My Dear father passed away this Monday July 21st, peacefully in his sleep at 3:15 in the morning. Here is a wonderful obituary we put together: Donald F. Goodman, professor emeritus of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York City, died July 21 in his home in Saint James, New York after a yearlong bout with pancreatic cancer. Born in 1933 to immigrant parents from Lithuania, he grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut and payed his way through school and finally to Yale University, first in the School of Music and then transferring to the College to pursue Russian Studies, by playing in jazz clubs when his mother believed he was playing at church functions. While at Yale, he was a founding member of the Yale Russian Chorus which was the first American cultural organization to travel to the Soviet Union on private initiative. After Yale, he spent a year in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar before returning to the United States where he soon began teaching at the fledgling State University College on Long Island in Oyster Bay, which would become, in the years that followed, Stony Brook University. While finishing his PhD. D. at Fordham University, he taught at Oyster Bay and then at Stony Brook before moving to John Jay College as it grew out of the New York City Police Academy. For the remainder of his academic career he taught notably in the Thematic Studies Program at John Jay which much like Oyster Bay emphasized teaching students in smaller classes and in close collaboration with fellow professors. Marked throughout his life by a love for those who were disadvantaged or in other ways ill-served by the criminal justice system, he devoted himself to studying and working to improve the US prison system. For many years he coordinated and facilitated the Alternatives to Violence Project in Greenhaven Maximum Security Prison. AVP is a Quaker and prisoner-inspired program which began in the 1970s as an attempt to keep children and young people from entering the prison system and which has grown, through the years, into an international program led both within prisons and in areas of conflict such as Northern Ireland, Israel and South Africa. He also facilitated workshops for several years as part of the Human Dignity Program, a joint venture of John Jay College, the FBI and the US State Department to train high-level police of the ex-Soviet bloc as well as various African and Asian countries. Ever enthusiastic about learning and teaching, he rarely missed beginning his day with the New York Times crossword puzzle. He is survived by his loving second wife Margo (née Kinnicutt) Goodman, psychotherapist, and his children, John, monk of the Taizé Community in eastern France, Robert, financial analyst in New York City, Daphne Youree Djordjevic, photographer, and her husband Andrija, and Luke Youree, groundskeeper and poet, and his partner Helen. Donald Goodmans first wife, Maria (née Tscherne) Goodman, born in a German-speaking region of what is now southern Slovenia, died in 1981. He is also survived by his beloved grandchildren, Victoria, John and Katherine Goodman and Aleksandar and Nikola Djordjevic. The funeral mass will be held on Thursday, July 24th at 10:30 am at Saint James Roman Catholic Church, 429 Route 25A, Setauket, N.Y. 11733. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Alternatives to Violence Project New York: avpny.org/
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 14:08:37 +0000
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