they walk through Touro University’s Lander College for Men. (Dmitriy Kalinin/Touro University)

It turned out that his grandfather, Alex Abramson, and his grandmother, Pavke Levitt Abramson, weren’t good farmers. “My zayde was a terrible farmer. He owned a confectionary store, and then he opened a dry goods store. A shmatta dealership. At that time, there was an influx of Jews coming into town. There was a minyan by the 1950s — but the second generation generally left for big cities — Toronto, Calgary, Montreal.

“My father was one of the youngest in the family — there were seven children, and he was number six — and he was the one who stayed.

His mother’s parents, Henry and Pauline Ravvin came from Lithuania in 1930. “They met on the boat,” Dr. Abramson said. “My grandmother was 18.” They settled in Montreal; his father, Jack David Abramson — he died in 2014, and “I think about him every day,” his son said — brought his mother, Ethel Ravvin Abramson, up to Ansonville. They lived there, above the store they tended, for decades, and that’s the life into which Henry was born.

“I had an idyllic childhood,” Dr. Abramson said. “I think it was like the shtetl upbringing that my grandparents enjoyed.” Not because there was a Jewish community there — there wasn’t — but “because I spent my time wandering in the woods, playing ice hockey, lots of other outdoor activities.

“I loved being outdoors. I loved my community. I loved my friends.” He had lots of friends, but “my best friend was an outsider like me. Peter Chin was the son of the family who ran the only Chinese restaurant in town.” Peter’s now a lawyer in Timmons, “the closest big city to Iroquois Falls,” Dr. Abramson said. (Iroquois Falls has about 3,000 residents.)

The family spoke English at home, but “we were fully bilingual, and I also knew a lot of Cree — Inuit — First Nation. My parents didn’t speak any Cree, but they worked out a  pidgin so they could communicate.”

The only problem back then was “that I was confused. The French and the English hated each other. I asked my father, when I was probably about 6 years old, if I was French or English, and he told me that I was neither. He said, ‘You’re Jewish.’ I nodded but I didn’t know what that meant. I asked if that was better or worse. And my father, wisely, said, ‘It’s neither. It’s just different.’”

When he was young, his parents confronted Henry’s inability to get a Jewish education in town by driving him to Timmons every Sunday. “There was a traveling melamed,” a teacher, “who would meet with all the local Jewish kids. There were maybe 10 of us. Some would drive as far as 90 miles to get there.

“That was our only Jewish content, and I found it very unsatisfying.

“By the time I was 10, my parents realized that this was insufficient. So they decided, at great personal expense to themselves, to take steps to be sure I was ready for my bar mitzvah. They weren’t well educated Jewishly themselves, but they wanted to be sure that I had what I needed.”

The steps that Dr. Abramson’s parents took were extreme. Yankie, as everyone knew him, sold half of his store to a partner; each of them worked there for two weeks and had the other two weeks off. Ethel and Henry Abramson moved to a Jewish neighborhood in Toronto, about 550 miles south of Iroquois Falls, Henry went to public school and then to a Jewish daily afterschool program, and Yankie stayed with them during his two weeks off from the store. “They did that for four years, just so that I could have two hours of Jewish school every day at 3:30,” Dr. Abramson said.

Dr. Abramson’s paternal grandparents, Alex and Pavke Abramson. (Henry Abramson)

“It was a big change for me, because now I lived in a Jewish neighborhood. I went from thinking that Jews were a tiny percentage of the world’s population to thinking we were most of the world’s population.

“I was right the first time.”

Henry Abramson became bar mitzvah in Toronto; the next year, after his father’s business partner died, he and his mother moved back north.

“When I returned, I had a huge Jewish awakening,” he said.

“I saw that I was not as welcome at school as I had been. What really surprised me deeply is that these kids, who I’d always played with — all of a sudden, they’d discovered antisemitism. And it was the really crude kind. The ‘Where are your horns, you dirty Jew?’ kind.

“I was like, ‘Where are you coming from? Don’t you remember that we used to play hockey together?’

“I had a very hard time.”

“My father, who grew up there and never left, gave me advice, which I should have listened to at the time. He said, ‘It’s like water off a duck’s back, Henry. It’s a normal part of life. These weren’t bad kids…’”

Then Dr. Abramson paused. “Well, maybe some of them were. One of them burned down his girlfriend’s father’s house, and another one shot a policeman…’” His voice drifted off momentarily.

“But as I matured, and went back as an adult, I saw that although they had some antisemitic attitudes, they valued me as a northerner. As a Jew, I had a box I had to occupy — but so did everyone else. Someone had a club foot. Someone was trans. We just make fun of people.” The general feeling for everyone — not just for him — was “‘Why can’t you just suck it up?’”

But when he was a teenager, he couldn’t just suck it up, or at any rate he didn’t want to, and didn’t see why he should, so his parents came up with another solution.

In 1957, his father, Jack David Abramson, stands in front of the store he inherited from his father. (Henry Abramson)

When he was 16, “my parents saw that the situation wasn’t tenable, and they didn’t think I was handling it well, so they helped me live alone in Toronto.”

He moved back to the Jewish neighborhood he’d lived in before.  His mother visited frequently, he had the kind of adventures that he’d rather not specify now, he graduated from high school, and he did well enough — it seems, although he doesn’t say, that Dr. Abramson did quite well — and he got into the University of Toronto, “one of the premier institutions in Canada,” he said.

He majored in philosophy,  taking seriously the directive in Pirkei Avot to “find yourself a teacher.” He became a student — and then a disciple — of Emil Fackenheim, “the world-renowned Reform rabbi,” he said. “I became one of his last protégés in his long career.”

The German-born Rabbi Fackenheim escaped the Holocaust and shaped his career as a philosopher in reaction to it. “He was a brilliant writer and an incisive thinker, and he had a massive impact on late 20th-century Jewish thought,” Dr. Abramson said. “I studied with him at Toronto, and then he made aliyah when I was a sophomore. He asked me to go with him. I was very proud of being asked.” He went, following his mentor to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “I studied with him in Israel,” Dr. Abramson said. They were so close that Rabbi Fackenheim gave Dr. Abramson the typewriter he’d used to compose some of his work — and old, heavy model, not only pre-word processor but pre-IBM Selectric.

Dr. Abramson became fluent in Hebrew during that time in Israel, and “my whole Jewish personality blossomed,” he said.

The base of Rabbi Fackenheim’s philosophy is “the 614th commandment, that Jews are forbidden to allow Hitler any posthumous victories,” Dr. Abramson said. “He basically captured the zeitgeist of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, and I resonated with that very much. But the problem with it, as many scholars identified, is that it is fundamentally negative, and it is just not healthy.

“It may be true, but it is not healthy. So I came to repudiate Fackenheim and regret my work with him; later, I reintegrated it.”

This is what happened. “I was at his home, and we had a major philosophical disagreement about whether or not Jews should engage in terrorism. There was some discussion at the time about Jews who were arrested for trying to blow up the Dome of the Rock. I felt that there was absolutely no justification for Jews targeting it. That it was treif. He was condoning it, but he was a survivor, and he felt that there was some justification for it. That was in the early 1980s; he was in his mid-70s, and I was 19.

“We had such a throwdown — a 19th-century-level fight — that I stopped studying with him.

“I went back to Canada, and we didn’t speak for 12 years, until my wife was able to effect a rapprochement.”

It was hard. The intensity of his intellectual engagement was dimmed; the point of continuing to become the academic he’d thought he’d be was blunted. “It was a low point in my life,” Dr. Abramson said. “I went through a dark time as a scholar and budding intellectual. I decided that more schooling was not in my future.”-

He graduated, but without paying much attention.

Today, Dr. Abramson runs a select ski school, with just two pupils — grandchildren David and Hadassah Singer. (Henry Abramson)

He had another, entirely different, life plan.

“I was going to be a fulltime ski instructor,” he said.

What?

“I was going to be a full-time ski instructor,” he repeated. “My father had gifted me with a love of skiing. I love skiing.” And of course that’s a logical passion to someone who grew up in the far north. There’s much opportunity to ski.

“And I love teaching, and I also was certified as a ski racing coach.”

His plan was to work in northern Canada for half the year, and in New Zealand, with its mirror-image calendar, for the other half. “I’d follow the snow.”

So he began to teach skiing. But he didn’t do it the easy way.

“I taught disabled skiers.” There’s a license for that, and he had one.

“There’s a basic technique for it. You have to get into the body of the other person. You have to mimic their disability. To teach an amputee, you have to take off one ski and learn to ski on the other.

“Every student represented a new challenge.”

He taught blind skiers. “You have to hear the snow,” he said. “You have to be much more sensitive to the vibrations under your skis, and even to the smell of the snow.” He learned to do that by skiing blindfolded. Of course, a blind skier needs a guide, he said, but that skier also must trust the guide, and the sounds of the snow, and the skill and love of the teacher.

In France, Dr. Abramson reverently holds a 17th-century Torah scroll. (Henry Abramson)

“Everything valuable that I’ve learned about teaching in the university classroom, I learned on the ski hill with these students,” Dr. Abramson said.

The reason his snow-chasing ski-teaching plan didn’t work was because “I met my wife, Ilana Zarowsky,” a Canadian-born Ukrainian Jew who also was a ski instructor. “She was great, but I wasn’t ready to give up on my plan,” he said. “But then I had a serious accident. I skied into a slalom gate, burst my femoral artery, and was in a wheelchair for six months. I spent a lot of time with Ilana.”

His wife held a Federation Executive Recruitment & Education Program scholarship — that’s FEREP for short — at Yeshiva University; she was a social worker, and she worked for the Jewish Federation in Westchester, but “our joint family career took us in different directions, and now she’s the family matriarch,” Dr. Abramson said. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

Back in northern Canada, eventually Dr. Abramson was able to ski again, “and we had all kinds of adventures, but I realized that if I was going to pay day school tuition” — eventually the couple had six children — “I wasn’t going to do it on a ski instructor’s salary.” (The couple also has grandchildren, both in Fair Lawn and in Florida.)

That’s when the other part of his life — the intellectual part — took over. “I realized that what I most enjoy is the history of ideas,” Rabbi Abramson said. “How people change their culture and their outlook, and how their philosophies adapted with time and space. So I decided that I wanted to go back to graduate school, and study history at the University of Toronto.

“I also thought about my philosophy professors there. Many of them wore T-shirts, jeans, and running shoes. The history professors all wore suits and ties. I thought the history professors got paid more.”

Given that he’d married into a family of Ukrainian Jews, “I decided I wanted to study the history of the Jews of Ukraine,” he said. It was a good time for that work — the Soviet Union was about to fall — “and I found a remarkable mentor, Professor Paul Robert Magosci, the world’s most well-known expert in the area of Subcarpathian Ruthenia,” the area  just below the Carpathian Mountains that’s changed hands frequently and bloodily; it’s part of Ukraine now. “He and I became very close, and he guided me through my master’s and Ph.D. degrees.”

Dr. Abramson specialized in the history of the Jews of Ukraine; Harvard University Press published his dissertation, and later it was translated and published in Ukrainian.

During this time, and in good part through his wife’s inspiration, “I was getting much more connected to my Jewish roots, and to traditional study,” Dr. Abramson said. He learned at Ohr Sameach, the yeshiva system that has a school in Toronto. When he was a graduate student, “I would spend weekdays in the university and the weekend at shul and at the yeshiva.

“One December, I had spent the good part of the Christmas break in the Jewish neighborhood in Toronto, where I would wear my kippah — it wasn’t a black one at the time, probably it was crocheted. When I went back to school in January, I wondered why I was living this dual existence. Why couldn’t I be the same person all the time? So I decided that I would go KFT — that’s Kippah Full Time.

“I said hello to my mentor, who was not Jewish, and he looks at me and pulls me aside and says, ‘Mr. Abramson, what? Why are you wearing that?’ I tell him why, and he puts his arm around me, and says, ‘Do you want me to make an appointment for you at the counseling center?’”

Ilana and Henry Abramson listen as their ketubah is read aloud at their wedding. (Henry Abramson)

Dr. Magosci was acting out of true concern for his student, Dr. Abramson said. “He actually thought it was some kind of sign of a mental illness. He cared about me, and he was worried about what this change meant. Was I suddenly becoming a religious person?”

This story has a happy ending. “He’s adapted, and he’s written several books on the Jews of Ukraine since then, including a new volume on the history of Babyn Yar.” (The book is called “Babyn Yar: History and Memory.”)

“I was getting near to my dissertation, and I had never studied full-time at a yeshiva, and then Ohr Sameach made me an extremely generous offer,” Dr. Abramson said. “They offered to support me for a year in Jerusalem, just learning full time. That was such an incredible opportunity, too hard to pass up, so we packed our bags and went to Jerusalem.”

The year in the yeshiva provided Dr. Abramson with another radically different intellectual and emotional framework; it, too, has enhanced his skills as a teacher. It also added even more to the heap of languages he can speak, and the even greater number he can read. “It’s what historians have to do,” he said.

After he graduated from the University of Toronto, the growing Abramson family were academic nomads, going from fellowship to fellowship; Dr. Abramson was at Harvard, Cornell, Oxford, Hebrew University. “We moved 10 times in seven years,” he said.

And then, in 1996, he got a tenure-track position in Florida. “We lived in North Miami Beach and the job was in Boca Raton,” at Florida Atlantic University, he said; both were far from northern Canada, and notably lacking in snow.

What was that like? “When we brought my father there for the first time, he’d never seen a palm tree in person before,” Dr. Abramson said. “After a week, he said, ‘Enough with the palm trees.’”

But his feeling about Florida, and his job there? “I loved it.” He got tenure. “I typically would have one-third non-Jewish and two-thirds Jewish students in my classes. I loved them all. A dozen or so students a year would go to seminaries and yeshivas. A lot of yeshivas used to call me their secret weapon.”

He worked there for nine years.

“And then Dr. Lander had an idea.” Rabbi Dr. Bernard Lander, a Columbia-trained sociologist with decades of work as a teacher, administrator, and public servant, was the founder and first president of Touro — then Touro College, now Touro University. It is his name that is on the school — Touro’s Lander College for Men — that Dr. Abramson now leads. (Touro also has Lander College for Women.)

“Dr. Lander, who was a visionary leader, wanted to open a branch of Touro in Florida. He put together a search committee to find a dean, and I was honored to accept that position. I started there in January 2006.”

Henry Abramson at 13 (Henry Abramson)

In 2015, after Dr. Lander died, and after the shock waves from the 2008 recession continued to batter the area, Touro’s college in Florida closed; “the good news is that we’re back in Florida,” Dr. Abramson said. “We received our license to operate a new campus in Boca Raton, and I am again the dean there.” Eventually, he said, he will be replaced by someone local.

Because when the Florida branch closed, “I am proud to say that Touro University wanted to retain me, so they brought me up to serve as dean in the large campus in Brooklyn, the mighty Avenue J campus — that’s the Lander College of Arts and Sciences — and then I ended up also being responsible for another school, Machon L’Parnasa. In English we call that the Institute for Professional Studies. It is focused on people who did not have the benefit of a regular high school background — a lot of chasidim, a lot of first-generation college students, a lot of charedim in general, mostly from Brooklyn.

“I did that again for another nine years, from 2015 until a week ago. Now I’ve been appointed to take over the flagship school, Lander College for Men, and that pretty much brings us up to the present.”

Yes, that does bring us up to now, but there have been some other work that we’ve omitted. Dr. Abramson has written quite a few academic books. He’s got a website, henryabramson.com.

And he’s been influenced by the work of Clay Shirky, the NYU professor who specializes in evolving media, and whose theories about how changes in media have caused changes in the audience have affected much of what he does now. “He’s really good at explaining what the internet means for those of us who are not internet natives,” Dr. Abramson said. “We are living in a Guttenberg generation. The technology is changing so fast that we don’t know what life will be like on the other side of it. We’re living in a transitional generation right now.

“I started thinking about how to apply it to my own work. I love giving adult education talks at my own shul. I’d give a series of talks, then stop and repeat them. People would ask why didn’t I just record them? Put them on YouTube? That way, they’d live forever.”

He did, and “That has changed things for me dramatically. I am proud to say that I recently received a YouTube creator award. I have more than 100,000 subscribers. It’s a crazy number of people who like learning Jewish history with me.” Those videos are available, free on henryabramson.com. “It’s about 500 videos,” he said, in some disbelief.

“I started by just putting a camera in the shul. I hear from people from all over the world. They will respond in different languages. If I don’t know the language, I use AI to translate it. It just changes the whole dynamic of education. Today we presuppose a global audience.”

This model of teaching is entirely different from the work he did as a ski instructor, working intensely with one student at a time, imagining himself into the mind and body of that one person, who was right there next to him. It’s entirely different from the Jewish model of chavruta, working with one other person, across a table or side by side, developing an intense relationship.

Both models are powerful.

“When I was teaching a disabled skier, I had to know the specifics of the disability. Was the leg amputated above or below the knee? At what age did the amputation happen? This is a la carte education. It is personalized. It is tailored. You can’t get any better than that. But we have built-in inequities in our civilization, and it’s all perfectly normal. Time zones, geography,” all kinds of hurdles. “But with the internet, all of a sudden, we have the tools that allow us to expand our reach to every single human mind on the planet.

Dr. Abramson, center, talks to Lander’s admissions director, Rabbi Ari Manheim, left, and the school’s dean of student life, Rabbi Ariel Kopitnikoff. (Dmitriy Kalinin/Touro University)

“It is a phenomenal, exponential change in potential.”

That doesn’t mean that everything will go from bad to good. “Obviously this also presents dangers,” Dr. Abramson said. “The digital generation now has a tremendous overabundance of knowledge, but a tremendous lack of wisdom. When I wrote my dissertation, if I wanted to know something, I had to read it in a book. If it wasn’t in my library, I had to go to another library. If it wasn’t in a language I knew, I had to learn the language.” Eventually, that collection of data had to end. Budget and time constraints were real. Part of writing a dissertation was knowing when to stop.

“Now, 90 percent of what I went around the world to get is readily available to my students. There are so many shortcuts. They can amass knowledge so quickly that they are overwhelmed by the firehose. They don’t know how to edit it. They don’t know how to tell information from misinformation and disinformation, and that is dangerous.

“Our task as the transitional generation is to teach  them to hone in on the essentials over the noise.”

The Lander College for Men does both, Dr. Abramson said. “For 25 years, it was led by a remarkable scholar, Moshe Sokol.” (Dr. Sokol is now the dean of the Touro University Graduate School of Jewish Studies.)

“When we went through the covid crisis, the university as a whole had to pivot to an online model. When we came out of the crisis, Dr. Sokol, whose training is in philosophy, made the careful decision to double down on in-person education.

“The Lander College for Men has a daytime program with a full yeshiva complement, so students are studying Talmud until three o’clock in the afternoon. To do that, it means that you have to have a real human relationship with your chavrusa — your study partner — and your rebbe. It’s very difficult — some say it’s impossible — to duplicate that online, even in synchronous communication, like when you’re on Zoom.

“We’re hardwired to receive information through limbic responses, everything from the tilt of an eyebrow to a change in tone to a slight adjustment in posture. So Dean Sokol’s position was to focus on the high-quality in-person traditional learning style. That’s our philosophical background.

“At the same time, we are also investing heavily in training our students with the incredible tools and potential of the current world.

“For example, we have recently hired a provost, Shlomo Argamon, whose entire responsibility is to figure out artificial intelligence and what it means to our students. He’s brilliant. We have to  think about what it means, now that we have all these tools. We have decided to embrace them — we know we can’t beat them — and we want to figure out how to give our students the highest-quality in-person education while mastering the tools of the digital universe that we live in today.”

Given the range of his life experiences — from the near-polar-bear north to subtropical palm trees, from Fackenheim to Ohr Sameach, from asynchronous YouTube videos to chevrusas — if anyone can put together those seeming opposites together gracefully and seamlessly, it’s likely to be Dr. Henry Abramson.

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