For 25 years, I have built a career as a professional Jewess, running some of the most important Jewish cultural institutions in the United States, curating major exhibitions, and consulting for institutions around the world. My Op-Ed pieces, historical essays, and curatorial work have been seen in The New York Daily News, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Jerusalem Post, The Chronicles of Philanthropy, The Advocate, Time Magazine, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and several others sources. I try to not make history boring, but in truth, I’m a geek. Ask anyone who knows me, they will tell you the truth. Unless you talk to the people I paid.

 

I grew up in Buffalo New York in a nice working class community filled with kids my age and great friends that I am still in touch with regularly. They lived very nice, decent, church going lives. We were the only practicing Jews on the block for many years, and my parents, though they tried to do their best, were totally ill equipped to be married to one another, or have a child, but they did, and here I am at 47, continuing to try and reconcile the nice Jewish suburban school teacher life my mother conveyed to the public with the gangster that was my father and my own personal wild side.

 

I miraculously was accepted at Boston University where I received a dual degree in History and International Relations. Upon graduating from college, I bought a used car and moved to Los Angeles to follow my gang of friends (great idea) and my boyfriend at the time (terrible idea). Within the first year, I got a job in data entry working for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (Now USC Shoah Foundation) where I worked for several years in the history department. I then pursued a PhD at UCLA but graduate school was a disaster for me, and when it was over, I took a job as the CEO of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the oldest Holocaust museum in the United States, founded by Survivors. From there, my career was made, and I haven’t looked back, employing the “fake it til I make it” strategy to succeed. I married in Los Angeles into an august Hollywood family that I most definitely did not fit into, and had two children with my husband, Ian Lithgow. After almost 25 years together, we separated in 2018, though we remain good friends. 

 

I live in Long Beach New York, which is a town designed for the divorced, the damned and the drunk, but I love this little quirky beach town and the good, bad and ugly that goes along with the fifteen mile long barrier island. I live on the bay with my two children, Ava and Archie, our puppy Dexter, and our bunny, Nibbles. I work as the EVP of the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv as their chief representative outside the state of Israel, and in my free time, I love to paddle board, read, work for social justice and local political causes, cook and stare at the open bay while trading wisecracks with my now teenaged children.