DUKER, ABRAHAM GORDON

DUKER, ABRAHAM GORDON (1907–1987), U.S. educator and historian. Duker, who was born in Rypin, Poland, went to the U.S. in 1923. He served on the library staff at the Jewish Theological Seminary (1927–33) and was research librarian at the Graduate School of Jewish Social Work (1934–38). From 1938 to 1943 he was on the staff of the American Jewish Committee, serving inter alia as the editor of the Contemporary Jewish Record (1938–41). He was also an editor of the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (1939–43), Reconstructionist, and Jewish Social Studies, a quarterly. Duker was president of the Chicago Spertus College of Judaica (1956–62) and from 1963 director of libraries and professor of history and social institutions at Ye-shiva University. His works include education surveys, books, and articles in his main fields of interest, Polish-Jewish relations and American Jewish sociology.   His books include Jewish Emancipation under Attack: Its Legal Recession until the Present War (with B. Weinryb, 1942) and Emancipation and Counter Emancipation (with Meir Ben Hurin, 1974). He also wrote about religious trends in American Jewish life (1949), Jewish community relations (1952), socio-psychological trends in the American Jewish community since 1900 (1954), and the impact of Zionism on American Jewry (1958). (Sefton D. Temkin / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)