Abraham Donald Lavender (November 14, 1940 – June 26, 2022) was a professor of sociology at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, where his special areas of interest include ethnic relations, Judaica, political sociology, urban sociology, the sociology of sexuality, and social deviance. He was editor-in-chief of Journal of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian Crypto Jews, and had served as president of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies. Having previously been a professor of sociology at St. Mary's College of Maryland and the University of Miami, he began teaching at Florida International University in 1990. Early life and education Born in New Zion, South Carolina, Lavender's formal education started at Salem Elementary School in New Zion, and he graduated from East Clarendon High School in Turbeville, South Carolina. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in psychology from the University of South Carolina at Columbia, in 1963 and 1965 respectively. While at USC, he was a member of Phi Epsilon Pi (which later merged with Zeta Beta Tau) fraternity, and the AFROTC's Arnold Air Society, was president of the Hillel Foundation, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Career Lavender served from 1964 to 1968 in the United States Air Force and completed his service as a Captain, serving at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Missouri, where he was a Personnel Casualty Officer, and in Izmir, Turkey, as part of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). After completing military service, Lavender began his doctoral studies and earned a Ph.D. in sociology in 1972 from the University of Maryland, College Park, with a doctoral dissertation on generational changes in Jewish identity. A prolific author, Lavender has written dozens of books and academic articles, mostly about ethnicity and Sephardic Jews, as well as other scholarly publications including journal articles, reference book/encyclopedia articles, book reviews, or research reports, on a wide variety of sociology-related topics. In addition to his books listed below, among his major publications linking multiple areas of interest (Jews, Latins, ethnicity, political sociology) are A History of Jewish and Hispanic Interaction in Miami-Dade County (published by the American Jewish Committee) and Jews, Hispanics, Blacks, and Others in Miami Beach: An Ethnically Divided City or a Cosmopolitan Multiethnic City?, a monograph published by the Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship Studies at Florida International University to which the answer was Cosmopolitan Multiethnic City. In 1977, Lavender published a collection of studies on non-mainstream