Memorial honors life of Penn prof

Former students, colleagues, old friends and family members filed into Houston Hall's Hall of Flags on Sunday to attend a memorial service for Penn Political Science Professor Alvin Rubinstein.

While celebrating his retirement at a lunch on Dec. 6 immediately following his last lecture of the semester, Rubinstein suffered a sudden stroke. He remained unconscious for nearly two weeks at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania before he died on Dec. 18 at age 74.

Approximately 200 people listened with tearing eyes as young and old alike praised Rubinstein for his life's devotion to scholarship, research and his students. Above all, they spoke of his love for life and his exuberance.

"I don't understand how someone so full of life with so much more to give could leave us all so suddenly," one of Rubenstein's former teaching assistants Henri Barkey said.

For the duration of the service, speakers continually stressed that Rubinstein was a scholar, an intellectual, an expert lecturer, a debater and a kind man.

Political Science Professor Henry Teune described Rubinstein's remarkable ability to attract at least 400 students every semester for nearly 40 years to his Political Science 50 course, "Contemporary International Politics" -- one of the most popular classes at Penn.

"The department and many departments elsewhere have taken their inspiration for teaching from him," Teune said. "That is his legacy."

Rubinstein specialized in Soviet politics, a difficult and controversial field. He focused on the foreign relations of the former Soviet Union and Russia with the Middle East and Central and South Asia.

Rubinstein helped define the study of political science and international relations for undergraduates at Penn. More than 15,000 students had the privilege to sit in Rubinstein's classroom, where he pushed them to excel. His passion for the subject rubbed off on his students, leading many of them to careers of their own in the field.

That inspiration was most evident in Rubinstein's hundreds of teaching assistants, from whom he encouraged and demanded the same excellence he expected of himself. As a memorial to Rubinstein, the Political Science department, which organized the service, decided to create the Alvin Z. Rubinstein Award for Excellence in Teaching to be conferred annually to a teaching assistant.

"As students, we thought Al was tough, exacting and we were scared of him," Barkey recalled. "But in fact, he was the most generous person I knew."

Members of the audience also had the opportunity to share their memories of Rubinstein. They shared glimpses into his life that showed the more intimate side of a man that many had known only as a professor.

For instance, members of the audience revealed that the seasoned academic and prolific writer was also a connoisseur of cheesecake. He loved Westerns and the only dance step he knew was the waltz.

And in addition to these personal traits, people laughingly remembered his habit of jotting down notes to himself and others on random scraps of paper.

Those scraps of paper were the foundation for more than 100 articles on political science and over 20 books, including Moscow's Third World Strategy, which was awarded the Marshall Shulman Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. Most recently, he published three articles detailing how the United States could win the war in Afghanistan, which laid out a strategy that included specific sites to bomb.

"He wrote like a historian, and he thought like a geographer," long-time friend Melvin Goodman said. "I don't know anyone who had the strategic mind like Al Rubinstein."

Some of the students who were among the last to learn from Rubinstein's teaching were in attendance - an indication that until the very end of his illustrious career, Rubinstein never lost his talent to touch lives.

"I appreciated the kind of teacher he was," College junior Janet Temko said.

Temko then added that "He took a personal interest in us as students. He wasn't a distant, cold teacher. He was really genuine."

Beyond his accomplishments in academia, however, Rubinstein was remembered as a person who was able to find true love in his life. Nearly all the speakers mentioned Rubinstein's adoration for his wife, Frankie Rubinstein.

Rubinstein's widow addressed those in attendance, weaving her own anecdotes and memories with those she had received from the hundreds of people who wrote her letters after hearing of Rubinstein's sudden death.

"It was wonderful to see you together," one letter read. "To see how gentle he was with you -- this tough-minded scholar."

Rubinstein recalled how when the couple was first dating, friends of theirs did not think the "relationship would fly," since she and her future husband disagreed on everything when they first met.

"What they didn't realize was that Al was the only person I knew who wasn't preparing his answer while he was speaking to you," she said. "He listened."

Rubinstein's ability to listen to others struck many who knew him. Although he was, by all accounts, an opinionated man, those in attendance said that he was also a fair man.

Penn Jewish Studies Professor Jeffrey Tigay recalled how Rubinstein, a strongly identified Jew with a personal love for the state of Israel and an interest in its welfare, would invite representatives of both the Arab and Jewish communities to speak in his classroom, to try to insure that his students heard both sides of the issue.

In addition to his tenure at Penn, Rubinstein researched in Israel, held fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and received awards from the Ford, Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, among several others.

And through it all, his colleagues and friends remembered, Rubinstein remained well-loved by those who knew him.

"One never heard a bad word about Alvin Rubinstein," said Harvey Sicherman, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute where Rubinstein was a senior fellow.

And according to Goodman, this love was returned by Rubinstein, whom Goodman said never spoke ill of anyone else.

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