Peter Samuelson is a Hollywood veteran. He produced and executive produced 25 films over 25 years including “Revenge of the Nerds,” “Arlington Road,” and “The Libertine.”  During this time, he also founded five charities. Now, he’s  released an inspirational book for young adults – as well as their parents and teachers – about his life and work and the importance of following your passion while making a difference in this world. 

“Finding Happy: A User’s Guide to Your Life with Lessons from Mine” (Regalo Press) is filled with stories about Samuelson’s adventures, like climbing down a hundred-foot pipe shaft at 3 a.m. to rescue a kitten, with no plan for how to climb back up, and doing daredevil filmmaking in Asia and Africa. He writes about how to seize the day, when to take risks, and how to find your own “secret sauce” in life. The book also offers practical help in three dozen situations that challenge Gen Zers and Millennials. 

The Journal sat down with Samuelson, who also serves as a mentor for young adults, to discuss his new work and what readers can learn from it. The interview has been edited for clarity and space.

Jewish Journal (JJ): Why did you decide to write this book?

Peter Samuelson (PS): Some things are beshert. In 1999, I founded First Star as my third nonprofit charity. I realized only 6% of American foster kids go to college, a fraction of the over half of all 12th graders who do so. I met with the Chancellor of UCLA, Gene Block, a wonderful man. I proposed that he allow me to house, educate and encourage high school-aged foster kids in the middle of his campus for a four-year period, with a curriculum [that was] one-third academic, one-third life skills and the other third a sense of belonging: new brothers and sisters for those deprived of their own and reliable grown-ups for the first time in their lives. First Star is now enormously successful, with 12 academies across the country. I’ve [also] done a lot of mentoring. Hundreds of young adults, mostly teenagers, some in their early 20s. About two years ago, I realized that I had pattern recognition helping young adults. 

My career as a film producer has taught me that even though every film is different, the producer’s toolkit is the same and you get better recognizing similar challenges. So it is with mentoring. I decided that I could make a list and that these could be chapter headings in a self-help book for all young people, especially those who are underprivileged. What is a good risk? What is a bad risk? How can you tell the difference? How do you find love? How ambitious should you be? How can you deal with a bully? How do you get organized? 

JJ: How does it tie into your Jewish values?

PS: I am immensely proud of being Jewish and what that means. Maimonides tells us that the top level of the soul, the N’shuma, is not something you own, but almost like a membership society of those who seek to make the world a better place. If you grasp tikkun olam, tzedakah, and exert yourself, Maimonides points out that you will meet extraordinary people who feel the same way. He says two meeting for the first time will feel as though they’ve known each other 1000 years, and say, “Hineini, here I am. What shall we do?” Through founding and running my seven philanthropies in between producing two dozen motion pictures, I am blessed by these N’shuma people, who help me push big boulders up hills. I certainly couldn’t have done it without them.

JJ: What do you think makes people really happy? Is it giving back? Is it finding meaning?

PS: When you help other people, you do find your own happiness. It does not have to be religious. I teach a class to cohorts of 10th grade foster kids called Random Acts of Kindness and Pay it Forward. In the first 90 minutes, I ask them to imagine they are walking down the sidewalk and see an old lady lying face down in rags, fast asleep. Do they A) stop and carefully put $1 under her arm? Or B) wake her up and give her the dollar? Or C) look the other way, and walk on by? This leads to a conversation about the Golden Rule of 170 world religions, whose scriptures tell their adherents that the humane values of social justice require them to right wrongs. Tzedek is a core value in Judaism, and I tell my gentile friends that the chosen people were not chosen to have privileges or space lasers, but rather to serve. It’s an obligation, but not a chore. It is where we find a great proportion of our happiness and many things to make us proud.

JJ: Why is it important to give back, especially in today’s world?

PS: In the class, I ask whether an atheist could still feel compassion and empathy and want to help. “Of course,” say most of the kids. This leads to a conversation about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that in any closed system, which could be the motor in your car, a family or a planet, unless we apply energy, if left alone, the whole thing will decay, collapse and end in random chaos. If you don’t oil the engine, it will seize up. If you don’t nurture your family, you won’t have one. And if we don’t take care of our planet, we will have huge amounts of migration that will be unstoppable and change everything around us as people seek to live somewhere sustainable. It is important for each of us to fix things to the greatest extent possible, not just because that makes us happy, but also because entropy, the random chaos that will otherwise ensue, is all around us. Life is a team sport, and I’m proud to help lead so many teams of great importance.  

If you think you need to be a Trekkie to care about Adam Nimoy’s memoir “The Most Human,” you don’t. You also don’t need to be Jewish, sober or estranged from your father. 

Adam’s father was Leonard Nimoy. Yes, that Leonard Nimoy — Mister Spock to the millions of “Star Trek” fans. But in “The Most Human,” Adam describes his father, who passed away in 2015 at age 83, as a hard man to love, and even harder to get love from. Adam’s book is a patient, painful reckoning with cycles of trauma, addiction, estrangement and reconciliation. Even if you’re just someone trying to figure out how to forgive a parent without forgetting what they did — this book lands like a long exhale after holding your breath for too many years.

If you’re browsing for a Father’s Day gift, this one is for anyone staring down family patterns and wondering if it’s too late to change. Nimoy’s story doesn’t offer easy resolutions, but it does offer something better: the tools and conversation examples to start again. “Everybody who reads this says that they didn’t know that side of Leonard, they got to know him a little bit better,” Adam said. “He’s this iconic character, and this book brings more of his personality as a dad into focus.” 

The book begins in a synagogue on Yom Kippur. Adam recalls sitting in the back row as his father was called to the bimah to chant the story of Jonah. The moment is brief but revealing. Jonah, the prophet who runs from his calling and winds up in the belly of a whale, becomes a spiritual mirror for Adam: a man who spent years hiding behind pot smoke and emotional avoidance. “I knew something about that,” Adam writes, noting how long it took him to stop fleeing from the discomfort of family, responsibility and reconciliation.

When asked what he learned from writing the book, Adam said that he gained a lot more empathy for his father. As the son of Russian Jewish immigrants growing up in Boston, Leonard was raised to feel desperate to survive. He came to Hollywood with no money, little support and no major connections. His parents were angry that he wanted to become an actor.

The echoes of Leonard’s career never disappear. Adam sees performance everywhere: in the classroom, in the director’s chair, even at Comic-Con and Star Trek events. But Spock, too, was shaped by Leonard’s past — as the child of immigrants, as the outsider, as the person trying to belong without betraying himself.

“There was a lot of conflict with him,” Adam said. “He was very difficult to deal with. And I say we didn’t have the tools to deal with any of the conflicts so that when issues would arise between us, it never went well.”

The book is filled with raw moments: childhood memories where Leonard is in the room, but not present; a six-page letter from Leonard to Adam that easily could have torpedoed anyone’s relationship for life; and stinging moments like the time that Adam sent his father an old production still from his father’s role as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” 

“My dad wrote me an email in response thanking me for the [‘Fiddler on the Roof’] photograph and also wishing me a Happy Father’s Day, and then informing me that he believed that ‘unconditional love was a fantasy.’”

For a story that takes place primarily in Hollywood, there’s little celebrity name-dropping. Rather, it’s a book about looking back and naming what-happened. And what happened, often, was silence. Adam said that when he shares his story anonymously at 12-step meetings, people are inspired to try to reach out to a parent or a sibling. 

“Acceptance is not approval,” Adam said. “Accepting my dad for who he was doesn’t mean I approve of everything he did. It’s just that I accept him for who he is.”

Adam said he learned to give his father some slack. That slack becomes the book’s spiritual arc. And it’s grounded — literally — in Jewish time and Jewish space. Shabbat dinners become the first step back into the relationship. Adam starts attending services at Beit T’Shuvah, a synagogue and addiction recovery center on Venice Boulevard. “The cycle of dysfunction is not new, but how to break the cycle is really what the objective is,” Adam said.

Recovery concepts like “detachment with love” and “living amends” are central to the story arc. Where Leonard once denied affection, Adam gave it. Where his father shut down, Adam leaned in and tried to become someone his own children, Maddie and Jonah, could trust.

Adam writes that the dysfunction between fathers and sons didn’t start in the Nimoy house. It started with Abraham and Isaac. With Jacob and Esau. With Joseph and his brothers. The question isn’t so much whether pain will travel down the family tree, the question is whether someone, anyone, will do the hard work of pruning it back. Throughout the book, Torah references stretch beyond the patriarchs. Jonah and the whale gets pulled in as a tale of finally stopping to listen in the midst of chaos. T’shuvah (“the process of returning”), l’dor v’dor (“from generation to generation), and tikkun olam (“repairing the world”) are all featured along Adam’s journey. 

Adam’s late mother, Sandra Zober, also looms large in the book, culminating with her final days spent bedridden, pill-dependent and fiercely opinionated as ever.

Anyone who’s ever stared down a closed door and wondered if knocking one more time would matter will find this book enjoyable. It’s well-written, the audiobook is everything an author should strive to do when reading their memoir — you can really hear in Adam’s voice what he’s feeling. Parents who struggle to show up emotionally will find this book relatable, and kids who are tired of waiting will find it to be a gateway to healing those bonds. 

Adam shares his story not from a Hollywood high horse as the offspring of a world-worshiped cultural icon, but as the bearer of something much harder to gift: emotional clarity, spiritual honesty and the exact kind of story you should hand your father on Sunday, if only to say: “I see you. I read this I’m trying, too.”

If you’re looking for a memoir about reconciling with a complicated parent, this is one of the most emotionally grounded and engaging that I’ve read. This would make a meaningful gift for anyone in recovery, or anyone trying to make peace with family history. Readers interested in spiritual memoirs, Jewish reflection or family repair will find something familiar and worthwhile here.

The author is a trained psychologist who teaches writing to would-be physicians and college students, and it shows. Her insights into herself and the human condition are masterful; her writing lyrical. One comes away from this book uncertain as to whether Horwitz is more fascinated with telling her own story or describing the many different rituals which she uses both to reveal and to conceal her story. What else is one to expect from a psychologist?

Readers should know that Horwitz is the younger sister of my former student and former sister-in-law whom I have not seen since she was a young woman decades ago. Still the familial relationship, however former, however lapsed, makes it difficult for me to write of her with any measure of formality. So she is Wendy to me.

Her depiction of ritual and her defense of ritual will appeal to believers but perhaps, more importantly, to non-believers or to “occasional” believers who struggle between moments of faith and lingering doubts. Her interest in advancing the conversation regarding ritual “is engaging in the ritual not necessarily in service of religious belief but also to create beauty, solace, celebration, and community.” She is adamant and most persuasive by demonstrating that one can find meaning through rituals without giving up one’s identity or ideals. She also shows how religious participation enhanced her own sense of identity and strengthened her conviction, not a bad insight for someone who portrays herself as a non-believing, not quite traditional, certainly not halachic, but deeply affirming Jew.

One can read this book on many levels. It is a COVID memoir. It describes the haunting reality we lived through, the isolation, the loneliness, the loss of community, the inability to interact with others and to participate in events so routine that we forgot how meaningful they were. It is also a memoir of liberation after COVID, getting out of the house, hugging those we love, having guests for the holidays, or the stage in between, when life was still dangerous but not deadly, going to synagogue even while it was being held in a tent, sitting masked together with one’s community but apart from one’s neighbor with rabbi and cantor behind plexiglass shields.

One marvels at her imaginative use of rituals and her emphasis on when rituals are missing. One of her children graduated during COVID and like my younger son missed the pomp and ceremony, the procession and the celebrations that marks such a milestone. So, Wendy improvised for what her child missed when high school graduation was held in the parking lot, for what her niece missed when medical school was concluded but not solemnized. Wendy depiction of the joy, the smiles and the appreciation reminds us all that if we can’t have everything, we can and must at least do something.

One can read this memoir as a creative use of Jewish rituals. What is one to do with flowers sent by a former lover, who does not quite know that he is a former lover? Wendy thinks of Tashlich and goes down to the stream casting the flowers out one by one, day by day, purging so one can begin anew. The Rabbis never imagined Tashlich – the ceremony held on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, casting one’s sin’s symbolically into the waters as crumbs of bread — but Wendy did. What does one do with a Ketubah, an artistic remnant of a failed marriage? The rabbi suggested it be buried. Wendy packed it into a case in the attic, a case that resembled a small coffin. She bemoans the lost opportunity to ritualize the “get,” the religious divorce as the ritual did not quite work for a modern woman, who could not view herself as property to be purchased and then freed. There was no ritual as to what to do with her engagement ring. Selling it does not quite capture both the joyous and bitter memories associated with it. Her work is a challenge to invent a new ritual or improve the old to mark important milestone of dissolution.

She can understand when rituals work brilliantly and when they heal. Her depiction of the rituals of mourning and Kaddish are an example. Anninut, the period between death and burial, burial, shiva and shloshim, the 11 months of Kaddish and the Yahrzeit. Anyone who has gone through such a loss and ritually consecrated it will find her writing moving and most familiar.

She appreciates the opportunities lost, a post-college trip to South America finds her without a seder. The community was not inviting – Jews should always welcome the stranger, especially on Passover —  Ritz crackers, which she knows are chametz, cheap wine, and Dayenu will just not do. One misses families and songs, a familiar ritual. The next year’s seder is all the more important, the recollection last decades into adulthood. Medical students receive a white coat when they move from the classroom to actually dealing with patients. Psychologists receive nothing as they see their first client before them.

Rituals can not only be formal religious rites, but their adornment. Polishing the silver; setting the table; using the recipes passed on from generation to generation, especially in the handwriting of the first to commit the oral tradition to writing; and the aroma of the foods so familiar that waft through the house. Her detailed description triggered for me the memory of the first year after my mother’s death, returning home on Rosh Hashanah eve and finding something amiss, but unable to understand what it was — the distinct smell of my mother’s brisket, not quite captured in my wife’s superb cooking.

Wendy is firmly grounded in Jewish memories, surprisingly so for this traditional reviewer, who remembers her childhood home as more secular, less ethnic. Her rootedness enhances her appreciation of other rituals. Buying challah on Friday empowers her to notice those who buy bread from the same bakery for the traditional family dinner after church or to appreciate more exotic rituals from her world travels.

Milkweed and Honey Cake is a work to be savored; its flavor lingers long after finishing the work. It makes you notice what she notices and may have a particular audience in those who do not quite appreciate the rituals that endow our life with meaning.

Michael Berenbaum is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute and a professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University.