Celia Stopnicka Heller (1922–2011)

Celia Stopnicka Heller was born to a Jewish family in Stryj, Poland. In 1938, they emigrated to the USA, settling in New York. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1950, she earned a master's degree and then a PhD in sociology at Columbia University. She joined the faculty at Hunter College as an assistant professor in 1964, and became a full professor in 1972; she retired as professor emerita in 1984. While at Hunter, she also taught at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she was one of the founders of the Jewish Studies program. In addition to numerous scholarly articles and reviews, Prof. Heller was the author of several books, including Mexican American Youth: Forgotten Youth at the Crossroads (1966); New Converts to the American Dream? Mobility Aspirations of Young Mexican Americans (1971); and the editor of a textbook, Structured Social Inequality – A Reader in Comparative Social Stratification (1969). However, she is best known for her book On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars (1977, 1987, 1994), which won the National Jewish Book Award. During her emeritus years, she focused her research on Jewish life in Poland after World War II. She was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Sociological Association. She also served on the boards of various organizations such as the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science, American Associates of Bar-Ilan University, and the American Federation of Polish Jews. In 1977-1979, she served as president of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry, which presented her with its Marshall Sklare Award in 1994.