He Never Gave Up on Anybody

This article is reprinted with permission of the New York Jewish Week. Visit www.thejewishweek.com.

Egon Mayer will be remembered for many things, particularly his groundbreaking research on Jewish identity and on intermarriage, and his advocacy for outreach to interfaith families. Yet the thing for which he will be most remembered by those who knew him will be his menschlichkeit.  

Mr. Mayer, a longtime scholar of American Jewish identity and a sociologist whose work will shape the policies of Jewish communal organizations for years to come, died last Friday of gall bladder cancer. He was 59.

Hundreds attended his funeral Sunday at the Reconstructionist Synagogue of the North Shore in Plandome, L.I., and nearly a dozen people eulogized him. They all talked about his goodness.

Though Mr. Mayer had strong opinions, his gentle and diplomatic manner, combined with his slight Hungarian accent, gave him a kind of European courtliness.

"Egon was such a sweetheart," said Rela Mintz Geffen, president of Baltimore Hebrew University, who worked with him for 25 years and delivered one of the eulogies. "He had the great ability to bring together disparate points of view. He had grace."

Though Mr. Mayer was a sociologist immersed in data, he never lost sight of the fact that the numbers were about real people whose Jewish lives were full of inconsistency, texture and nuance.

He was invariably optimistic. While other sociologists were full of doom and gloom about the results of the 1990 and 2000 National Jewish Population Surveys, Mr. Mayer viewed the intermarriage rate as an opportunity rather than certain disaster.

"He cared about all Jews," Geffen said. "Being the child of Holocaust survivors, he felt strongly that he wanted to save every Jew possible and never gave up on anybody. Some people thought he was too lenient, too inclusive, in the way he would count people in" as members of the Jewish community, "but they didn't understand that this is what it came from."

Mr. Mayer was born in Switzerland and raised in Budapest, immigrating with his family to the United States during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. He attended the Toras Emes Kaminetzer yeshiva in Brooklyn, and then earned a bachelor's degree at Brooklyn College.

After earning a master's at The New School for Social Research and his doctorate at Rutgers, Mr. Mayer returned to Brooklyn College in 1970 to teach. He stayed at the school for more than 30 years, ultimately working as the chair of the sociology department.

His successor and longtime colleague Roberta Satow has kept a picture of Mr. Mayer on her desk since his cancer diagnosis in August. She looks at the photo when she thinks her tone might become too sharp.

"I sometimes tend to be too direct, but he was always very tactful and considerate," Satow said. "I look at it when I'm talking to someone to remind me to reconsider what I'm going to say."

Mr. Mayer's career was multifaceted though always focused on the well-being of the Jewish community. In the early years of his work as a sociologist, he focused on the Orthodox world. But by the late 1970s, his interest turned to intermarriage and conversion.

He worked as director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the City University of New York Graduate School, and as a head of the North American Jewish Data Bank, which "owned" the information from the 1990 NJPS at the time of its publication. Mr. Mayer also was a member of the National Technical Advisory Committees for the 1990 and 2000 surveys.

He was founding director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, an organization focused on the needs of interfaith families. Mr. Mayer conducted many studies--most recently the American Jewish Identity Survey in 2001--about intermarriage, philanthropy and other aspects of Jewish identity. He authored many monographs and articles on those subjects, as well.

Mr. Mayer wrote two books, From Suburb to Shtetl: The Jews of Boro Park (1979) and Love and Tradition: Marriage Between Jews and Christians (1985) He also maintained a Web site, and was working on a book on Rudolf Kasztner, the rescuer of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust whose negotiations with Adolf Eichmann permitted his parents, along with some 1,600 other Hungarian Jews, to buy their freedom.

Mr. Mayer, a man with modest comportment, a scholarly air and a twinkle in his eye, influenced many.

Ed Case, publisher of the Web magazine InterfaithFamily.com, traveled from his Boston home to be at the funeral.

"I'm intermarried myself and in the 1990s, when I looked to see if the Jewish community would be welcoming to my family, Egon was one of the only people in the Jewish communal world who seemed to be creating that," said Case. "Before I ever met him he had a very big impact on my life. When I met him it became more personal. He was a hero for me."

Satow said, "He was a role model for me as a human being, as a mensch. He was a role model to an awful lot of people."

Mr. Mayer even handled his months-long battle against painful abdominal cancer with remarkable grace, said his wife, Marsha Kramer Mayer, never indulging in self-pity.

Last Thursday, Marsha recalled, she was crying as she sat by his bedside. Half-teasingly, "Egon said, 'don't cry at my party.' And then he slipped into semi-consciousness," she said. He died the next day.

They met in 1986 when she answered his New York magazine personal ad. Marsha sent him a copy of an article that had been written about her in The New York Times Long Island section. In response, he sent her an article that had been written about him in The Jewish Week.

Their first date was Shabbat dinner at his house, Marsha recalls. The following Tuesday, he gave her the first of many poems that he wrote for her.

Though they faced challenges--they both had school-age children, they lived in different communities and came from much different Jewish backgrounds--"right away, we knew it was serious," she said.

"I suppose it's strange that it's not grief, but right now my main feeling is that I'm lucky that I had 18 years with him," Marsha said. "It was a joy every minute I was with him."

Mr. Mayer is also survived by a daughter, Daphne; two stepdaughters, Rena Fox and Danielle Kramer; his mother, Hedy, of Borough Park; and a brother, George, of Staten Island.

Debra Nussbaum Cohen is a staff writer for the New York Jewish Week.