NATHANIEL S. LEHRMAN (May 26, 1923-January 19, 2020)

Widower of Emily R. Lehrman; father of Leonard J. Lehrman, Paul D. Lehrman, Betty J. Lehrman; grandfather of Alison and Laura Schwartz. Contributor to Jewish Currents since 1962; life subscriber since 1979.

As a child, Nathaniel Saul (Hebrew name: Noson'l Nuchum) Lehrman, known to the Lehrman family as "Nucky," to others as "Nat," scored highest or second highest in all of NY City/State on several IQ tests. ("I loved taking tests," he remembered, where "after all, the worst you can get is zero, and that's nothing!") Skipping semesters six times, he graduated Erasmus Hall High School at 15, and entered as second youngest of 1200 in the Class of 1942 on full scholarship at Harvard, where he majored in chemistry, played violin and then viola in the orchestra, and was the only member of both the local chapter of the Young Communist League and the Avukah (predecessor to Hillel), of which he became Secretary. One of only ten to attend his 75th Reunion in 2017, he "made the minyan," but then had to explain that term to all present, as no other attendees were Jewish, due to the 15% quota Harvard President Lowell had installed. Throughout his life, Nat would be both an activist for justice and a faithful, though proudly atheistic, Jew. At first enthralled but later disillusioned by the false gods, Marx and then Freud, he developed a concept of God as "the sublime metaphor," valuing ritual, study, and constant commentary. He was active in the Brotherhood of Temple Sinai in Roslyn, NY, Great Neck Forum, Great Neck Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and the American Humanist Society.

Unable to find a job in chemistry, due to the anti-semitism of Harvard's job counselor, he worked for the signal corps and then got his M.D. at Albany Medical College, courtesy of the US Army, which then sent him to Ft. Riley, Kansas in 1948-50. Returning to NY, he interned at Bellevue and Creedmoor, completed psychoanalytic training at Flower & 5th Ave. Hospital, and began private psychiatric practice in Great Neck in 1954. One of his first published articles condemned the Catholic Church's "Psychological Warfare Against Long Island's Public Schools," oddly prophetic of what Orthodox Jewish parochial schools are doing to local communities now. After a visit from the FBI, fearful that his office was being bugged, in 1964 he moved his practice to his home in Roslyn, where he and his wife Emily lived from 1954 until moving to The Amsterdam in Port Washington in 2011. He passed away in his sleep there, 9 years later. A week earlier he had sung and played the violin in commemoration of the 5th anniversary of Emily's death. (He also played in several Long Island orchestras and in the 2014 US premiere of his son Leonard's opera, Hannah.)

In addition to his contributions to Jewish Currents, he wrote extensively (a nearly complete 157-page autobiography, and over 140 published items, housed at Albany Medical College) for The Churchman/The Human Quest, The Humanist (US and Canadian), The Jewish Spectator, The Jewish Standard, The Jewish Voice, Jewish Week, JONAH, Midstream, Promethean Review, The Reconstructionist, the Newsletter of the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case (which he edited), dozens of medical and scientific journals, and numerous letters in Roslyn News, Newsday, Wall Street Journal, Amsterdam News and The New York Times. Subjects he wrote on included continuity of care, creativity, schizophrenia, AIDS (alternative theories, with John Lauritsen and Peter Duesberg), Jewish humanism, the morality and joy of fidelity (he and Emily were married for 70 years), Carl Jung, and what he believed to be the mutability of sexuality. He also wrote numerous book reviews, and several chapters of a book titled Getting Away with Murder: The Insanity Defense as a Mask for Terrorism. He served as Chief of Service at Bronx State Hospital and then Deputy Director, Clinical, at Kingsborough Psychiatric Facility in Brooklyn, retiring in 1978.

Two papers of his were presented in Israel in the fall of 1984. Rabbi Emanuel Rackman and Dr. Karl Menninger were among his admiring correspondents. In 1989 he was presented the New Frontiers Award by the American Friends of Ezrath Nashim Psychiatric Hospital in Jerusalem. That year he also participated in a Jewish Currents Readers Forum. Five years later he served 7 months in prison for Medicaid fraud conspiracy, which he had been duped into committing at a clinic in Harlem by two disreputable tax dodgers he had mistakenly trusted. During his incarceration, he encouraged fellow prisoner Carl Berk to submit poetry to Jewish Currents, which published some of it.

In 2014 Nat's daughter-in-law, Helene Williams Spierman Lehrman, set up a website for him at nslehrmanmd.homestead.com, including a link to some of his papers posted by Jim Gottstein at http://psychrights.org/Research/Digest/Effective/Lehrman/Lehrman.htm and the video of a talk he gave April 21, 2014 on "Psychiatry and Its Problems: A 67-Year Retrospective." Videos of his funeral are at <tinyurl.com/24Jan2020>; concerts in his memory at <tinyurl.com/14Feb2020> and <tinyurl.com/6Jun2020>. The NY premiere of the Blitzstein-Lehrman opera Sacco and Vanzetti, with The Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus (of which he was a charter member - "I'm really a shortstop," he would say, "but they needed a Second Bass") and funded mostly by The Prof. Edgar H. Lehrman Memorial Foundation for Ethics, Religion, Science & the Arts (which he founded in memory of his brother), was scheduled to take place, in his memory, staged by his step-grandson Benjamin Spierman at the Hofstra Italian-American Festival Sept. 13, 2020, which was, however, postponed until Sept. 10 & 11, 2022, when it took place at Lehman College in the Bronx.