Deceased April 17, 2020

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In Memory

Adam Steven Henschel passed away on April 17, 2020. The College did not find out about his passing until very recently, and the members of our class did not find out about Adam’s passing until Jim Kennedy ’75’s November email. I was not sure how many members of our class, if any, Adam had been in touch with over the years, especially since he graduated in 1976, a year later than most of us.

Adam’s obituary from the funeral home in New Jersey was short and gracious: “Adam was a learned, kind and gentle soul. He was a proud American. A proud Jew.” The funeral service and burial were private, and he is survived only by his sister. Scrolling through LinkedIn reveals that Adam got his J.D. from NYU Law School; he had a very successful career in the health insurance industry as a claims analyst, had lots of contacts and that he went back to school mid-career to get a master’s in library science. 

Adam came to Amherst from the Ramaz School, a Jewish preparatory school in the Yorkville section of Manhattan founded in order to serve the children of those adults who managed to escape the darkness surrounding European Jewry just prior to WWII. This alone made Adam sui generis in the Amherst student body. He was an intense, hyper-competitive guy, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that there wasn’t a single person in our class who was pursuing pre-med coursework who didn’t know who Adam was. He was consumed with keeping track of everyone’s grades, courses, plans, etc., and seemed completely caught up in the absurd zero-sum insane environment of pre-med studies in the mid-1970s. 

Late in our freshman year, I finally approached Adam to try to figure out why he needed to navigate his planned medical career this way. He confessed to me that he was under enormous pressure from his family to become a physician; he was really interested in political science and the law but felt trapped by social forces he couldn’t control. Ultimately though, Adam was able to come up with a strategy to make a permanent break with pre-med, take some much-needed time off to reboot and pivot to studies and a career that was what he really wanted. 

Despite his idiosyncrasies, Adam can and should be remembered well by all of us for having the courage to be his own man and the honesty to recognize, and change, a life choice that was not his.

Bruce Patsner, M.D., J.D. ’75