Biography
Samuel Schafler was born in the Bronx, New York in 1929. His father, Benjamin Schafler, and mother, Ethel (née Schnapp) owned a grocery store. Schafler studied at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, the Talmudical Academy and the Teachers Institute of Yeshiva University. Schafler grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He had one sister, Pearl. In 1951, he married Sara (née Edell) of Toronto, then a student at the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, where Schafler was studying for the rabbinate. They had six children.
In 1950, Schafler graduated with honors from the City College of New York, where he was awarded the Cromwell Medal and the Nelson P. Mead Prize in History. Schafler was ordained as a Conservative rabbi in 1952. He pursued graduate work in Jewish history and education at Columbia University.
Read more about this topic: Samuel Schafler
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)