Contribute to the Michael Gurevitch Fund
You can help Prof. Gurevitch's legacy live on. Click here to give a gift online or contact Sheila Young for more information. Funds will be used to create a scholarship in Michael's honor.

"Michael was an internationally distinguished scholar, recognised specially and equally in Israel, England and the United States.

For me personally, he was a great friend and close colleague, wonderful to work with. I have had many collaborators across my career, but of these, Michael's was the most continually long-lasting (from 1971 to almost the present) and the most productive relationship. That is why the Political Communication Division of the American Political Science Association 2005 Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award was conferred upon us JOINTLY.

I have many memories of Michael, but perhaps three stand out as most formative. It was he who in 1971 suggested that we embark on studies of the relationship between political institutions and media institutions -- which became the leitmotiv of our work thereafter. It was he who early in the 1990s suggested that we bring together our joint essays on that theme into a composite book with two fresh concluding chapters, which became the much noted "The Crisis of Public Communication." And it was he who paved the way for me to take up a semester-a-year appointment in the 1980s at the University of Maryland, which allowed me to undertake enjoyable stints of teaching, new projects of research, and yet more fruitful exchanges of writing and research with Michael.

I will miss Michael's warm and stimulating personality and intend to stay closely in touch with Pat, Ruth and Abby (and their children) in the coming months and years."

- Jay Blumler, professor emeritus

"Dear Pat

I am so sorry about Michael. He seemed wonderfully well when I had lunch with him in December. But it was so good to see him flourishing relatively shortly before his death.

No words can console you for your loss. As you know, he was enormously attached to you, and also the family. Yours was a wonderful partnership: he was completely uxorious man utterly devoted to you. He would talk nostalgically sometimes about bringing up the family in Buckinghamshire, obviously a high point of his life.

He was also a charming colleague. I edited a number of books with him from the late 1970s onwards. During all that time, I cannot recall a single occasion when he said or wrote a cross word. He was an enormously nice and easy-going person.

He was also smart. His Distinguished Career Award from the American Political Science Association is testimony to that, as are his numerous books and essays. He was a distinguished academic, but this was combined with a completely informal, modest, unstuffy style. The fact that he bedded down in our crowded flat a number of times in the early 70s, sleeping on the floor, was typical of his un-pompous style. It was one of the things that was endearing about him.

He was also a maverick. He had been reared in Cold War communication scholarship, yet one of the things that he did was to introduce marxism and critical social theory into the mainstream of the field through the Open University course that he chaired, and in the early books that he edited. It was not that he was ever an adherent of Marxism, or even sympathetic to its position. He just thought that it was tradition that had something to say, and should be invited to the table to join the conversation.

His intellectual openness and decency, his lightness and good humour, were part of what made him charming. He had a love of ideas, of debate and discussion, in addition to an empirical cast of mind. He would smile, joke, look perplexed and make jabbing argument, all the time take pleasure in the flow of discussion. That is the Michael I will remember."

- James Curran, Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths University of London

From a letter read by Michael's niece at the Israeli service:

"My Dear Uncle:

You were the man of words in our family, but today I have words for you.

When I was a child, you were my uncle from England. When I grew up, you became my uncle from America.

Hearing from Ima that you and Pat were coming for a visit always brought me great joy.

It was always a pleasure meeting you – sitting, talking, laughing together.

Although you lived in the States, you kept up with all the new Israeli comedy sketches, and it was important for you to learn all the new idioms and slang of Israeli youth.

I remember expressing my wonder at how you religiously read so many newspapers since the same things appear in all the papers, and then you explained to me how you read the newspaper. Perhaps your explanation is the reason that I am still reading “Ha Aretz.”

I know that you loved your work, but there were two other things in your life that were more important to you than work – family and good friends from Israel.

Eight years ago you managed to bring the entire family together to celebrate your 70th birthday here on the kibbutz.

Two years from now we could have celebrated your 80th birthday with even a bigger family group.

Today you brought the whole family together from all corners of the earth, and we are all very sad.

We promise to keep our big family together.

I love you and miss you."

- Hagit Shapiro, niece of Michael Gurevitch

"It is a terrible loss for our journalism school and our university, and for our field of scholarship. And I myself lose a great, highly valued and warm friend of 25 years. He was and will remain a towering figure in schools of our kind, all around the world.We will miss him in so many ways. He was an original. He was one of the first two or three people I hired when I was dean (with Jay Blumler, too). He brought perspectives to what we do that enriched all of us.

I always looked forward to our brief encounters in the halls, and sometimes I just went up to his crowded fourth-floor office to sit down with no particular reason and talk. Sit down if I could find a surface that was not built high with books about to topple, maybe one of them falling against his big poster showing Einstein on a bicycle

I once asked him to go to lunch with me and see the home of the man who founded the university, and we would eat nearby. It was a five-hour lunch! I felt like a kidnapper. It was all just talk, no agenda. A wonderful memory.

He often educated me, a journalist who came in with no credentials as a full-time academician, about what was happening in our scholarly world. Once I was sitting on the front steps of the Journalism Building talking to a student. He came by, greeted me and I heard him saying, in his usual quizzical way, as he passed by, "Talking to students. . . ." He later asked me what that was all about. Always curious . I always sought him out early in a search for a faculty member to learn what stature and value a particular scholar would have. In my first days as dean I asked another professor, Haluk Sahin, to name the best, leading figures in our scholarly world. world-wide. That was how Michael came to my attention, and Jay. "

- Reese Cleghorn, Professor and former dean of the College of Journalism

"When I talked to colleagues from other universities, they often would comment that they had "read Gurevitch." We were very fortunate to had have an international scholar of his reputation in our midst for nearly three decades. I sat in on Michael's class some years ago. He showed unforgettable passion for the subject matter, much of which he had originated himself. Michael loved what he was doing and inspired others to follow his example. Apart from being a world-famous communication theorist, he was one of the kindest individuals I have ever known. While he readily saw the weaknesses in students' work, he displayed tremendous compassion toward fledging scholars during his service on scores of Ph.D. committees. I truly do not know how our Ph.D. program will get along without him. I hope that a room in our new building can be named for him. On a personal note I considered him a good friend - someone I always could count on to give me good advice. The college will be a different - and colder - place without him."

-Maurine Beasley, Professor

"I first met Michael Gurevitch in 1982 when he was considering the offer to come to the University of Maryland. After he joined the university in 1983, I had the chutzpah to invite him and his wife to dinner: I did not yet really know this great man and this great couple, but I knew of his distinguished career. However, I wasn’t sure what kind of a person he was.

Pretty quickly I knew him: distinguished, certainly, but with attributes that we may not associate with such distinction: erudite but humble, serious but playful, busy but always with time for friends and colleagues and students.

He and Pat became my close friends. He was always inquisitive about my strange research and a willing listener to my stories. Once when I was going to deliver a lecture on humor, he sighed and, teaching and affirming and provoking in his paradoxical way, said that humor was indeed the most serous topic of all. And when I helped put together his exercise machine, making it completely unusable, his justified consternation seriously injured me; I made up for this blow to my ego by continually reminding him that he couldn’t get his VCR/DVD player to work.

He reminded me several times that when the television announcer intoned “It’s 11:00 p.m.; do you know where your children are?” he would always respond, quite loudly, “Thank God, no!” And he was constantly in mock delight at my inability to learn Hebrew, amused and feigning astonishment that I tripled my Hebrew vocabulary in four months, going from three to nine words.

And in this season of Passover I recall Michael’s great joy in singing in Hebrew at the seder.

Michael found in his dissertation that in 100 days his average participant came in contact with 500 people. But contacts differ in their memorability. For those who came in contact with Michael, it was an experience, an event, and often an epiphany. Mark Levy, a former colleague, described encounters with Michael this way:

He taught me a lot of what I know. He had this wonderful ability to look at your research and ask, in a very gentle almost bemused way, a question that went to the heart of the matter and for which you almost never had prepared a very good answer.

Michael was truly one of a kind, and the many tributes to Michael tell us about his life.

In these tributes his role as a scholar is revealed by these words:

Towering
Original
Curious
Mentor
International
Brilliant
A giant
Rigor
Insight
and Accessible—as a writer, teacher, and advisor.

Leo Rosten, the author of The Joys of Yiddish , defines a mensch as “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being ‘a real mensch’ is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous.” Michael was all that and more: His colleagues and students and friends reveal his menschlikeit with these words:
Friend
Kind
Conscience
Droll
Fatherly
Courteous
Ironic
Wry
Grace
Humor
Inspiring
Honest
Generous
Warm
Open
Compassion
Wit
and Accessible—like a member of one’s family.

And he loved and was loved. He loved his work, knowledge of the arcane and the esoteric and the exotic, loved his students, his classes, conversation, jokes, stories. He was loved by his colleagues, his students, his friends, and, his greatest loves, his family, Pat and his children and sons-in-law, and grandchildren.

I will miss this wonderful man."

-Ed Fink, Professor, School of Communication - University of Maryland

"Professor Gurevitch had a remarkable mind, droll sense of humor, and fatherly way that I shall miss a lot. I already miss the way he spoke up when a proposed change threatened to undermine scholarly rigor -- he was always courteous, usually ironic, never shrill, and generally right. Michael probably would have scoffed if someone described him as a conscience of the College, but that he was. He was such an ivory tower man that it's easy to forget he was also a brave soldier who fought in three wars for the country where he will be buried."

-Chris Hanson, Associate Professor

"I am deeply heartbroken at the sad news of Prof Gurevitch's demise. I have composed at heart a tribute to him on my blog, which I shall request you to kindly go through when time permits:

http://saswat.com/blog/files/gurevitch.html

For me, it is a terrible, personal loss. Yet in his absence, I am certain all of us shall aspire to live upto his expectations in every manner possible. "

-Saswat Pattanayak, Ph.D. Student

"I became a doctoral student after more than 30 years as a working newspaper reporter. During all those years in the field, I never gave a thought to the impact of my craft -- not until I had the privilege of taking several of Michael's courses. I loved being in his classes; he enabled me to look at journalism through an entirely new lens.

Moreover, he always remained open to the ideas of his students. He welcomed (after voicing a few wry comments of resistance), for example, a lively classroom talk about media effects from a feminist perspective (specifically a discussion of Gaye Tuchman's essay, ``The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media'') led by Kathy McAdams, and me. (He even invited me to come back and speak about my Tuchman paper to the doctoral students who came after, and I was thrilled to do so.)

Later, I had the great pleasure of getting to know him as a colleague, a valued member of my doctoral committee -- and a friend. What a remarkable teacher, scholar and human being!

I really will miss him.

- Marlene Cimons, Ph.D. Student

"When I joined the faculty 25 years ago fresh from a career in newspapers, Michael Gurevitch and I became what seemed at first unlikely friends. He was ivory tower; I was newsroom. He was the big thinker; I copyedited. But his boundless curiosity transcended those kinds of borders. He loved to discuss almost everything, with grace, humor, and those signature flashes of dazzling insight that made us all marvel. His thoughts ranged from brilliant to baffling, but his collegial kindness was unending. For example, he quickly brought me into a project that resulted in a book chapter that contributed immeasurably to my tenure application. The copyeditor in me knows you're supposed to avoid cliches like the plague. But if the phrase "a gentleman and a scholar" ever applied, it was truly personified by Michael Gurevitch."

- Carl Sessions Stepp, Professor

"My memories of Michael are simple. He was a great teacher.

I was a shy, overwhelmed new Ph.D. student working on papers for his classes. When I'd meet with him one-on-one, I'd see the stacks of papers and feel like I had entered the sacred world of a great scholar.

Then, he would hook me up to one paper or one book that seemed to capture a thought I was forming before I knew I was forming it. I'd read it and follow the thread. Each time, my intellectual life was enriched immensely. It was great teaching.

There were always smiles and kindnesses along the way.

I will miss him.

- Lane Williams, BYU-Idaho Department of Communication

"My first visit as an applicant to the University of Maryland was to Dr. Gurevitch's office. His humble smile and casual wave to sit down made me somehow feel right at home, even in that cavernous attic of papers and books. He was the kind of professor who was curious about what you were doing, who took the time to sit and talk and think. He was my indispensable tour guide through world of international media, an invaluably cherished mentor and advisor. My dissertation research at the BBC would not have been possible without him.

I am teaching communication theory now, and was preparing to invite him yet again to speak to my class about Uses and Gratifications this semester. He had declined last time; he wasn't feeling well, but would I like to have lunch? That missed opportunity will always leave me with a sense of yearning to close the loop, to take the time to be the kind of professor he was, the kind with a smile and a wave to sit down. Dr. Gurevitch, wherever you are, I owe you lunch."

- Brecken Chin Swartz, Ph.D.

"The news about Michael that came through to me via email was devastating--I literally called out from my desk chair. Not only did I--apparently like so many others?--assume that he was on the mend, but the last time I saw him at Maryland he was not just well but his insightful, engaging, benign self (a characterization that might seem odd to call attention to until you've sat on a few PhD defenses and you learn how valuable an "insightful" AND a "benign" presence is!). I now see, with some disbelief, that Michael was 77. When the news came over to Europe and a few people here in Austria asked me his age, I had said, "Oh, maybe late 60s? Maybe 70?" He wore his age lightly--not only physically, but intellectually. He was always in my 7 years at Maryland immensely curious, eager to hear the new, invigorated by both large and small bits of information, and unconsciously able to make connections that others only came to see because of his perception. Michael was brilliant and accessible, generous and quirky, droll and humane. He was the leader in the field, but he worked to bring you up to his scholarly heights, rather than remind you of how far you had to go. His death is not just a personal and institutional loss, but a global one."

- Susan Moeller, Associate Professor

" "What a gift he was to us all. I had read much of his work before I came to Maryland, and I wondered what the great man would be like. I could never have imagined that warm and unforgettable character, so caring with his students and also with young assistant professors who also had a lot to learn. Surely he is now with Moses and the prophets, talking about great ideas over lunch."

- Kathy McAdams, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of Journalism

"I first met Michael in the spring of 1981 at Jay Blumler's Centre for Television Research at the University of Leeds in England. My last visit with him was at a conference in Taipei, Taiwan, in July of 2006. He was his usual insightful and humorous self there, and my wife and I enjoyed being with him and his wife, Pat, at the conference meals and during some sightseeing tours. On one of these tours, when we were outside in the hot sun, Michael bought a distinctive straw hat from a local stand to protect his rather bald head and proceeded to wear it for most of the rest of the day on the bus and off. I will never forget how funny he looked, and how well that hat symbolized his unassuming and unpretentious approach to everything he did, despite his many achievements and tributes as a distinguished scholar. I will miss his wisdom and wit, and his keen insights, very much. It is hard to believe that he is gone."

- David Weaver, Roy W. Howard Research Professor at Indiana University

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