Mollie Schwartz Rosenhan, a women’s studies professor and a devoted supporter of Stanford University Hillel, died Feb. 2 of cancer in Stanford. She was 63.
Described as a woman of “emphatic views” with a “palpable hunger for intellectual stimulation,” Rosenhan had an “almost boundless love” for the Jewish Studies program she supported at Stanford, said its director, Steven Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history.
“All who knew, and all who loved Mollie Rosenhan, knew her to be an assiduous, restless consumer of culture,” Zipperstein said in an address at Stanford Feb. 10, “someone who read with an avidity that seems increasingly imperiled, someone who felt ideas were no less important than air itself and who seemed convinced that air was meaningless without them.”
Rosenhan lived longer than her doctors expected, given the advanced stages of an inoperable brain tumor.
“She was a benefactress, but she and her husband, David, were so much more than that,” said Robert Rosensweig, president of the Hillel Foundation board of directors. “They were really the center of Jewish life at Stanford. She had large numbers of people to her home at holidays, and many Jewish people at Stanford met there who otherwise wouldn’t have known each other.”
Rosenhan had been the “heart of Hillel,” he said.
She was born in Chicago in 1936 and educated at some of the most distinguished universities in the country. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University in 1957 — two years before her marriage to David Rosenhan. He is a legal authority, psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University.
She went on to receive a master’s degree in history from the University of Chicago in 1964 and a doctorate in Russian history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981.
Rosenhan was chosen to create the San Jose State University women’s studies program in 1972 and was involved with Stanford’s Center for Research on Women (now the Institute for Research on Women and Gender), becoming an affiliated scholar in the late 1970s.
Several years ago she became a lecturer in Stanford’s Structured Liberal Education Program and sat on the Hillel Foundation executive board.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her son Jack Rosenhan of Palo Alto, and sisters Abbie Kurinsky, Edie Isenstadt and Toby Ann Mayes. The Rosenhans’ only daughter, Nina Rosenhan, predeceased her parents.
Memorial donations may be made to the Institute for Research on Women and Gender or the Jewish Studies Program, Building 240, Room 1093, Stanford, CA 94305.