The Journalist and the Rabbi

"The Journalist and the Rabbi: the Dual Career Stories of Stephen Fried and the late Gerald Wolpe" Dr. Arlene interviews Stephen Fried, an award-winning investigative journalist and essayist, the author of four acclaimed books: The New Rabbi, Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs, Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia, and Husbandry, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's graduate school of journalism. A two-time winner of the National Magazine Award, the Pulitzer Prize of magazine writing, Fried has been a prolific writer of feature stories and personal essays for Vanity Fair, The Washington Post Magazine, GQ, Rolling Stone, Glamour, and Philadelphia magazine (where he also served for two years as editor-in-chief). His most recent book, Husbandry, is a collection of essays he wrote as the "Heart of a Husband" columnist at Ladies' Home Journal. His 2002 book The New Rabbi, which is in the news again since its main character Rabbi Wolpe recently died, was highly praised by the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe and featured on "All Things Considered." It was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly, which said, "Stephen Fried took what many would consider a mundane topic-a Jewish congregation searching for a new rabbi and turned it into a marvelous journalistic memoir that recorded his own spiritual development as well as a community's quest for leadership." It was named one of the year's top 10 books on religion and spirituality by beliefnet.com. Rabbi Gerald Wolpe who died on May 18, 2009 at the age of 81 was married to Dr. Arlene's cousin Elaine. Fried, writing about Wolpe’s death, said "American Jews lost one of our great sermonizers, one of our most fascinating and challenging pulpit leaders, and a renaissance rabbi whose dramatic life yielded several distinct acts, each with its own powerful teaching moments."