Brandeis Magazine

Susan Kahn is celebrating the publication of her 19th book, “Sue’s Strategies: Grammar the Easy Way, 10 Minutes a Day,” which covers identifying and using syntax.

With sadness, Martin Levine reports his beloved wife, Martha, has died, after 45 years of marriage. “It is heartbreaking,” he writes.

Art Weiner and his husband recently celebrated 60 years together. “We have both retired from doing antiques shows in Chicago, New York, Miami, and London, and are spending time traveling with our cats and dog,” he writes.

Judy Gordon Landau, GSAS MA’64, and husband Manny made aliyah to Ramat Beit Shemesh in 2022. They live close to both daughters and sons-in-law, and their 16 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

“The Girl Who Counted Numbers,” a novel by Roslyn Bernstein, was named to the Kirkus Review Top 100 Indie Books of 2023 list.

Toby Kravet, who earned an MA in psychology from Boston University in 1964, retired in 2006 from working for the city and county of Honolulu. In 2013, the former marathoner broke both legs, an ankle, and a foot while skiing in New Zealand, spending a night alone on the slopes in subzero temperatures. Incredibly, he is back in skiing form, he reports.

Physician Marc Sapir celebrated the publication of his memoir in January.

Michael M. Berger was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Section of State and Local Government at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in August 2023.

Paulette Cooper reports her memoir, “The Perils of Paulette: My Life as a Stowaway, Tabloid Reporter, Travel Writer, Scientology-Basher, Holocaust Survivor, and More,” has been optioned for a movie.

Elizabeth (Freund) Fideler’s latest book is “Blanche Ames Ames (1878-1969) and Oakes Ames (1874-1950): Cultivating That Mutual Ground,” the story of a partnership between two activists that led to advances in women’s suffrage, reproductive rights, and scientific knowledge. The Ameses’ North Easton, Massachusetts, home, Borderland, is now a state park.

Angela Davis was the keynote speaker at this year’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast at Texas A&M University.

A profile of Miriam Gilbert in The Daily Iowan discussed how her passion for Shakespeare prompted her to teach an online class on the Bard a decade after retiring from the University of Iowa as an English professor.

Mary Lucier is a video artist who lives in New York City and New York’s Sullivan County. Her work will appear at this year’s Summer Invitational at Catskill Art Space, in Livingston Manor.

Vicki Cohn Pollard writes, “I’m in fairly good shape, with a few aches and pains. I’m deeply saddened by the state of our planet and our country, although, on hopeful days, I see a strong pull toward healing. My husband and I still live in our slightly hippyish, highly energy-efficient envelope house, which has five sets of stairs (yikes) — we are following the ‘use it or lose it’ philosophy.”

Earlier this year, Richard Weisberg taught a seminar on “The Merchant of Venice” titled Shakespeare Sides With Shylock, at the Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Paul Bloom and Allen Zerkin, P’02, completed the challenging Presidential Traverse in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. They report their 14-mile hike, done over three days, was extraordinarily beautiful and brutally difficult.

Alexander Nacht has been an anesthesiologist at New York Medical College for 38 years. He and wife Laurie Basch recently celebrated their kids’ graduations from Colby College and Emory University.

Mary Huff Stevenson’s memoir “Our Words Were Our Bond: A Mother- Daughter Relationship Preserved in Letters” — based on five years of correspondence between her and her mother — was independently published in November 2023.

Michael Blumberg is retiring after 50 years as a physician (he also holds business and law degrees). He writes, “I credit most of my ambition to my family and my Brandeis friends Pedro and Anthony, who spent endless hours with me in the library, which they made my second home.”

Deborah Dash Moore is the author of “Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York,” published by Three Hills in September 2023.

George Gopen, professor emeritus of the practice of rhetoric at Duke University, narrates the audiobook version of “What Is Health: Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design” (MIT Press, 2020).

To escape the hot summers of Moab, Utah, Robert Greenberg bought a 160-year-old farmhouse in Brooksville, Maine. Robert reports his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren have returned from an eight-year stint in Mozambique and are living in Cortez, Colorado.

Toby Mostysser lives in a retirement facility in Shoresh, Israel (not far from Jerusalem), where he enjoys swimming every day and reading. He has a PhD in English literature from the City University of New York. He moved to Israel in the late 1970s and lived for decades in Tel Aviv, working as an English-language editor.

Ralph Propper served as a panelist for Haven From the Holocaust — Philippines, and appeared in a film that showcases the history of the Environmental Council of Sacramento, California. Daughters Becca and Peri live in New York and Cambridge, England, respectively.

Sara Anne Fox is a former feature-film executive in Los Angeles who now works privately with screenwriters, novelists, and memoirists. Her older son is a writer in L.A.; her younger son is a classical conductor and music educator in Oregon.

Samuel Heilman, P’98, P’02, and his wife, Ellin Kaufman ’69, P’98, P’02, live in Israel, along with all their children and grandchildren. Their youngest son is serving as a reserve soldier near the southern front of the Israel-Hamas War. Samuel and fellow members of the Class of 1968 — including Renee (Tankenoff) Brant; Arthur Chernoff; Everett Fox, GSAS MA’72, PhD’75, P’05; Harris Gleckman, GSAS MA’77, PhD’82; Allan Goroll; Sarah Andi John; Ron Kronish, P’99; Andy Ross; David Soloff, P’07; Henry Sussman; Gila (Schwartz) Svirsky; and Joanna Kudisch Weinberg — debate the pros and cons of the war and the suffering it has caused during their weekly Zoom get-together, started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Samuel was invited to serve as a visiting professor at Princeton University’s Effron Center for the Study of America this spring.

Stephen Herman writes he lives in Connecticut “but not where the rich people live. Rather, it’s up in the northeast corner. The location allows me proximity to the Berkshires as well as my Manhattan office.”

A play written by Henry Sussman, “Soirée at Walter Benjamin’s,” was staged by the New York Theater Festival in October 2023.

Thanks to the recommendation of Brandeis theater arts faculty member Dmitry Troyanovsky ’98, Lauren Komer ’21 served as assistant director. Michaele Weissman’s book “The Rye Bread Marriage” was chosen by writer/podcast host Zibby Owens as one of 2023’s 10 best literary memoirs. A self-described late bloomer, Michaele is currently working on book No. 5. She’s the mother of three and grandmother of four.

Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, GSAS PhD’84, received the 2023 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, which comes with a $1 million award. Patricia, a Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland, is the author of the 1990 book “Black Feminist Thought.” She is the first Black laureate of the Berggruen Prize.

University Professor Eve Marder, who in October 2023 received the National Medal of Science from President Joe Biden at a White House ceremony, has been appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study’s board of trustees.

Linda and Walter Zimmerman, both P’95, traveled from Canada to attend the Brandeis 75th-anniversary celebration, which they say they wouldn’t have missed for the world. Linda and Walter, a retired librarian, contributed a scanner to the library to mark their 50th Reunion in 2019, and have pledged a new gift to the library in honor of the 75th anniversary and their upcoming 55th Reunion.