Marty Herman loved stories and people, and he loved telling stories about people, usually with clever punchlines. His memory was astonishing, and his mind remained sharp and engaged until the end. Marty expressed love easily and gratitude often. He cared deeply about living an ethical, socially connected life. Although the news often dismayed him, he never surrendered to cynicism, gave up on the people or institutions he cared about, or lost his sense of humor. “We are all in this together” was a favorite expression. Marty had a lifelong talent for cultivating community and he cherished the many wonderful friends he made throughout his life. He had a passion for understanding meaning and how it was communicated — whether through musical performance or religious practice.

Martin (“Marty”) Herman was born on September 3, 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, to Bertha and Hyman Herman, members of the Eastern European Jewish immigrant diaspora and founders of the Bay Ridge Jewish Center in 1926. The Hermans’ love for Jewish observance and community filled the childhood of their adored only son, lovingly called “Bunny.” Marty’s father, an attorney, had a beautiful singing voice and often served as cantor for their cash-strapped synagogue where his mother, a homemaker, participated in extensive volunteer work. Marty’s love for music and other forms of culture was encouraged by his parents, who took him to the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Yiddish theater, and New York’s many museums. For his tenth birthday, Marty requested tickets to Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” at the Met. It remained one of his favorite operas until the end of his life.

Marty attended Stuyvesant High School during World War II, also working as an “office boy” for an advertising agency in the Empire State Building and frequently staying overnight in the Manhattan apartment of his Uncle Victor and Aunt Alice, which made his subway commute to school much shorter. He enrolled in the College of William and Mary in 1946, where he majored in Fine Arts and English and studied alongside numerous returning veterans, an experience that permanently influenced Marty’s ideas about how higher education could — and should — change lives. After his first year of college, Marty took a job as a tennis counselor at Camp Mayfair in Hunter, New York, where he met and fell in love with Judith (“Judy”) Fine, another Brooklynite whose love of music and Judaism matched his own. They were married at the Bay Ridge Jewish Center on January 27 1951 because January 27 was Mozart’s birthday. They had two daughters: Ellen in 1957 and Rebecca in 1959. Marty and Judy both relished being parents and were extremely proud of their daughters’ interests and achievements. Judy died in 2020, just short of their 70th wedding anniversary.

Marty began graduate school at Yale in 1950, intending to study with Leo Schrade, a German-born musicologist, and pursue a PhD in music history. His studies were interrupted in 1952 when he was drafted into the Army during the Korean War. Years later, he learned that members of his draft board were convicted of taking bribes for unauthorized deferments. Marty, entitled to a deferment because he was both a full-time student and married, was a warm body the corrupt officials needed to make their quota. After basic training, Marty was assigned to a course in basic electronics and the operation and repair of a radar system called the M-33 Antiaircraft Fire Control System.

Much of his two-year military service was spent at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where Judy joined him after graduating from Hunter College. Marty worked as a radar instructor until 1954. Because the GI Bill required school enrollment within a year of discharge, and the third year of his Yale program was not available at the time, Yale awarded him an MA and Marty enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Hans David, a Bach scholar, and Louise Cuyler, a leader of the American Musicological Society who was known for mentoring doctoral students and making the UM musicology program one of the best in the country.

The subject of Marty’s dissertation was Jean François Le Sueur, a French composer of operas, oratorios, and sacred music who also taught composition to Hector Berlioz, a well-known 19th-century orchestral composer and conductor. Marty and Judy both became devoted Francophiles. In Ann Arbor, they posted a street scene of Montmartre on the living room wall of their North Campus apartment and Marty told everyone to “think France.” They dreamed of going to France and their dream came true. Marty lived with his family in Paris and explored Europe — first in 1960-61 on a Fulbright and again during a sabbatical in 1971-72. During these years, his interests were concentrated on recovering and interpreting the music written for the festivals of the French Revolution. Steeped in Jewish ritual, it is not surprising that Marty was drawn to the beauty and majesty of rituals of many different kinds.

Marty’s first academic job was in the Music Department at Colorado College from 1955 to 1959. He and Judy loved Colorado Springs, where they found a small but welcoming Jewish community and a thriving music scene, and they returned to Colorado during several summers in the late 1960s, during which Marty taught summer courses at the University of Denver. But it was his appointment at Wayne State University’s Monteith College in Fall 1962, and the family’s move to Detroit and decision to remain in the city, that shaped Marty’s career as well as his family and community experiences for the remainder of his long life.

Always inclined to think about music as an aspect of culture, rather than only as a craft to be taught to aspiring performers or composers, Monteith provided a nurturing environment for Marty’s broad questions about music history and its meaning in ritual and social life. What qualities made music “musical”? How did melodies and texts interact to evoke emotion? Why did musical settings lend themselves to distinct meanings? With his beloved Monteith colleagues, Marty helped to pioneer a novel approach to undergraduate general education by creating interdisciplinary courses that melded philosophy, art, theater, literature, and music. Supported initially by a Ford Foundation grant, Monteith was a model for a number of other innovative experiments in higher education that flourished during the 1960s.

During a budget crisis in 1975, the Wayne State University Board of Governors decided to phase out Monteith College, ostensibly to save money, a distressing process that inspired Marty to do everything he could to find new homes at Wayne for all of his Monteith colleagues who wished to stay. Monteith’s termination also led Marty into a series of administrative roles in Wayne’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences that kept him busy defending humanities teaching and research until his retirement in 1994.

Marty was always a committed Jew. From their earliest days in Detroit, all members of the Herman family attended Adat Shalom, which was in walking distance of the family home in Northwest Detroit. Adat Shalom left the city for the suburbs in 1973, along with most of the city’s Jewish population. Marty always lamented that the synagogue did not keep its promise to maintain a presence in Detroit after it moved, a failure that turned him into a self-described “disheartened Jewish nomad.” He had occasionally visited the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue and met Rabbi Noah Gamze, but it was not until he started saying kaddish for his own parents in 1989 that he joined the Downtown Synagogue. Marty was still working at Wayne State University. During his year of mourning, he felt extremely grateful for the proximity of the synagogue and its daily services.

He also appreciated its uniqueness — Rabbi Gamze paid Jewish residents of the Cass Corridor $2 each to make a minyan — and threw himself into the daunting project of sustaining the last free-standing synagogue in the city of Detroit. In the two decades after 1990, and especially after Rabbi Gamze retired in 2001, this was challenging. The Downtown Synagogue building was in terrible disrepair, its membership almost non-existent, and its financial resources depleted. Marty worked with a small group of other devoted members to keep the synagogue on life support. They found emergency financing for a new furnace when the heat stopped working and coped with dangerous and unsanitary conditions on the floor above the sanctuary. Marty served as de facto Ritual Director for many years, leading weekly shabbat and holiday services. The key turning point came in 2005, when the board and congregation seriously contemplated selling the building, an outcome that was only narrowly averted.

By 2010, a renaissance was well underway at the Downtown Synagogue, thanks to an influx of young congregants, many of them professionals, who took a serious interest in revitalizing Detroit and worked hard to repair the synagogue’s organizational and fiscal health and rebuild its membership. To his credit, Marty welcomed members of the synagogue’s new guard and the changes they brought to the synagogue. He served as a bridge between younger and older generations and helped to mediate divergent Jewish traditions and views about what kind of institution the Downtown Synagogue should be. The synagogue’s revival was a long process that culminated in the hiring of professional staff and a new rabbi, Ariana Silverman, in 2016, and the renovation and reopening of the building in 2023, an event that also marked the synagogue’s centenary. To celebrate the occasion, Marty worked on a book that included an organizational history, many beautiful photos, and vignettes about the Downtown Synagogue illustrating its personal significance. Marty could not have been prouder of the congregation’s stamina, its diversity, and its affirmation of the enduring values of Jewish Detroit.

After he retired, Marty was also one of the founders of SOAR, the Society of Active Retirees. It originated in Wayne State’s College of Lifelong Learning and was established in 2003 as a Wayne affiliate, housed at the Oakland Center in Farmington Hills. SOAR offered an initial menu of 23 classes that year to seniors enthusiastic about the prospect of continued education. By Spring 2004, 700 people had enrolled. Marty taught one of the very first SOAR courses, “Experiencing Opera,” designed to showcase the operas being performed by the Michigan Opera Theater (now Detroit Opera). He continued to offer that course for many years running. Today, the SOAR schedule includes approximately 50 classes during each of its two six-week terms, taught in person and via zoom by both retired and active faculty members at area colleges and universities.

Marty Herman was a very loving and very loyal human being, above all to the members of his beloved family. He is survived by his two daughters, Ellen Herman and Rebecca Herman, daughter-in-law Lynn Stephen, guardian angel Andrea Kannon, and four grandchildren: Sarah Herman, Hannah Herman, Gabriel Stephen-Herman, and Jose Stephen-Herman.