In Memoriam
Roy L. Felshin
Roy Felshin
1964 Yale graduation
Our classmate The Reverend Douglas Grandgeorge ’64 reported on May 10, 2025:
I regret to inform you that our classmate Roy Lincoln Felshin died on February 20, 2025, in New York City. What started as a back pain proved to be a cancer. Roy may have been the youngest member of our class, as he was born in 1944.
I officiated at a memorial service held on April 26 at the Theatre for the New City in Manhattan. It was attended by about 100 people, including his wife, Stephanie Felshin.
No obituary is available, but as remembrances we have reproduced his essays from our 60th Reunion Book and 50th Reunion Book.
Essay, 60th Reunion Book
by Roy Felshin
May 2024
I have been attending Class of 1964 reunions for some 25 years, and it's been apparent that classmates are tolerant and accepting of each other; there aren't many conflicts based on ethnic background, religion, social status, or politics. But it was quite a different story, as I recall, when we were at Yale in the early 1960's. In our younger days, it was tough to be part of a minority or to be labeled as "different."
When I first arrived at Yale, I was in the minority in several respects. I was considered to be Jewish on ethnic and cultural grounds and reflexively accepted that designation, although I had no religious affiliation. Secondly, I was a financial-aid student; my family had a below-average income by Yale standards. And finally, I was a "red-diaper baby," a child of Communist parents (that term was unknown in our college days, but came into popular use in the late 1960's).
Among these various challenges, I received the greatest hostility for being Jewish, my least significant characteristic! I had led a sheltered life, growing up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and school district in Far Rockaway, Queens, and didn't encounter antisemitism until I came to Yale; then it was almost an everyday occurrence. I was amazed that so many supposedly intelligent people could be so prejudiced. On the positive side, I saw the prejudice receding and a more tolerant atmosphere emerging during the four years we were on campus; on the negative side, those first few semesters were difficult.
My most distressing experience occurred in the fall of 1961, shortly after the beginning of our sophomore year. I was sharing a suite at Timothy Dwight College with two other Jewish guys, John Friedberg and Rick Riman. Riman and I were at home one evening when there was a knock on the door, and we opened it to find a burning wooden cross! It had been placed there by three antisemites from the Class of 1963 who lived on the floor above us; we could hear them laughing uproariously, then slamming their door behind them. Riman and I agreed we would keep mum for the time being — we didn't want to give them the satisfaction of seeing us upset.
That reasoning made sense to us, but when Friedberg came in shortly afterward and heard the story, he blew his top! He marched up the stairs to shout at our offending neighbors through their closed door, then returned to our room and chewed out Riman and myself for not reacting like he did and fighting back. This incident and other personality clashes between me and Friedberg created a deep rift, which was not resolved until I wrote to him 40 years later and we agreed to bury the hatchet.
In addition to being in the Jewish minority at Yale, I was also in the much smaller minority of Yale students with Communist family connections, my Dad having been a Party member since the 1920's. The year that we started college, 1960, was a conservative time, and like many left-leaning people, I was both cautious in expressing political opinions, and "in the closet" concerning my family's politics. I found the political atmosphere at Yale very difficult to deal with and responded for a time by becoming apolitical.
That all turned around in the years after I left Yale, when I became successively an antiwar activist, an independent socialist, and an environmentalist, all of which I remain to this day. Around age 35 I developed a great fascination with my family's political history, and it has become a lifelong research project and avocation. Is there a book in store? Time will tell.
Essay, 50th Reunion Book
by Roy Felshin
May 2014
About a year after graduation from Yale, my life took an unexpected change in direction. Whereas I had been “apolitical” at Yale, I began to seriously question my country’s foreign policies in the spring of 1965, while attending graduate school at UNC/Chapel Hill, and a bit later started going to demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. Over the next six years, I progressed from a “pure and simple” antiwar activist to being also a civil-rights activist, a partisan of the New Left, a socialist, a Marxist, and a radical environmentalist.
For many in the New Left it was just a passing phase, but in my case left-wing activism became a dominant motif in my adult life, surpassing my work (I had a primary career in urban planning, and a second one as an archivist) and family life (I have been married 20 years, but have no children). My period of greatest activity was probably from 1980 to 1992, when the multiple wars in Central America were my main issue. In political terms, I identify with the environmentally oriented “Greens,” rather than the older leftist tendency, the “Reds.”
Questions of identity have been important to me throughout my life. When I first arrived at Yale in 1960, I was amazed at the enormous importance my classmates placed on the fact that I was Jewish, whereas I had always considered that to be a minor detail. In my hometown of Far Rockaway, Queens, where people knew a little more about where I was coming from, they knew me as:
- the guy who never attended Hebrew school, and who was rarely seen in a synagogue;
- the guy whose parents were said to be Communists . . .
In fact, that was not just a rumor; that story was mostly true! My father was a lifelong member of the Communist Party, and my mother was a former member. My father was also a full-time political functionary, directing a small publishing firm that published the work of Communist-leaning writers.
My father was my biggest childhood role model, but it was never assumed that I would follow closely in his footsteps. On the contrary, although Dad was a radical in his own life, he was an apostle of conformity where his children were concerned. Left-wing politics were OK for his generation, he seemed to suggest, but for mine it was more important to be polite and deferential at all times; be the best student at school; and strive for a conventional, middle-class definition of success. It was my father who persuaded me to apply to Yale.
I found the challenge of adjusting to life at Yale incredibly difficult, and although there were multiple reasons for this, one major reason was that Yale was a conservative place in 1960, and I felt I was part of an unwelcome political minority. My coping mechanisms included avoiding political discussions, adopting the pose of an “objective social scientist,” pushing any radical ideas I might have had into a deep closet, and abandoning some of those ideas altogether. I became more and more conservative the longer I stayed at Yale, until by 1964, I had become a middle-of-the-road Democrat.
That all changed in April 1965, when I decided that LBJ’s policy of all-out war in Vietnam made no sense and had to be opposed. I regretted having ignored the peace movement earlier, and sought to join it now to make up for lost time. That fall, I tracked down the small but scrappy antiwar/New Left community in Chapel Hill, and over the next two years became one of its most active members.
In 1967, I abandoned my quest for an academic career and moved back to New York to begin a new career in urban planning, as well as to participate in the city’s intellectual and political life. I have lived in midtown Manhattan now for 46 years.
The political path that I eventually followed was somewhat different from my father’s. Dad was an unrepentant “Red”; I became an independent socialist and a “Green.” He gave short shrift to the environment, feminism, and gay rights; for me, those issues were primary. Nevertheless, Dad and I remained personally close until he died in 1983.
Reflecting on my family’s unusual story, I developed a deep interest in history, and actually became an archivist so that I could study that subject. Over time, I have started to think of myself as a historian of the American Left, as well as an active participant.