Class of 1968
Peter Battis retired after nearly 50 years in the practice of psychology. He played Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” in December and, via Zoom, has been workshopping a play by Andrew James Harmon about vampires and psychoanalysis. Sara Anne Fox is a story editor/writing consultant for screenwriter, novelist and memoir clients, and is also a screenwriter for hire. Her screenwriter husband, Theodore, died in 1997. Son Daniel is a writer who also teaches ESL online, and son Nicholas is assistant conductor, chorus master and director of the artist-in-residence program at the Portland (Oregon) Opera. Sara Anne lives in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood. Looking behind a desk drawer in his study, Peter Gidal discovered a 23-page manuscript he’d written in 1978 for a seminar at the Royal College of Art, in London. In 2021, Helsinki’s Rab-Rab Press published the manuscript as a book titled “The Author as Producer of Nothing,” with a new introduction by Peter. “Out of the blue, things reappear,” he says. Samuel Heilman is working on two new books. He retired in 2020 after 47 years of teaching sociology at the City University of New York and moved with Ellin ’69 to Israel, where their children and grandchildren live. Since taking up residence in Jerusalem, he and Ellin have celebrated the bar mitzvah of their oldest grandson and the bat mitzvah of their oldest granddaughter. They hope to make a trip back to the U.S. soon to visit Ellin’s 101-year-old mom. Rabbi Ronald Kronish, P’99, reports the “Brandeis Eight of ’68” started getting together for Sunday Zoom calls during the pandemic. The group includes Ronald, retired but still writing books and blogs (lives in Jerusalem); Everett Fox, GSAS MA’72, PhD’75, professor of Jewish studies (lives in Newton, Massachusetts); Harris Gleckman, GSAS MA’77, PhD’82, retired from the UN (lives in Portland, Maine); Allan Goroll, Mass General Hospital primary-care doctor and Harvard Medical School professor (lives on Cape Cod); Sam Heilman, retired sociology professor (lives in Jerusalem); Andy Ross, a book agent (lives in Berkeley, California); David Soloff, retired from Camp Ramah in Wisconsin (lives in Chicago); and Henry Sussman, a retired comparative literature professor (lives in NYC). Richard Rapfogel and wife Diane Mines have relocated to Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, where, he writes, “with a yearlong interruption due to a pandemic you might have read about,” they are building a small house. Son Jed works as a film critic and curator at Anthology Film Archives in NYC. Son Karl and his wife, Jane Anne Oishi Morton, manage Green Gables Design and Restoration, and live with their two boys on Sauvie Island, near Portland, Oregon. Daughter Lucy, now 19, is following in her brothers’ footsteps as a first-year at NYU. Eric Uslaner, professor emeritus of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, is the co-editor of “National Identity and Social Cohesion” (ECPR Press, 2021) and the author of “National Cohesion and Political Polarization” (Oxford University Press, 2022).
A LIFE, DOCUMENTED: The subject of a critically acclaimed 2021 documentary film (“My Name Is Pauli Murray”), Pauli Murray was a lawyer, a human-rights activist, a poet, an Episcopal priest — and the architect of key legal strategies that successfully fought discrimination in America in the 20th century. From 1968-73, Murray taught American studies at Brandeis.