Class Correspondent

My husband and I spent Thanksgiving in California with our daughter and son-in-law, who then joined us in January in Florida for a weeklong visit with my parents. We took the kids to Universal Studios to see the Harry Potter attractions and quickly discovered that sensitivity to motion does not improve with age. Still, a good time was had by all. Keep sending in your Class Notes; it’s great hearing your latest news. If you’re not receiving email reminders from me, please let me know.

Marian Bass and her husband, Jeffrey Albert, spent two days with Jane Kaufman and her husband, Ken Sacks, last summer. Dale Morse, P’00, and her husband, John Salvati, visited Marian and Jeffrey at the end of January. The Rev. Peter Connolly has served as minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bowling Green, Kentucky, since 2009. He will be retiring in June and looks forward to getting to know his family better; traveling with his canine companion, Lady Beagle; and getting more involved with community work. Joel Fiedler, Gary Zellerbach, Mike Kusevitsky Gould, Carl Sealove, Steve Bober and their respective spouses, along with David Katzen ’75 and his wife, Bobbi Binder ’76, got together for their fourth biennial reunion week. They met in Breckinridge, Colorado, and report they “had a blast.” Joel is a pediatric allergist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes, “Our youngest son graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and will go to grad school after a gap year, so tuition payments are not completed yet.” In November, Don Friedman participated in a Brandeis panel discussion on the global music industry, and enjoyed a dinner with Betsy Sarason Pfau and Dan Pfau ’73. Don and his wife, Ilene Miller, became grandparents for the second time, thanks to their son Ira, who works as a music lawyer in New York. Their son Jeffrey, daughter Emily and three other partners founded and run a business conference company, BrainXchange. Jack (Gilberg) Gilron, P’09, writes, “Our older son, Roee ’09, and his wife, Tiffany (Roberts) ’10, had their first child, Adam Tal, in October. In November, they moved to San Francisco, where Roee has taken a postdoctoral position in neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. Our younger son, Yishai, is following in my footsteps and studying chemistry at Ben-Gurion University. In December, my colleagues and I participated in a U.S. Chamber of Commerce BusinessH2O summit on water management. I periodically get together with Sam Cohen here in Israel.” In October, Christie Hefner delivered the keynote address at a two-day Brandeis conference, “Comedy and the Constitution: The Legacy of Lenny Bruce.” It marked the opening of an exhibition of Bruce’s papers and personal effects that Brandeis acquired from Bruce’s daughter, Kitty, with a generous grant from the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation. Christie’s keynote address is available on YouTube. Kathryn Hellerstein’s book “A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987” received the Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies, awarded by the Modern Language Association of America at its Philadelphia convention. Bob Jaffe continues to live and work as an actor in New York. He returned to the Boston area (and to the 1960s) to play a small role in the upcoming film “Chappaquiddick” (look for the reporter harassing Ted Kennedy as he’s leaving the church). As an artist at Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST), and the board chair for the past four years, Bob is thrilled that EST is building a new theater space in the building that has housed the theater since 1968. Rabbi Ellen Jaffe-Gill reports she has “finally” started a blog: ellenjaffegill.wordpress.com. Dan Klein and his wife, Shelley, stayed warm in Florida during the winter. Dan has volunteered at an animal shelter since his last dog died a few years ago. He is also on the board of a little storefront synagogue he and Shelley attend in Port Charlotte. That makes two synagogues he helps govern, one up North, one down South. “I send a hello to everyone in the class,” he writes. Caroline Leavitt’s 12th novel, “This Other Life,” will be published in 2018, around the time she’s due to be finished with a TV pilot. She and her husband, writer/editor Jeff Tamarkin, are having a blast in the New York City area. Their son, Max, has formed a film company with friends. (Don’t miss Caroline’s Turning Points essay in this issue.) Adam Molvin writes, “I am forever grateful for my Brandeis education. It opened up so many fields of action that helped further the things I believe in. I am now physically disabled but still mentally active, and I work from home.” Cathy Morris Chernoff celebrated Hanukkah in Tokyo and New Year’s in Hong Kong, and had a big birthday bash in May in Las Vegas. Tom Phillips scored “Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities,” a PBS documentary by filmmaker Stanley Nelson. The film premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival (Tom’s seventh Sundance film). Tom also performs monthly, playing keyboards in a Central Massachusetts rock band, Jokers Wild, along with his wife, who is the drummer. View some of the band’s videos here. Ernie Rubinstein visited campus to see the Goldfarb Library exhibition “Building Brandeis,” which included aerial photographs of the campus as it grew over time. He learned that architect Eero Saarinen designed Ridgewood, where Ernie lived, along with several other Brandeis buildings. In other news, Ernie took an online “Jewishness in Israel” course created by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. In November, Betsy Sarason Pfau and Dan Pfau ’73 were visited in Boston by Francine Ladd Sohn and Roger Sohn ’73. In February, Betsy and Dan visited Francine and Roger in California. In May, Betsy joined other members of the Rose Art Museum board of advisers at the Venice Biennale, the oldest contemporary art event in the world. Christopher Bedford, the former director of the museum, was chosen by the U.S. State Department to be the commissioner of the 2017 U.S. Pavilion, which will present the work of contemporary artist Mark Bradford. Glenn Wong was appointed director of the sports law and business program at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, at Arizona State University. Previously, Glenn served as a distinguished professor of practice in the program. Earlier, he was a professor and department head at the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management in the Isenberg School of Management, at UMass Amherst, where he is professor emeritus. After a 30-year hiatus, during which he worked in government and the private sector, Khan Zahid is teaching again in, of all places, China. He is an associate professor of economics with Fort Hays State University of Kansas in its joint program with Shenyang Normal University, in Shenyang, China. Khan writes, “Every American should go to see what is making China great again, and learn some things from its people — like they are learning from us.”

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