Nathan Glazer, who died Jan. 19 at age 95, was for more than a half-century a leading scholar on race and ethnicity, immigration, the challenges of urban schools, and the erosion of community. Yet for all the obvious relevance of such work to the world today, outside a stray sociology course, if there, it’s doubtful most readers under age 50 have run into his work, despite its generous combination of rigor, clarity, civility, and low-jargon writing style.

Glazer’s books are getting hard to find outside big libraries. Even Beyond the Melting Pot, the canonical 1963 text on immigration he wrote with future Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., has a mere five reviews on Amazon. (Affirmative Discrimination, to my mind the best book ever written about racial preferences, has none.) The Public Interest, the phenomenally successful policy journal he co-edited for many years, ended its run in 2005.