My amazing mother is in an awful marriage. Her husband is lazy, racist, sexist, kinda mean and none of us can stand him. Oh and he is a loud talker! She obviously loved him at some point and he is the only person she has been with besides our dad, but oh man he sucks the joy out of any family gathering. He hasn’t worked in years, she supports him with her job. They are in debt, the house is falling apart and now she is sick and my brothers and I are taking care of her, because he is caught up in his next ‘get rich quick’ scam. She seems miserable and knows she made a bad choice with this guy, but she is way too stubborn to admit it. Whenever the subject is broached she gets angry and leaves the room. When we try to talk to him he just takes it out on my mom. Please let know what the heck we are supposed to do.
Frustrated in Colorado…
Dear FIC,
There is a season and a time, so says a great book, for everything. This is not, I don’t think, the time to be attempting to rearrange your mother’s love life. One thing that is hard in life is sitting with the shit choices others make. Whether this means choosing a dumb partner, cutting your thighs with a razor blade, or consuming alcohol to numb the pain, there are times when your job is to just stay out of it.
Why? Because you might drown in your attempt to save your mother from her bozo boyfriend, and then two lives sink together. With any type of addiction or bad behavior, the addict or culprit has to want to make a change, has to want to see a shift. Until then, you are barking up a hollow tree.
This doesn’t mean we should flush the afflicted, ignore their suffering, and stop with our love. Quite the opposite. The best way to help your mother is to tend to her illness. Her lifestyle choices are hers, and chances are you can’t shift them. Even if you could, you would have a better chance convincing her to leave this man if she was able to really settle into knowing that you love her.
People want to have control over things that they can’t control. But when someone is actually physically sick, that type of health always takes precedence.
So put on your best set of emotional blinders and sideline this jerk she chose, and put all that concern and love into tending to her health. Crap husband or no crap husband, your love might keep your mother alive, and a live mom can be the best kind.
For more help:
1) Even though this book is about marriage, it’s major theme is differentiation and self-care. Read Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Passion Alive in Intimate Relationships by David Schnarch, PhD.
or, with a grain of salt to curb the cheesy content, try Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself by Melody Beattie
2) Find a local Codependants Anonymous meeting.
3) See a counselor.
” title=”www.send-email.org”>www.send-email.org to merissag[at]gmail[dot]com.
A few weeks ago, I got one step closer to being/working on Glee. (Ok, maybe not, but one can hope.) I was a guest at Paley Fest’s “Inside The Writer’s Room” with Glee, only I wish I was actually sitting inside the writer’s room as a writer or on the show singing, or both, but I was happy to be there nonetheless.
The event took place at the Writer’s Guild Theatre in Los Angeles and was filled with guests (me), press (me) and fans (me). (Do I get extra points for fitting into all three categories?) I had the opportunity to meet Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. Now I can say I officially have almost met the entire cast and production team of Glee. (You would think that would land me a position on the show…or not.)
The night was filled with lots of Glee highlights and inside the mind of the writers with lots of mingling afterwards, but looking back in retrospect there are probably a few thing I should’ve done differently that night:
For starters, I probably should’ve stopped smiling so much. Perhaps I looked a bit overeager to work on Glee. Maybe I even seemed stalker-esque when I practically sat on Ryan Murphy’s lap choosing the closest seat to him. It was also probably not a great idea to take notes on my iPhone, giving the impression that I was updating my Facebook status every twenty seconds like most of the fans that were just happy to be there. For one, I don’t even have a Facebook account – I just ran out of room on the small notepad I was using.
And lastly, the biggest thing I regret is not having talked to Brad and Ian as we waited outside the elevator in the parking lot afterward. I tried, but couldn’t quite put a coherent phrase together in my mind – “I want to write for you.” “I want to write for Glee.” “I need to write for Glee.” “I can also sing…” – it was too late. Before I could get my thoughts together, the elevator doors opened. They were still standing outside chatting. I had to get in otherwise I would truly look like a stalker at this point.
“Have a good night,” was all I was able to mutter as I jumped in. I don’t know if they said anything as the doors slid shut. But you know what they say…where one door closes…
With the press abuzz about the Royal wedding of Chelsea Clinton this past weekend, JInsider began to reflect on the current state of Jewish “royalty.” Who are our own rich, famous and impactful Jews?
Top on our aristocratic list is Rebecca Lieberman, daughter of Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). Politics aside, Senator Lieberman has been one of the most powerful Jews in government over the last few decades. Rebecca’s husband, Jacob Wisse, also comes with paparazzi status with a celeb mom (Ruth Wisse) who is a Harvard professor, prolific writer and vocal supporter of Israel. Jacob is a professor of Art History at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women and also Director of Yeshiva University Museum. As a result, Rebecca and Jacob’s highly publicized marriage was hailed as a union of leading families in American Jewish life and letters. We spoke with Rebecca about her life in the public eye and Senator Joe’s influence on her Jewish journey.
Public Scrutiny
Proud as I am of my dad, the good news is that people generally don’t think the Lieberman they are interacting with is “that” Lieberman, so scrutiny feels minimal these days. Growing up in a place with fewer Liebermans, I always had a sense of representing the family, which probably provided a good check on potential teenage nuttiness. In college I was happily anonymous until sophomore year when my dad won his Senate seat in an upset victory that drew national attention. With the vice-presidential nomination in 2000, all bets were off. I campaigned for Gore-Lieberman fulltime. It was an incredible privilege and enormously fun, but I learned some hard lessons early on: don’t assume a reporter will treat you kindly even if they are acting friendly; most personal things should be kept personal; remember to answer the question and then shut your mouth. This saves lots of embarrassment in the press and also isn’t bad advice for dating, job interviews and in general.
A downside of being “the child-of”? If your parent is in government, people think you discuss affairs of state on a daily basis. The reality is, other than during campaigns I’ve worked on, my father and I have always been more likely to talk about personal than political things. He gets enough shop talk outside the family.
Rebecca and Jacob at their wedding
Personal Journey
For nearly five years now I’ve had the opportunity to work with the NADAV Foundation, its founder Leonid Nevzlin, and director Irina Nevzlin Kogan, to advance the field of Jewish peoplehood. The foundation aims to strengthen collective Jewish identity through programs and institutions that encourage individual Jews to connect in a substantive way with the broader, global Jewish experience across boundaries of geography, culture and practice. Our goals apply as much to Jews in Tel Aviv and Paris, as to those in Kiev and Kentucky. Through NADAV and KolDor I’ve grappled with Jewish peoplehood – person-to-person and as an idea – and connected to my people and Jewish life in a way I hadn’t before imagined.
I also met my husband through my work with NADAV, which was a great and unanticipated outcome! Marriage and motherhood have made Jewish practice a larger part of my life than it had been since childhood. Often I feel myself reaching back to my Baba, Marcia Lieberman – my father’s mother, who showed me what a Jewish woman, mother and wife can and should do and be.
Senator Joe’s Influence
I think about the seemingly undivided attention I received from my dad as a young girl and how much his pride and praise have always meant to me. I think about my father’s professional life, which he approaches with an ethic of service, great drive, and a remarkable ability to enjoy people and experiences. I wonder at his capacity to appreciate the mundane and the miraculous in his personal life and to share those feelings with others. I realize that knowing my dad helped me to recognize a good man. Happily I married a great one, and now get to consider how to follow the model my dad set as a parent.
An article published in the L.A. Weekly this week attempts to link the family of prominent Orthodox rabbi Shmuley Boteach with a fraudulent arms dealership in Miami Beach. But a closer read of the story raises questions about the legitimacy of its claims and hints at a possible smear campaign aimed at one of the country’s most important Jewish voices.
The L.A. Weekly alleges that Boteach’s father, Yoav Botach, a wealthy real estate owner and Boteach’s brother, Bar-Kochba Botach, a law-enforcement supplier, are really high-level arms merchants who may be in cahoots with a felonious outfit in Miami Beach. Through a confusing web of allegations, the Weekly connects Bar-Kochba’s L.A.-based law enforcement supply company, Botach Tactical, with the now defunct arms dealership AEY Inc. of Miami Beach run by Yoav Botach’s grandson, Efraim Diveroli, who was convicted of conspiracy in 2008.
Diveroli was 21 when he was convicted of defrauding the U.S. government for peddling decomposing ammunition as part of a $300 million contract to arm the Afghan government. In order to duck a U.S. embargo on arms from the Chinese military, Diveroli hired a third party to repackage millions of unusable bullets he had purchased—cheaply—from China. According to the L.A. Weekly, Diveroli is currently awaiting sentencing in a U.S. District Court in Miami.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who was the subject of a Jewish Journal profile last June (and which included a column about Shabbat dinner at his brother, Bar-Kochba’s house) responded to the allegations:
“While this is not about me, I will of course defend my father and brother, two highly respected and philanthropic businessmen, against a silly and factually absurd story that was, according to both LA Weekly and the Jewish Journal, sourced by the party who sued my father for palimony and had the large amount of money sought rejected in court.”
Indeed, the allegations connecting Botach’s business with Diveroli’s fraudulent one hinges on some dubious evidence, as well as the single-sourced testimony provided by Yoav Botach’s estranged ex-wife, Judith Boteach (the family name is Botach though several family members, including Shmuley, have changed the spelling for practical reasons). According to Judith Boteach, a 2004 federal contract granted to Botach Tactical uses Diveroli’s now defunct AEY address in Miami Beach. Another connection cited in the article reflects information found on the Web site Fedvendor.com, a portal for companies interested in government contracts, that lists Botach Tactical’s mailing address at the same Miami Beach location.
Beyond a link between addresses, the story elucidates only one other connection between Botach and Diveroli: Apparently, Diveroli spent his teenage summers interning for his uncle Bar-Kochba, and, according to an expose of Diveroli in Details Magazine, “It was there, equipping police departments, that Diveroli learned how to bid on government contracts.”
Oddly, the story also implicates Congressman Henry Waxman for his alleged “silence” on the issue, when, according to Weekly author Penn Bullock, Waxman promised to conduct an investigation into the munitions fraud and any connection to the Botach family.
Bullock writes that Waxman’s 2008 inquiry “aimed to answer a fundamental question: How did Botach’s inexperienced 21-year-old grandson Efraim Diveroli ‘get a sensitive, $300 million contract to supply ammunition to Afghan forces?’”
Congressman Waxman issued a statement explaining: “When I was Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee we began an investigation into the procurement process at the Department of Defense that allowed AEY to receive a $300 million contract to supply ammunition to Afghan forces. In June 2008 we held a hearing on the issue in the hope that we could learn what went wrong so that we could rebuild our procurement system and protect the interests of taxpayers.”
Waxman did not allude to the outcome of that investigation, except to say that shortly thereafter he was elected Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, while the investigation remained with the House Oversight Committee.
But the real heart of this story is a common refrain: the damage that ensues in the aftermath of a breakup. In this case, Judith Boteach is accusing her ex of financial malfeasance and alleges that Yoav Botach wired money to Israel to avoid paying her.
She also claims he was influential with L.A. city and state officials. “There were special lunches, dinners and fund-raisers,” she told the L.A. Weekly. Those special events apparently included Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s “Turn Friday Night into Family Night” initiative which was launched last year in Beverly Hills, and the paper reported that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and City Council President Eric Garcetti were in attendance. (For the record, Garcetti was a student of Rabbi Shmuley’s at Oxford, where Boteach ran a prominent speakers bureau as part of his work for Chabad, but Garcetti said he was not at the event that night. Rabbi Boteach added: Eric Garcetti, one of the most honest, sincere, and devoted figures in American political life was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford where I served as Rabbi for 11 years and where we became close. He has kindly joined many other international figures to help me create a global family dinner night.”)
For what it’s worth, Judith Boteach and Yoav Botach were never legally married—though Boteach claims she was unaware of this. In August 2009, according to L.A. Weekly, Boteach was awarded $250,000 plus legal costs in an L.A. Superior Court for “claims of assault, battery, emotional distress and unpaid work” but her palimony suit was rejected.
“Relationship breakups are always painful but disparaging one another in the press, while perhaps affording immediate comfort, is, in the long run, never conducive to healing,” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach said in a statement. “My father has been a successful real estate investor for 40 years and the suggestion he is an arms dealer is pure defamation and libel. My brother’s business sells law-enforcement, military, and public safety supplies to the police, army, and those who keep our country safe. He is a cherished friend of US law enforcement.”
Questions remain as to whether the allegations are true or if they are part of a broader smear campaign waged by an angry ex-partner and her audacious lawyer, Robert W. Hirsh.
Boteach would rather see this story buried, where he thinks it belongs: “How unfortunate that journalists simply reprint untruths without even checking the facts.”
Seven members of a single family were killed Thursday when a train collided with a minivan near the Israeli city of Kiryat Gat.
In a grim scene Thursday evening, workers from the ultra-Orthodox-manged rescue-and-recovery organization ZAKA recognized one of the fatalities as their own Aryeh Bernstein, 43, a ZAKA volunteer. He was killed along with his wife, four children—including a pregnant daughter—and an infant grandson. Thousands turned out Friday for their funerals.
“The family is well known,” said ZAKA Chairman Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, who rushed to the scene from Jerusalem. “Aryeh was a very important veteran volunteer who attended my daughter’s wedding only last week. This incident, in which an entire family has been wiped out, is very hard, but the pain for us is doubled when we are talking about a respected member of the ZAKA family.”
Initial investigations showed that the driver of the minivan drove through a barrier and stopped on the tracks. All of those killed were in the minivan.
The place is the Warsaw Ghetto, the year 1942, and the black-and-white footage shows fashionably dressed men and women, with yellow Stars of David as accessories, having a high time at a champagne ball.
In the following scenes, emaciated kids root through mounds of garbage and excrement for scraps of food.
The puzzling and contradictory scenes are from “A Film Unfinished,” an unwitting collaboration between a Nazi propaganda crew and an Israeli filmmaker, separated by 67 years.
In May 1942, a German film crew in Wehrmacht uniforms arrived at the Warsaw Ghetto with somewhat vague orders to shoot a documentary on every aspect of ghetto life in order to show the Jewish “folk” character.
On a daily basis, the crew got its assignments from the local SS commander, nicknamed the “Gold pheasant.”
The crew stayed for 30 days and did a thorough job, alternating staged shots with actual street scenes.
The champagne ball patrons were “actors,” temporarily dressed up and fed for the occasion. Eight young women were kidnapped off the street and forced to enter a mikveh, stark naked, in a “purification” scene.
Apparently, the Germans were fascinated by Jewish rituals, painstakingly shooting a circumcision, a wedding, and the koshering of chickens.
The crew didn’t have to stage manage the grimmer scenes: Corpses of children and adults lying in the streets, strapping German soldiers shaking down kids trying to smuggle a few carrots into the ghetto, and hand-drawn carts piled his with naked skeletons on their way to a makeshift cemetery.
After 30 days, the German crew disappeared and so did their footage, which was never processed into a film or shown in Germany. However, in 1954, four reels of the ghetto film were discovered in a vault in East Berlin, left behind by the departing Soviet occupation troops.
In subsequent years, various filmmakers extracted some of the footage for their own projects, however showing only the scenes of misery, which became accepted as authentic depictions of ghetto life.
It was not until 1998 that a British filmmaker, searching for footage on the 1936 Berlin Olympics in a film vault at an American air force base, noticed two cans of film lying on the floor, labeled “Das Ghetto.”
Inside the cans were 30 minutes of outtakes left on the editing floor, which proved instantly that the entire production had been staged by the Germans.
The outtakes showed not only that some scenes had been shot over and over again, but also moments in which the Nazi cameramen accidentally entered into one another’s frame.
In the same year, another piece of the puzzle fell into place when German authorities tracked down Willy Wiest, one of the cameramen on the project, and interrogated him.
In 2006, Yael Hersonski, an Israeli television editor and director, whose grandmother was a Warsaw Ghetto survivor, started putting the various threads of the strange story together.
For a closing perspective, her staff scoured Israel, Poland, England and the United States for survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, who could remember seeing the German film crew at work. Nine fit the bill, of whom five – four women and one man – were willing to watch the Nazi version of life in the ghetto and comment on it.
To Hersonski, 34, this was the most difficult part of the project, but it may also have been the most enlightening, for it showed that amidst the staged ghetto scenes in the film, there were kernels of truth and reality.
For instance, in a number of scenes, pedestrians walk apparently indifferently past dead children lying unattended on the street. The outtakes showed that some of the same pedestrians repeatedly walked past the same point, obviously ordered to do so by the Germans.
Yet, one survivor commented, such apparently inhuman callousness existed, as a kind of defense mechanism.
“We became indifferent to the suffering of others, otherwise it was impossible to live,” she said.
In another example, while the film’s “champagne ball” was enacted under Nazi coercion, to show the gap between rich and poor, there were indeed a few dozen ghetto inhabitants who had managed to hold on to their money and temporarily were able to enjoy some privileges.
In the end, of course, the rich suffered the same fate as their poorer brethren.
In any case, Hersonski said, “Nobody who wasn’t in a ghetto or concentration camp can judge these people.”
Hersonski is not surprised that a few factual scenes, such as German soldiers stripping starving kids of some smuggled carrots, were included in the footage.
“Propaganda consists not merely of lies,” she said. “The most effective propaganda mixes the lies with a few kernels of truth.”
Nobody knows what propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels hoped to achieve with the film or why it was never completed.
Perhaps, Hersonski speculates, Goebbels wanted to try something more subtle after the failure of “Der Ewige Jude” (The Eternal Jew), which depicted Jews as hordes of voracious rats emerging from a sewer. Although personally supported by Hitler, the film bombed, even in Germany.
So far, “A Film Unfinished” has won major awards at Sundance, as well as at other film festivals in Berlin, Canada and Jerusalem.
It opens Aug. 20 at Laemmle’s Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles and Town Center 5 in Encino.
Israeli director Yael Hersonski fought long and hard to bring the Warsaw Ghetto documentary “A Film Unfinished” to the screen, but she couldn’t beat Hollywood’s rating board.
On Thursday (8/5), the Motion Picture Assn. Of America (MPAA) upheld a previous decision of an “R” rating for the film, due to “disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities, including graphic nudity,” the latter in a Nazi-coerced scene of five young women in a mikveh.
The rating, which prevents anyone under 17 from watching the film, unless accompanied by a parent or guardian, will not block commercial screening of the film in theaters, scheduled for later this month.
However, the “R” will prevent the film from being shown in high school classes as an educational tool, to the disappointment of its creators and backers.
Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, head of the film’s distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories, commented that “In a world where young people are bombarded with meaningless entertainment, it’s unfortunate that a film with real educational and historic value would be denied to them by an organization that is supposed to be working to help them.”
Hersonski observed, “I realize that this may be a difficult film to watch, but I wish I had had the chance to see such a film when I was a teenager. I think high school teachers should have the opportunity to decide whether or not to use it in their classes.”
The MPAA appeals board voted 12:3 to uphold the “R” rating, despite fervent pleas by Hersonski and a letter from Warsaw Ghetto survivor Hana Avrutzky.
Further arguments that the 1998 film “The Last Days,” produced by Steven Spielberg and showing mass executions and extensive nudity, received a PG-13 rating, did not sway the board’s ultimate decision.
Today marks the end of Summer for Justice 2010. After 11 weeks at Bet Tzedek, I’ll be returning to the classroom—copyright, entertainment law and digital wars, here I come—and starting an internship at NBC Universal, where I will be researching and writing memos outlining the company’s rights to exploit content from across it’s entertainment library.
I’m looking forward to the fall, but today brings an end to a great summer—and not just because Big Ben got married and I was again playing basketball three or four days a week. It was great because I got to give back to a community that has unknowingly given so much to me.
It really has been a rewarding journey through the Jewish community these past three years, and I’m sure it’s far from over. (Next up: Summer 2011 at a “Jewish” law firm? I have a few in mind.)
Assisting Holocaust survivors in their claim for ghetto pensions this summer wasn’t as challenging as feeling comfortable in Kevin MacDonald’s office nor as fanboy-fun as profiling Jordan Farmar. I spent much of my time speaking with survivors and worked primarily on cases that either required further information or that were being appealed. I also spent a few weeks on work related to the underlying network of pro bono attorneys participating in the Holocaust Survivors Justice Network, which has assisted thousands of survivors in applying for ghetto pensions.
Many of the survivors I spoke with (not the attorneys) suffer from dementia or the consequences of stroke or lingering trauma that impairs their memory, so pulling important details about their experience in the Holocaust was no small feat. It was also, at times, emotionally exhausting.
Without getting into specifics, let’s just say that most of the survivors I spoke with were among the only members of their family to make it out alive. Now well into their 80s, some their 90s, they may have outlived their spouse and are living in desperate poverty. More on that here.
There were of course survivors who didn’t appear to need our help—there was that survivor who claimed to be worth millions as she stormed out, apparently unaccustomed to the windowless offices involved with free legal services. But, in general, we served an essential bridge—both in terms of legal knowledge and the ability to decipher documents and correspondence in a foreign language—between indigent survivors and a German government trying to make right.
I’m glad I was able to do this when I did. While I certainly expect to be involved with public interest causes when I’m a practicing lawyer, the need for legal services directed at Holocaust survivors, part of Bet Tzedek’s core mission since its founding in 1974, is fading fast.
“Rise and Shine: The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Journey From Near Death to Full Recovery” by Simon Lewis (Santa Monica Press: $24.95)
A car accident on the crowded roadways of Southern California is a wholly unremarkable event. For producer and writer Simon Lewis, however, the crash that killed his wife — and nearly ended his life, too — was the beginning of a saga of struggle and redemption that is truly heroic, as we discover in “Rise and Shine: The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Journey From Near Death to Full Recovery” (Santa Monica Press: $24.95).
As Lewis describes it, he was already beginning to die from his injuries when an off-duty paramedic happened upon the accident scene and started to resuscitate him. Unable to speak, Lewis was merely a “John Doe” to his rescuers. By the time he was taken to the Cedars-Sinai emergency room, he was “naked and nameless, balanced between death and rebirth,” as the emergency-room personnel struggled to evaluate his injuries and save his life.
Deep within his coma, however, Lewis was already beginning to experience himself in a kind of dream-state in which he was aware of “fragments of the present, and then a deeper, puzzling past.” He endured surgery, infection, delirium, all the while locked in what he calls “innerspace” and “comascape.” When he finally emerged to consciousness, he was confronted with the greatest challenge of all — the recovery of not only his health but himself.
“I was purely an observer; a visitor from another planet recording sights for the first time,” he recollects. “That is how I felt, with the awe of a newborn child at everything I saw, still with no doubts or questions – a simple, gentle rapture in being able to perceive all things, and that I was present in this moment of time and space to behold them.”
What follows is an account of the slow, frustrating, and anguished process of repairing an injured body and brain. Although he is an experienced producer, Lewis doesn’t know what his mother means when she asks if he wants to watch the Oscars. She needs to remind him that his wife died in the accident that resulted in his injuries. Merely getting out of the hospital bed for the first time is a triumph: “No medical report could describe what it felt like to sit on a chair for the first time in months, see my room from a different perspective than horizontal, my head held high.”
Even after five months at Cedars-Sinai, however, the recovery was just beginning. Like every victim of brain injury, Lewis endured a long course of rehabilitation, but he was also forced to address issues of grief and loss occasioned by the death of his wife. “I felt I lived in a silent landscape, like Narcissus, who gazed for eternity into a pool of water, except I didn’t want to see myself,” he told his psychotherapist.
But Lewis, to his credit, is not merely recalling and celebrating his own desperate efforts to regain not only his health but his very identity. He reminds us that even at the moments of crisis and throughout the long ordeal of repeated hospitalizations and multiple therapies, the most mundane concerns are the most urgent — how would he and his family pay the staggering medical expenses that began to mount from the first moments after his accident? Just as he was escaping from “innerspace,” Lewis was entering what he describes as “the Byzantine complexity of the business of caring.”
Lewis narrates his ordeal in meticulous detail, and he even provides a glossary to assist the reader with the more obscure terminology of medical care and insurance practices. In a sense, the lengthy account of his ordeal is the best evidence of his ultimate recovery. And he insists that the healing goes much deeper than flesh and bone: “It brought something else, too: a strange revelation which brought full recovery for my soul through the insight that all my struggles since the hit-and-run that crushed my life made it no less sweet, in fact the opposite.”
Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve and can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.
