Brandeis Magazine

Jesse Appell lives in Beijing, where he has established a comedy club, the U.S.-China Comedy Center. He performs comedy shows all around China and the U.S. Michael Baum and Traci Gordon welcomed a baby boy, Parker Ian, on Dec. 21. The family lives in Birmingham, Michigan. Abby (Kulawitz) Brill reports she got a cat. Jeremy Elkins married Hillary Maxwell in Chicago in June. Kelsey Grab, who completed her master’s degree in education at Harvard, has moved to Seattle. She writes, “Brandeisians of the Pacific Northwest, be in touch.” Yael Katzwer is editor of two weekly papers in New Jersey: the West Orange Chronicle, and the News-Record of Maplewood and South Orange. She recently won two New Jersey Press Association awards: first place in the crimes and police reporting category for a series of articles about police brutality, and second place in the environmental health and science reporting category for an article about lead in a local school district’s drinking water. Carina Platner and Ben Harel are engaged; the wedding is planned for this year. Carina is completing her master’s to become a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Louis Polisson received an MA in Jewish thought and was ordained as a rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary in May. He and his wife, Gabriella Feingold ’14, live in White Plains, New York. Louis serves as the rabbinic intern at Temple Israel Center, in White Plains, and student rabbi at Congregation Eitz Chaim, in Monroe. Louis and Gabriella received a grant from the Hadar Institute to record an album of original Jewish and spiritual music, due for release online in the fall. Daniel Shimansky loved seeing so many old friends at the five-year reunion last June. He graduated from Penn’s School of Dental Medicine and now practices dentistry in south Florida.