He was educated in New York City's public schools, at
Williams College, and earned a doctorate in sociology from
Harvard University in 1958, supervised by
Talcott Parsons. He taught at the
London School of Economics and Political Science,
Oxford University, the
University of Strasbourg,
Amherst College, served on the Graduate Faculty of the
New School for Social Research and was Distinguished
Fulbright Professor at the
University of Bologna. Birnbaum's pedagogical work included the introduction of sociology to the
undergraduate curricula at Amherst and Oxford. A founding member of the editorial board of
New Left Review, was active in politics on both sides of the Atlantic He had been an advisor to American trade unions and members of Congress, as well as to a number of social movements and political parties in Europe. He contributed regularly to a number of publications, including
openDemocracy,
El País in Spain, and the German daily
Die Tageszeitung. He published his memoir,
From the Bronx to Oxford and Not Quite Back, in 2018. == Bibliography ==