In 1978, I attended a Summer Sociolinguistics Institute at Champaign-Urbana and Professor Fishman was my teacher.
Joshua A. Fishman (1926-2015)
A beloved teacher and influential scholar, Joshua A. Fishman passed away peacefully in his Bronx home, on Monday evening,
March 1, 2015. He was 88 years old. Joshua A. Fishman leaves behind
his devoted wife of over 60 years, Gella Schweid Fishman, three sons and
daughters-in-law, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. But
he also leaves behind thousands of students throughout the world who
have learned much from him about sociology of language, the field he
founded, and also about the possibility of being a generous and
committed scholar to language minority communities. As he once said, his
life was his work and his work was his life.
Joshua
A. Fishman, nicknamed Shikl, was born in Philadelphia PA on July 18,
1926. Yiddish was the language of his childhood home, and his father
regularly asked his sister, Rukhl, and him: ?What did you do for Yiddish
today?? The struggle for Yiddish in Jewish life was the impetus for his
scholarly work. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania
with a Masters degree in 1947, he collaborated with his good friend, Max
Weinreich, the doyen of Yiddish linguistics, on a translation of
Weinreich?s history of Yiddish. And it was through Yiddish that he came
to another one of his interests ??that of bilingualism. In 1948 he
received a prize from the YIVO Institute for Yiddish Research for a
monograph on bilingualism. Yiddish and bilingualism were interests he
developed throughout his scholarly life.
After
earning a PhD in social psychology from Columbia University in 1953,
Joshua Fishman worked as a researcher for the College Entrance
Examination Board. This experience focused his interest on educational
pursuits, which eventually led to another strand of his scholarly work
?? that on bilingual education. It was around this time that he taught
what came to be the first sociology of language course at The City
College of New York. In 1958, he was appointed associate professor of
human relations and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and
two years later, moved to Yeshiva University. At Yeshiva University he
was professor of psychology and sociology, Dean of the Ferkauf Graduate
School of Social Science and Humanities, Academic Vice President, and
Distinguished University Research Professor of Social sciences. In 1988,
he became Professor Emeritus and began to divide the year between New
York and California where he became visiting professor of education and
linguistics at Stanford University. In the course of his career, Fishman
held visiting appointments at over a dozen universities in the USA,
Israel, and the Philippines, and fellowships at the Center for Advanced
study (Stanford), the East West Center (Hawai?i) the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced
Study, and the Israel Institute for Advanced Study.
