Brandeis Magazine

Politics scholar Donna Robinson Divine has retired from teaching at Smith College. Prior to her retirement, she received the Most Honored Professor Award for teaching and was named the Katharine Engel Lecturer for distinguished scholarship. She has taught sessions on Israeli politics at Brandeis’ Summer Institute for Israel Studies, organized by the Schusterman Center, and has participated in conferences on Zionism and Israel at Brandeis. In 2015, she was elected vice president of the Association for Israel Studies. Rita Brickman Effros finished her one-year term as president of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the nation’s largest interdisciplinary organization devoted to the field of aging. She was elected by GSA’s membership, which consists of more than 5,500 researchers, educators, practitioners and other professionals. An expert on the immune-system changes associated with aging and HIV/AIDS, she is professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. Charles Giuliano published two books, “Shards of a Life” and “Total Gonzo Poems.” Robbie Pfeufer Kahn, MA’83, PhD’88, spent the winter in London with her son, Levin, and his family. In December 2015, her article “Reading Shakespeare at 70” was published in the eclectic journal 05401. Lucy Landesberg retired as a professor of mathematics at Nassau Community College, in New York. Lawrence Rosen continues as Cromwell Professor of Anthropology at Princeton and an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School. He authored “Two Arabs, a Berber and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco.” Marc Sapir retired from community and public-health medicine in 2014. One of his plays, “Zara’s Faith,” had three professionally staged readings this year. The play is about police killings of young black men, religious faith, a grandmother’s spirit and oppressed communities fighting back. Marc and his wife, Sheila Thorne, a retired college English instructor and published short-story writer, have been together for more than 43 years. Judith Shapiro is in her third year as president of the Teagle Foundation, which awards grants for liberal-arts teaching and learning. She also chairs the board of ITHAKA Harbors, which includes JSTOR and a number of other branches that support digital resources for research and teaching. She writes, “I have been taking singing lessons and have a teacher who seems to think I am a mezzo-soprano, a far cry from the folk singing I did at Brandeis many years ago.” Since he and his wife retired, Evan Stark has been working to change policies on violence against women in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. In 2013, largely on the basis of his work, the Home Office adopted his definition of domestic violence, which Evan views as a pattern of coercive control that violates women’s rights to autonomy and liberty in personal life, as well as their physical integrity. In December 2015, England, Wales and Northern Ireland became the first countries to make “domestic violence and coercive control” a specific offense that carries up to five years in prison. Frank Susman just completed his 145th appellate case. After the case lost in the trial court and the New Mexico Court of Appeals, the New Mexico Supreme Court reversed the two lower courts in his favor. Julian Weitzenfeld and his wife, Ruth, joined classmates Julie Lazarovich Simon and Beth Goldstein on last year’s Brandeis Alumni Travel Program trip to Apulia, Italy.