‘His real advice was his life’

Herbert Rosenbaum, longtime Hofstra professor, dies

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Dr. Herbert D. Rosenbaum, a longtime Rockville Centre resident who came to America after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937, died in his home on May 18, of congestive heart failure. He was 95.

Rosenbaum was born to Edward and Jenny Rosenbaum in Hoernsheim, Germany, on Nov. 1, 1920. His family lived in the small village until 1937, when they fled to America to escape persecution by the Nazis. His son, Daniel, a journalist, wrote in his eulogy that his father had relatives in the U.S., and they helped pave the way for him to come over on the SS Deutschland.

After arriving in America, Rosenbaum worked odd jobs, including an apprenticeship in a tailor shop. He was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a machinist when he was drafted to fight in World War II in 1943. He served in the Pacific theater.

After the war, in 1947, he married Nikki Magdove, whom he had met through a friend of his cousin. The two settled in Levittown, where Nikki gave birth to their two sons, Edward and Daniel. In 1965 the family moved to Rockville Centre, where Rosenbaum had lived ever since.

After he married, he attended college, graduating from New York University and then earning a master’s in political science, and eventually a doctorate as well, from Columbia University. In 1952 he began teaching at Hofstra University, where he distinguished himself over the course of a 39-year career.

“When my dad arrived here at 17, he kind of flipped the immigrant narrative,” said his son, Edward. At the time, Edward said, many immigrants got jobs in trades so they could save money for their children to get a college education. “He did in one generation what most people do in two,” Edward said. “He’s the one who went from apprentice in a tailor shop to a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia.”

A career in academia, however, was a choice his family didn’t quite understand. “When I was about two years into my first job as a wire service … I had a conversation with my Dad’s mother, still making a living as a glovemaker in Washington Heights,” Daniel wrote. “‘You know,’ she said to me, ‘I never really understood this academics business your father is in. But a newspaperman, that I understand!’”

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