Brandeis Magazine

Greetings, fellow class members. I hope some of you made it to the alumni events this past June. I’m sorry that work and my stepson’s wedding kept me at home.

Robert Besner writes that although he is “not setting the world on fire,” he is “keeping a small flame glowing.” A semi-retired psychologist who is managing chronic health issues, he presented a paper on psychoanalysis and Buddhism at the Joint International (Psychoanalytic) Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is also working to develop infant mental-health resources in Toronto, where he lives. Robert is celebrating a 30th anniversary of life shared with his partner, Gregg Zufelt. Philip Kohl and his wife, Mary, are officially empty nesters. Their younger child, Steven, has headed off to college at Stanford. Daughter Alison, who graduated from Stanford in 2015, recently moved from San Francisco to New York City, where she is a software engineer. Melanie Turner Pinkert is a folklife specialist at Sandy Spring Museum, in Montgomery County, Maryland. She and husband Marvin ’74 celebrated son Alan’s wedding to Rebecca Marks in early October. Richard Sherwin, the Wallace Stevens Professor of Law at New York Law School, has returned from a six-month visiting fellowship at Fitzwilliam College and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. He writes, “It was mostly an opportunity to immerse myself in early modern culture, especially Shakespeare, as part of a larger project studying law and literature. I’ve been writing about sovereignty — what holds polities together.” Richard’s latest book is “A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age.”