In Memoriam

Ruth Zerner

1935 – 2026

Ruth Zerner graduated from Hunter College in 1956, where she won the Thomas Hunter Prize for best undergraduate history major. She went on to earn a PhD from Cal-Berkeley in 1962, winning a Fulbright grant to work in Berlin, which led to her dissertation on German-Austrian relations in the 1880s. She joined the history faculty of Hunter in the Bronx as an instructor in 1962, then was appointed assistant professor in 1967 shortly before it became Lehman College. After 45 years of service to the college, she retired in 2007.

Besides her book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s American Experiences, and several articles on Bonhoeffer, she also wrote about diplomatic history, the Holocaust, and the history of religion. Among many other scholarly honors and activities, Ruth served on the Executive Board of the AHA’s Conference on Faith and History in the early 1970s, organized a Scholars’ Conference on the Church Struggle and the Holocaust in 1977, and helped found the New York Rainbow Group for Jewish-Christian scholarly exchange in 1982. At Lehman, she was a recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award, faculty advisor of the Student Christian Association and, in the History Department, a long-time undergraduate advisor.

Ruth spent most of the first five years that she taught at Hunter recovering from polyneuritis, which severely impaired her mobility, and she continued to walk with a cane the rest of her life. She always set a model for students and colleagues alike with her moral courage and good cheer—not to mention the tasty German cookies she always had on hand in her classes. Ruth lived in an apartment in Riverdale for many years, before moving to Mount Vernon toward the end of her life.

“I always feel better about the human race after talking with her.”

Jacob “Jack” Judd

1929 – 2026

Jacob (“Jack”) Judd received his BA in German from NYU’s Bronx campus in 1950 and his PhD in History, also from NYU, in 1959, writing his dissertation on Brooklyn politics before the Civil War. After starting as a lecturer in the School of General Studies (an evening program for adult students) at Hunter College’s Manhattan campus in 1958, he moved to its Bronx campus in 1963, where he remained a fixture in the History Department until his retirement in 1998.

He wrote two books, Fort Lee on the Palisades (1964) and Colonial America: A Basic History (1998); edited three volumes of the Van Cortlandt family papers; co-edited four volumes of essays on American industrialization, and wrote numerous articles on Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley. His teaching duties, at Lehman and the CUNY Graduate Center, included courses on New York City and State, early American history, and public history.

He also served Lehman as History chair from 1985 to 1998, Acting Dean of Arts and Humanities in 1988-89, chapter chair of the CUNY Welfare Fund (predating the PSC), and President of the Lehman Retirees Association, for which he organized numerous lunch lectures by Lehman faculty. In 2018, he received an honorary degree from Lehman for his forty years of outstanding service to the college.

He and his wife Irene moved to Ossining, NY, in 1965, and they lived in the same house into the 2020s. In an interview in 2012, Jack recalled Hunter’s early years as a co-ed college, the impact of open enrollment in the early 1970s, the fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s, and the choice he and several of his History colleagues made to stay at Lehman instead of teaching at Hunter, when the colleges split in 1968.

“It was a very, very nice group—we felt that there was a challenge to help really create something new.”