|
Andrew R. Heinze (born 19 January 1955) is an American playwright, non-fiction author, and scholar of American history. Growing up in New Jersey in a close-knit Jewish family, he left home at fourteen to attend Blair Academy, graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, and moved to California. He did his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, training in American History, with an emphasis on the history of race, immigration and the history of American Jews. During his academic career he taught both American and Jewish history at several American universities and was a tenured professor of History at the University of San Francisco, where he was director of the Swig Judaic Studies Program, holding the Mae and Benjamin Swig Chair and creating several new programs including an Ulpan and a Judaic studies lecture series. He has written extensively about the American Jewish social, intellectual and cultural experience, and is the author of ''Adapting to Abundance'' (1990), the first full-length study of the impact of American consumer culture on an immigrant group, as well as ''Jews and the American Soul'' (2004), which hypothesizes that Jewish intellectuals provided a framework that came to shape the American psyche. He co-authored two books that deal with race and ethnicity, and he has contributed to a wide variety of scholarly journals as well as to popular newspapers, periodicals and online publications. His books and articles have been widely reviewed, praised in the scholarly community, and cited extensively. In 2006, feeling creatively stifled by the confines of academic writing, he left his tenured full professorship at USF and moved to New York City to begin playwriting. He has written one-act as well as full-length plays, many of them focusing on the historical and Jewish themes that had absorbed him in his former career; these include a comedy about Moses and his family, a drama about a New York Jewish family adjusting to life after World War II, and a drama about an Israeli Russian immigrant who, in desperation, has turned to prostitution. His plays have been produced Off-Broadway in New York City and around the United States; several have won awards in national playwriting competitions. == Early life and education == Andrew R. Heinze was born on January 19, 1955 into a close-knit Jewish family in Passaic, New Jersey. His paternal grandmother (also born in Passaic) was one of eight children born to a self-made Polish Jew who had supplied coal to the city of Passaic. Heinze memorialized his grandmother in an article he wrote for ''The Jewish Daily Forward'' shortly after she died at the age of 101; he described her as a flamboyant, stylish, and impeccably dressed woman, and he recalled that after his grandfather (her husband of 60 years) had died, she "kept on going, honestly confessing her loneliness but unflaggingly maintaining her enthusiasm for life and for us." He quoted her as frequently giving him the reminder, "We are 100% Americans, dear, always remember that!" Heinze has a close relationship with his parents; in his acknowledgements of his second book, he wrote, "I have been blessed with extraordinarily devoted parents who enabled me, as a child, to feel at home in the world." His mother, he said, is a woman of "gentle disposition, sensitivity to human qualities that others overlook, vivacious imagination, love of art, and whimsical sense of humor," and his father he described as a man of "great loyalty, heartfelt devotion, and frequent praise () helped me set my sights high and pick myself up when fallen low." At age fourteen Heinze won a scholarship to Blair Academy, a private boarding school in Warren County, New Jersey. His experience at Blair was formative. It was there that he first discovered a fascination with both writing and history. In a 2005 interview, he recalled that he had relished the mental stimulation his Blair teachers had given him, that they took his intellectual growth very seriously, and that he still recalled distinct lectures from many of his classes. He honed his writing skills working for Blair's school newspaper; he started as a reporter doing local news and human interest stories and ended up as the paper's editor-in-chief. Graduating from Blair in 1973, he won a Bodman Foundation scholarship which enabled him to attend Amherst College, where he received his BA in 1977, graduating Magna Cum Laude. After graduating from Amherst, he left the East Coast, moved to California, and attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley where he received his MA (1980) and his PhD (1987) in American History. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Andrew R. Heinze」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|