William Safran

William (Bill) Safran, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, passed away on January 22, 2026, in Palo Alto, California. He was 95.

He was born Bezalel Wolf Safran (after his Romanian grandfather, a Talmudic scholar) on July 8, 1930, in Dresden, Germany, where his father was also a rabbi and teacher. After the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, life for Jews in Germany became increasingly precarious; between 1938 and 1940, his family made multiple unsuccessful efforts to leave Germany. His older half-brother was able to emigrate to Palestine to study viticulture in 1938; the two would not see each other again until 1957.

In 1942, his family were deported to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia. They were subsequently sent to the nearby Kaiserwald concentration camp, and then, in 1944, to the Stutthof concentration camp, near Gdańsk, where he, his full brother (one year older), and his father were separated from his mother and his sister. His father and brother died in Stutthof and a satellite camp in early 1945; when he was liberated by the Soviet army shortly thereafter, he was one of seven surviving Jewish boys from Stutthof. Several months later he was reunited with his mother and his sister, who was the only Jewish girl to survive Stutthof. After stays in a displaced persons' camp in Berlin and elsewhere, they sailed to New York in late 1946.

After he and his family moved to Poughkeepsie, NY, in early 1947, he enrolled at Poughkeepsie High School and completed four years of high school in two years. He subsequently enrolled at City College of New York, earning bachelor's and master's degrees, and then served two years in the US Army. In spring 1961, he married Marian Folk, who had just completed her coursework at Barnard College. He received a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University in 1964, writing his doctoral dissertation on the reform of the West German health insurance system, and began teaching at CU in 1965.

During his 38 years on the faculty, his main research areas were French politics and nationalism, pluralism, and ethnicity more generally. He was founding editor of the journal Nationalism & Ethnic Politics and authored The French Polity, a textbook of French politics printed in seven editions (1977-2009). He also presented and/or published over 80 papers and book chapters in English, French, German, and Spanish, remaining active as a scholar into his late 80s.

Safran argued for scholars to focus not only on the integrated nation-state but also on the "hyphenated identities" of immigrants and ethnic and religious minorities. He defended the potential of these minority identities to strengthen democratic and pluralist institutions. Safran's essay in the first issue of the journal Diaspora provided a definition of the journal's title that compares the "paradigmatic" case of Jewish diaspora to the Armenian, Maghrebi, Turkish, Palestinian, Greek, Cuban, Chinese, Polish, African American, and Roma experiences; it is widely cited.

Despite the connections between Safran's experience as a survivor and his later academic focus, he refused to be defined by it. Although later in life he spoke about it publicly more often, he refused to make that experience his "calling card."

Following a stroke in 2020, he and Marian moved to California to be closer to family, but he continued to read the New York Times and to discuss politics with friends old and new. He predeceased Marian by nine days. He is survived by his children Gabriella (Michael Kahan) and Joshua and granddaughters Eva and Frieda Kahan.