Tina Levitan


Tina Nellie Levitan was an American writer, who wrote mainly about topics related to Jewish history.

Early life

Levitan was born in Boston and attended the Boston Hebrew College Prozdor. At age 17 she moved to Brooklyn, N.Y. with her parents. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1944, winning the Jane Fischel Memorial Prize for the Best Essay on the "Philosophy of Traditional Judaism". She also received a Bachelor’s of Education degree from the Herzliah Hebrew Teachers Seminary in New York.

Writer and columnist

Levitan’s books consistently explored the intersection of some aspect of history, usually American history, with Judaism.
In 1967, when preparing The Laureates: Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize, Levitan wrote to Richard Feynman, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, requesting a biographical sketch and a black and white photograph. Feynman wrote back saying that his inclusion in the book would be inappropriate because at the age of 13, he had converted to non-religious views. When she wrote a follow-up letter saying that she intended to include not only professing Jews but also those of Jewish origins because “they usually have inherited their valuable heredity elements and talents from their people,” he replied that “it is evil and dangerous to maintain… that there is a true Jewish race or specific Jewish hereditary character… to select for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory… such theoretical views were used by Hitler.” Feynman was not included in the book.
Levitan also lectured frequently, and had over 450 articles and reviews on American Jewish history and Jewish life published in both scholarly and popular Jewish journals, including a weekly column on Jewish history in The Jewish Press from 1974 to 1977.
She was elected to the Hunter College Hall of Fame in 1979.
Levitan died in New York City on June 9, 2014.

Works