Brandeis Magazine

My husband and I visited my parents in Florida in June, then vacationed in Southern California with our older daughter and son-in-law, who live in Northern California, and our younger daughter, who lives in New York. September included a wedding in Newport, Rhode Island, and a bat mitzvah in Portland, Oregon. Please keep sending in your notes. If you’re not receiving email reminders from me, let me know.

In June, Marian Bass and her husband, Jeffrey Albert, were visited by Dale Morse, P’00, and her husband, John Salvati, in Princeton, New Jersey. In August, Marian and Jeffrey visited with Jane Kaufman and her husband, Ken Sacks, on Cape Cod. Larry Beck has practiced at HaasNajarian, a law firm in San Francisco, since 1984. He runs the trusts and estates department, and he has no plans to retire anytime soon. He and his wife, Anna, have twin 21-year-olds, Christina and Zachary, who are seniors at the University of California, Berkeley (psychology), and New York University (politics). Bob Creo still lives happily in Pittsburgh, where he is an arbitrator, mediator and adjunct professor at the Duquesne University School of Law. He writes three regular columns for legal media: “The Master Mediator,” “The Effective Lawyer” and “Gray Matters.” He just launched a blog and a companion website (joyful. lawyer) promoting contentment at work for lawyers. He has three children and two grandchildren. In February, Joel Fiedler; Don Friedman; John Parcellin, P’11; and Basil Racheotes enjoyed a mini-reunion. The foursome, who lived in North D freshman year, attended the Brandeis-NYU basketball game in New York and had dinner afterward. After 35-plus years, Steven Goldberg retired. He is now a graduate student studying history at Brooklyn College. He also volunteers with Reading Partners in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Michael Goldenkranz welcomed the birth of his first grandchild, Adin George, on Feb. 13. Bob Jaffe continues to be a busy actor. One film, “Crazy Famous,” in which he plays the head of Homeland Security, is starting to make the film-festival rounds. Bob and his wife, Jill, delight in their granddaughter, Riley, who just turned 2. In June, Andy Jick celebrated his 65th birthday by hiking the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, the same hike he did 50 years ago as a teenager. Joining him on the journey were his brother, Trustee Dan Jick ’79, P’09, P’12; sisterin- law, Elizabeth ’81, P’09, P’12; their sons, Josh ’12 and Jeremy; and Andy’s nieces, Zoe and Adina. The remainder of the family joined Andy in Las Vegas after the hike, including niece Jamie Jick Relle ’09, brother Todd and sister-inlaw Wendy Ehrlich Jick ’78. Dan Kazzaz, MA’74, is celebrating the addition of Sophie, his newest granddaughter, to the family. Son Zachary has just started a master’s program in public policy at Columbia University. In May, Dan and Sam Cohen attended a program in Tel Aviv on using art to create connections among elementary-school children of various nationalities. Dan Klein and his wife, Shelley, enjoyed a three-week cruise of the lower Danube River (“It’s really brown, not blue,” he reports) and toured the Jewish quarters in several Eastern European cities. Back in Massachusetts for the summer, Dan volunteered with an organization that provides home furnishings to those in need and played golf. He and Shelley plan to return to Florida, where they are now official residents, at the end of October. Cathy Morris Chernoff announces the arrival of her first grandchild, Ezra. She continues to produce and invest on Broadway. Tom Phillips is scoring five films simultaneously. One is an “American Experience” documentary on the work of Alfred Lee Loomis, who established a scientific community in Tuxedo Park, New York, which helped develop radar and start the Manhattan Project. Alfred’s son, William Farnsworth Loomis, was a biochemistry professor at Brandeis. Tom is also working on a PBS film on post-traumatic stress disorder, two films for the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and a film for West Point. Kenny Raskin leads leadership-communications workshops, both in the United States and abroad, as an affiliate of the training company Ariel Group. Kenny and his wife, Joanna, live in Needham, Massachusetts. Their son, Evan, is a junior at American University. Betsy Sarason Pfau and Dan Pfau ’73 took a golf cruise focused on World War II. They visited the beaches of Normandy with a historian on D-Day, and Betsy saw Highclere Castle, where “Downton Abbey” was filmed. They ended their trip by going to London to visit their older son, David. Gail Shister, a senior writing fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and 30-year veteran of The Philadelphia Inquirer, presented a talk titled “Making the Transition from Journalism to Academia” at the annual Association of LGBTQ Journalists convention. Gail is a member of the organization’s hall of fame. Stephen Simons, MA’76, PhD’01, retired, and now lives in Jerusalem and Delray Beach, Florida. He lectures on Jewish mysticism, does Yiddish-to-English translation projects and is a correspondent for Der Moment. Rabbi Bonnie Steinberg, who has retired, completed a master’s degree in bioethics at age 64. Her two sons and daughter-inlaw live in Boston. She welcomes hearing from classmates at gen.stein1@verizon.net. Judith Tolnick Champa co-curated “Crossing Borders” at the Periphery Space gallery, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The exhibition featured artists born throughout the world who trained and practiced in Los Angeles, New York and New England. Neil Weiner and Debra Gordon Weiner ’73, who live in Glencoe, Illinois, became grandparents for the first time in April. Neil is a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, where he started working in 1978, and Debbie is an attorney for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Cindy Wentz retired from a 40-year career in designing and coordinating services that help seniors and people with disabilities live independently. She now works as a consultant. Her life has been full of travel, including trips to Italy, Greece and Costa Rica, and she takes courses at Brandeis’ BOLLI program for lifelong learners. She and her husband of 35 years, Bob Branscombe, live in Watertown, Massachusetts. Former Wien Scholar Khan Zahid teaches economics at Shenyang Normal University, in northeastern China. “What I find most interesting, besides the marvel of the gleaming new infrastructure, is the simplicity, innocence, intelligence and honesty of the younger generation,” he writes. “China is a very different country than it was 20 or 30 years ago. They are not just developing the country’s infrastructure; they are developing the sophistication of its people.”