Ary was my dissertation advisor, and in that regard he was outstanding. Since graduating from the New School, I’ve actually come to appreciate more and more just how much support and guidance Ary provided. As another friend noted, he was a great and generous mentor. I’ll always be grateful to Ary for his helping in getting me through that long haul of finishing the dissertation.

One small example, which, much to my students’ amusement, I mention at least once a semester was a project that he had me undertake on parking in New York City. I learned more about alternate side parking than nearly anyone in the City that semester. Ary left no stone unturned in examining the politics of parking. He had me go through pages and pages of city council hearings concerning the suspension of parking rules. We interviewed one of the original deputy commissioners of parking. By the end of the term I knew how many miles of curb there were in the city, and how much of it got cleaned on a weekly basis. The reason for all of this was that Ary had theorized that the suspension of parking rules for religious observance paralleled process of incorporation for minority religious communities in the city over time. It was a neat little bit of theorizing, and true to Ary’s nature, it touched directly on the real lives of people. It spoke to the way in which he rooted his scholarship in the human experience, whether that was the world historical experience of refugees and displaced people, the meaning of citizenship, or the daily push and pull of life in New York City.

I learned a lot from Ary, and I’ll always think of myself as lucky to have the opportunity to work with him, and get to know him.