Both her parents (Vladimir/Ze’ev Grinfeld and Viktoria Kirshenblat) were physicians, educated in Leningrad, who worked in the first hospital opened in the port of Nakhodka.
He was a brother of Yakov D. Kirschenblat [ru], a prominent biologist and a cousin of Yevgeny Primakov, a future Russian Prime Minister.
In Sochi, before she emigrated to Israel with her parents, Greenfeld was first known as a child prodigy, playing violin on TV at the age of 7, receiving the Krasnodar Region's Second Prize for poetry (and a bust of Pushkin) at 16, and publishing a collection of poems, under a properly Russified alias, in Komsomolskaya Pravda.
She received grants from the Mellon, Olin, and Earhart foundations, the National Council for Soviet & East European Research, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
This idea, she argues, was brought about by the historical accident of the Wars of the Roses which created a vacuum in the upper strata of English feudal society leading to an unprecedented amount of upward social mobility.
It destroyed the traditional social hierarchy and, with national identity, granted people dignity, which was previously enjoyed only by the elites.
In The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth,[5] Greenfeld argues, nationalism, being inherently egalitarian, necessarily promotes a type of social structure needed to develop the modern economy—that is, an open system of stratification which allows for social mobility, makes labor free and expands the sphere of operation of market forces.
The reviewer of the book in the American Journal of Sociology, Karen Cerulo, writes: "Greenfeld builds her argument on a theoretical foundation that challenges long-standing conceptions of mind.
She also explores the ways in which symbolic culture transforms and expands the biological mind, making it a far more complex and dynamic entity that reforms and reconfigures itself, ever emerging in relation to changing environmental events.
This autonomous, self-iterating process, like the material and biological realities which underpin it, provides its own paradigm of scientific study (which Greenfeld dubs sociological mentalism[11]).
[7] "Nationalism is, above all, a form of consciousness which projects the image of social/political reality as consisting of sovereign communities of inclusive (that is cutting through lines of status and class) identity, whose members are fundamentally equal.
"[13] National consciousness presupposes a secular, egalitarian world-view, wherein all individuals are understood to be members of an inherently equal elite.
In Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Greenfeld confessed: "I was bewildered by the complexity of historical evidence and periodically discouraged by the sheer quantity of the material.
Pearson stressed that his review is by no means exhaustive: "To most historians, the objections to what the cover blurb calls 'this historically oriented work in sociology' are so numerous as to positively jostle for attention.
"[15] In his short review of Nationalism, Fritz Stern found the German section "particularly weak" and overall concluded: "The author's reach is far greater than her grasp.
Critics argue that this narrow focus overlooks the diverse ways nationalism has manifested in non-Western and postcolonial contexts, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The critique, as articulated by scholars like Partha Chatterjee and Benedict Anderson, is that Greenfeld's model of nationalism — as a natural outgrowth of modernity — cannot be applied universally.
"[19] In The Journal of Modern History, Andre Wakefield wrote, also referring to Nationalism: "The two books also share many shortcomings: a lack of respect for historiography, a penchant for building broad generalizations out of meager anecdotal evidence, and a tendency to lodge historical 'examples' in a prefabricated schematic model.
"[22] Referring to the book, Andrew Scull remarked: "It seemed to me so bizarre, so solipsistic, so lacking in connections to any substantial knowledge of the relevant subject matter, so convinced of its own validity though heedless of any systematic review of relevant evidence or any knowledge of what insanity has meant across time and place, that I was at a loss to understand how it had appeared under the imprint of a major university press."