David Sarasohn

Fuks:  This is David Fuks interviewing David Sarasohn on December 5th, at their home. David, could you first give me your date of birth and where you were born?
SARASOHN:  August 17th, 1950. Jersey City, New Jersey. 

Fuks: Thank you. We are very close in age. I was born in September 1950. 
SARASOHN: So was Lisa. 

Fuks: Is that right?
SARASOHN: Yes. 

Fuks: We were talking about the little statue you have in your home of a baseball player. You were telling me that you played organized ball briefly . . .
SARASOHN: Very briefly. 

Fuks: Tell me about your home in New Jersey and your family there. Let’s start with that. 
SARASOHN: I was born in Jersey City. We lived in North Bergen, which was the other end of Hudson County, but everybody in Hudson County was actually born in Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City, named after Frank Hague’s mother. My father was an internal revenue agent. My mother was a schoolteacher, and I had one sister, who was 11 years older than I am. 

Fuks: That’s a big age difference. 
SARASOHN: It was. And the thing is that I have a cousin who’s one year older than I am. My mother once said that if Cele could have another kid, so could she. And that was the reason I got born, presumably. 

Fuks: So were you and your cousin pretty close? Did you live near each other?
SARASOHN:  They lived across the river in New York, but we saw a lot of them. 

Fuks: What was family life like in New Jersey?
SARASOHN: My father was ill for most of my life. He had rheumatic fever when he was a child, which is something that people don’t have anymore. But in the early 20th century, people would have it, and it would do permanent damage to their heart. 

Fuks: Rheumatic heart disease. 
SARASOHN: Right. Basically what it did was destroy the valves. And again, these days that’s not a big deal; replacing a heart valve is almost outpatient surgery. But back then, this was in the very, very early stretches of it. I say that my father had open-heart surgery before they knew how to do open-heart surgery. He had three very difficult surgeries when I was seven, nine, and 12. He wasn’t actually expected to survive any of them, but he did. 

He actually survived until the January of my senior year in college. For most of my childhood, it would have been unimaginable to think that he would have lived to see me graduate from college, but he almost made it. 

Fuks: So he was able to be an influence on you. 
SARASOHN: Yes.

Fuks: Tell me about that influence. 
SARASOHN: My father’s grandfather, who had the same name as he did, Kasriel Sarasohn, was the founder and publisher of the first Yiddish daily newspaper in New York, Yidishes Tageblatt. It was conservative religiously and politically, so it was never getting the kind of attention that The Forward got, but for a while it was a very prominent publication. It lasted until the end of the 1920s. My great-uncle took over the newspaper, and my grandfather became a lawyer. My father actually went to CCNY. 

My father never did any of what are supposed to be the “fatherly” things. It would be unimaginable having a catch with my father or going to a ballgame with him. But we used to go on walks and talk, and it was pretty much the best thing one would imagine with a father. 

Fuks: That sounds like a terrific thing to be able to have. 
SARASOHN: Yes, it was. 

Fuks: It’s interesting that you have a newspaper in your family background, given that you ended up . . . 
SARASOHN: Yes. 

Fuks: Being a journalist for such a long period of time. 
SARASOHN:  Things show up in strange ways down the line. 

Fuks: I want to hear about your mom too. What was she like?
SARASOHN: My mother was a first- and then a second-grade teacher. I know people often say this, but it’s literally true that my mother was the best person I ever knew in my life. She was very loving and supportive. She was also very blunt and direct. If she had an issue with what you were doing, she would let you know. We were very close for her entire life. 

There’s a story I tell about my mother. When Lisa and I became engaged, when we were both in graduate school with very limited prospects, we came back with Lisa’s parents and we had this family meeting about what the wedding would be like. Lisa’s father, who could be very courtly, said to her, “What kind of thoughts do you have about the wedding?” And my mother said, “Well, as long as somebody was asking” — which nobody had done up to this point — she thought we were too young to get married. 

Fuks: Wow.
SARASOHN: That was what my mother was like. However, once . . .

Fuks: She was very straightforward. 
SARASOHN:  But once it happened and we were going forward, my mother was very loving and supportive. 

Fuks: That’s terrific. I want to know a little bit about your relationship with your sister. You and I have had the opportunity to talk about her circumstances, but I want to know, as a child, growing up with a sister ten years older, what was it like for you?
SARASOHN: At the time that I actually reached consciousness, my sister was off to college, so I didn’t have a really great relationship up to then. There was a time when my sister was working in New York and I was in middle school, high school, and I would go in and have lunch with her. That was very cool, to have a sister working in New York that you could take the bus, have lunch with. My sister and I had different values and directions in life. At various points it’s been difficult, and at other points it’s been easier. 

Fuks: That’s not unusual with a sibling that much older. I can see that between my two sisters, who are ten years apart, that they were very, very different people. 
SARASOHN:  Yes. And we had very different experiences growing up; it’s like we grew up in different families, which I think is also not very unusual for people with that kind of distance apart.

Fuks: It’s like two only children almost. 
SARASOHN:  Really.

Fuks: Tell me about your neighborhood. It’s obviously the New York area, the part of New Jersey you were from. There’s a fairly large Jewish population there. Was it a Jewish neighborhood that you were living in?
SARASOHN: There was a substantial Jewish population. The majority of the town was Catholic. Irish, Italian, Polish, some Germans. There was an equal number of Jews and Protestants. We grew up attending this fairly conservative temple. My sister says that the men and women were actually sitting apart. I don’t remember that part; maybe I was just too young for it. It was kind of a curious experience because I was never very good at languages. From public school, where I was generally considered pretty bright, I would go across the way to Hebrew school, where they were teaching Hebrew and I was sort of the dummy. It was a difficult transition across the street, and this continued until it got to the point when I was supposed to go every afternoon. I made it clear that I didn’t want to, and my family became Reform. They found a synagogue in Hoboken that would bar mitzvah me after just going on Sundays. 

Fuks: That’s an interesting transition for you. Do you belong to a synagogue now?
SARASOHN: Yes. 

Fuks: What’s your congregation?
SARASOHN: We belong to Beth Israel, which we joined when we arrived in Portland in 1977. 

Fuks:  So that connection to Reform Judaism stuck. 
SARASOHN: Yes, it did. Both Lisa and I wanted to be part of a congregation. We’re the only ones of our siblings on either side that belonged to a congregation. We do have nieces and nephews who were bat mitzvahed, but then after the bat mitzvah, the connection waned. For us, it’s maintained. 

Fuks: I want to talk to you about your Portland experience in a little bit, but let’s stick with your earlier experiences. I’m curious. I appreciate that double life you had with the Hebrew school experience and the public school experience. Talk to me a little bit about your public school experience, and your choice of university, and the kinds of things that you ended up studying. 
SARASOHN: In public school, which I was in up until seventh grade, I had a pretty good time. I was pretty smart, which made life easy. The difficult part of it was that up until third grade, I was attending the same public school in which my mother was teaching second grade. My mother used to say when she was walking along the hallway, and she would see the teacher whose class I was in at the moment, she would duck into an empty classroom to avoid meeting her. It was sort of known that I was the teacher’s kid. Later on we moved across town, I attended a different public school, and it was in some ways easier. Then for high school I went to, first a private school in Jersey City, and then to another one in New York, which in what I think was kind of the common situation at that time, my class and the public school in New York was almost entirely Jewish. 

Fuks: It was a public school in New York?
SARASOHN: No, it was private school. 

Fuks: What was the name of that school?
SARASOHN: The Fieldston School. Ethical culture. 

Fuks: Ethical culture, interesting. What did you derive from that experience? That’s an interesting experience in a private setting.
SARASOHN:  I was a scholarship kid there. Everybody would come back from spring break with tans, and I wouldn’t. There were a lot of people there who had been in class together since kindergarten, and I just dropped in, in tenth grade. And because I had skipped eighth grade, I was also a year younger than just about everybody. It was, in some ways, a bumpy social arrangement. 

Fuks: Yes, it’s hard to be among the youngest ones in the school. Especially if you were an August baby, even if you had been in the same year, you would have been among the youngest.
SARASOHN: And I can’t say that I was actually socially smooth and accomplished. It was, in some ways, a bumpy role. 

Fuks: Did that experience of being an outsider have an impact on you to some degree? In terms of your worldview or the way you look at things?
SARASOHN: I think so. Whenever I don’t want to do something socially, or I’m reluctant to encounter someone, Lisa says, “You’re not in Fieldston anymore.” Clearly it’s had a prolonged, somewhat warping experience. 

Fuks: Now you’re a writer, and there are a lot of writers who’ve had that experience, being able to step back from things, and to some degree that outsider experience might’ve influenced that. I wonder. 
SARASOHN: Well, I always wanted to write. No, I took sort of a circular path to it. When I went to college . . .

Fuks: And where did you go to college?
SARASOHN: I went to a place called Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. I went to college intending to become a lawyer. Then when I was in college, I became very close to and intrigued by a certain number of my history professors, and I went off in that direction. In fact, when I was graduating college, I was applying to both law schools and to history graduate schools to see what would happen. I was going to go to law school, I had paid the deposit, and everything was smooth. Then I got an offer from UCLA for a four-year fellowship in graduate school, and so I decided to do that. That was the most difficult stretch I ever had with my mother. 

Fuks: Yes, I can imagine. 
SARASOHN: My mother was very strongly pro- law school and disapproving of graduate school. There are a couple of reasons for this. Obviously, being a lawyer was a more solid path to go on, and also the idea was that she saw being a professor as just a variation of the teaching she was doing. It was one thing for her to do it but something else for me to be doing it. 

Fuks: She wanted more for you. 
SARASOHN:  But again, once it was locked in and I was going to graduate school, she was quite supportive of the idea. 

Fuks: Were both your parents from America? They were American-born?
SARASOHN: Yes, both of my parents were American-born. One of my grandmothers, I think, arrived from Poland very young. But aside from that, the parents, the family . . .

Fuks: So the Yiddish culture was just part of the scene of New York and New Jersey at that time, in any case? 
SARASOHN: Yes, although for my mother’s mother, Yiddish had been her first language. My mother didn’t really speak Yiddish but could understand it. I couldn’t understand it but knew a number of phrases that were common in our lives. My children, I think, have only the slightest idea that such a language exists. I think that’s a very common pattern. In fact, it’s a pattern that I’ve discovered when I’ve been speaking to Native American families. 

Fuks: That makes sense. Over time the generations have a very different experience and assimilate more into what it means to be an American. 

Fuks: So you ended up with a PhD in History?
SARASOHN: I ended up with a PhD in History. We came up to Portland for me to teach at Reed College, which I did for three years, and it wasn’t a great mixture. I’ve always said that I departed by mutual agreement; they asked me to leave and I agreed to. But from that, I went into a magazine, Oregon Magazine, because I had done a lot of freelance writing as a graduate student in Los Angeles. Then from Oregon Magazine, I ended up at The Oregonian. In a very circuitous route, I ended up as a writer after all. 

Fuks: Talk to me a little bit about the passion for writing, and then I want to hear a little bit more about The Oregonian experience. 
SARASOHN: I always loved reading and spent a great deal of time doing it throughout my childhood. From this came the idea of wanting to write, wanting to have that kind of experience myself. I was always writing, and part of the appeal of going to graduate school was the idea that you could write about it. The idea of research and writing was always a lot more appealing to me than teaching, which was sort of the side part of the deal. If you were destined to be a writer, I concluded, that’s where you’re going to end up, whatever various different steps you take along the way. There’s an O. Henry short story where the character takes several different steps in his life, and whichever step he takes, he ends up being killed by the same gun. It always seemed to me that was sort of the way this worked. 

Fuks: So it’s in some way, from your perspective, a predestined part of your character. 
SARASOHN: Yes. If you’re actually going to be a writer, there may be no way of escaping it. 

Fuks: I would imagine also, given your scholarly work in the area of history, good historians have to be good writers. And some of them have tremendous influence. I think about Doris Kearns Goodman, for example. One of the things I liked about Obama was that one of his favorite books was Team of Rivals and that that reality influenced him in terms of how he conducted himself. I think that’s an interesting phenomenon. 

Fuks: You grew up and came of age in an interesting time of history. School desegregation happened in the early ’60s when you were an adolescent. Then the Vietnam War era was going on while you were a young college student. There were all kinds of social issues. And as you mentioned, you went to a school where ethical culture was at the core of the curriculum. I wonder how that influenced you in terms of the kinds of things you chose to write about and the things that you chose to make central to who you are.
SARASOHN: My family were always Democrats. I’ve always voted Democratic, although my father once said that he’d been severely tempted by Wendell Willkie. I think that was the only “blotch” on our record. Civil rights was sort of a given in the early ’60s, later ’60s. We all admired that. At the time, we all thought that this was a Southern issue, and what would later develop about it, that this had to do with the nature of the entire country, was sort of a slow-arriving realization. 

Fuks: Dick Gregory once said that if you’re from south of the Canadian border, you’re from the South. 
SARASOHN: Exactly. This took a long time. And on the subject of Vietnam, I was actually a relative hawk for quite a while, much, much later than my parents were. My parents actually went to a Eugene McCarthy rally in New York at a time when I was still supporting the war and being on the side of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. That idea persisted until I got into college, and first of all, Richard Nixon was elected, whom I did not trust. It got to the point when I was approaching draftability myself, and maybe that had something to do with my change of thinking on it. 

Fuks: So you were never in the military?
SARASOHN: No, I was never in the military. I had a narrow escape. My draft lottery number — something which is inconceivable to people today, but which for a stretch was very vivid to us — was 154. It was just right at the cusp, and I actually was called up for two draft physicals and passed both of them. What happened was, when I graduated college in June of 1971, at the end of June the selective service had lapsed, so they couldn’t draft anybody. Doves in the Senate filibustered and prevented its renewal for several months, so they couldn’t return to drafting anybody until September. By that point, they weren’t going to get up to my number. It was a very strange experience, but it was one of the ways that I consider I’ve been very lucky. 

Fuks: Serendipity, for sure. So what attracted you to Oregon?
SARASOHN: I was graduating from UCLA with a degree, and there were very few jobs in the country. It was really a very remarkable thing that at Reed I got one of the best jobs in the country. We were just thrilled about it because, assuming that you did get a job at all, it could’ve ended up in any number of places. I remember one of the other places I interviewed for was Louisiana State at Lafayette. We were much pleased that it turned out that way. The entire summer before coming up here, Lisa and I would just walk around and say to each other, “Portland!” We were quite thrilled about the idea. So this is how we ended up here. 

Fuks: And Lisa ended up teaching. She got a history degree as well, right?
SARASOHN: Lisa was also in graduate school. We met at the orientation-day meeting of new History graduate students. She got her degree in European History, and when we came up here, Oregon State was looking for people to teach individual classes. She was hired to teach three sections of Western Civ and basically worked her way up and up. Eventually she was hired as a tenure-track professor. 

Fuks: Talk about that courtship between you and Lisa. I want to hear about that before I hear your experiences as a writer. 
SARASOHN: It was a remarkable thing because we met, as I say, on this first day of graduate school, and we were together ever after. 

Fuks: So it was an immediate connection. 
SARASOHN: Yes. There was an immediate connection for us, and it’s been very good. The one thing I’d say is that on our first date we went to a UCLA football game. Lisa, with what turned out to be extreme duplicity, pretended to like it. But really, ever since the time we met, we’ve been together. 

Fuks: That’s great. So talk to me about those early days at The Oregonian. You were doing field reporting? You had a beat? Or what were you . . .?
SARASOHN: No, I had a very unusual course into this. I had never been a reporter; I was a professor, and then I worked for magazines for a couple of years. 

Fuks: What kinds of things were you writing about in the magazines?
SARASOHN:  I was doing a range of things. I was an editor, so I was working on other people’s things, and I was writing features of my own on just about anything having to do with Oregon. I did a long piece once about the Portland police, who were having difficulties at that time with their relationships with the African-American community. I did a piece about riding the trains through Oregon, the train running south to Klamath Falls and running east to Pendleton. I also started writing restaurant reviews, just because the job opened up and I presented myself for it. It was sort of a wide-ranging experience. 

But then in 1982, Lisa got a fellowship to spend a year at the University of Pennsylvania, and I managed to get a job with New Jersey Monthly. Since I wanted to come back, I went to see Bob Landauer, who was the editor of the editorial page, to talk to him and say that I wanted to come back sometime, and he was relatively friendly. When we’d been back in New Jersey for a month, I picked up The Times and saw that The Oregon Journal had been closed down and incorporated into The Oregonian. I figured that’s it; they’ve gotten all the people they are going to need for the next 20 years. 

After we’d been in New Jersey for six or eight months, and Lisa’s fellowship was coming to an end and she was planning to return to Oregon State, I just called Bob to ask if there was anything possible, and it turned out there was. For six months, I would call him every two, three weeks just to ask if there was anything else I could provide. He became more and more encouraging on it, and it actually happened. It was really a remarkable thing because he was looking for someone to edit the Opinion section. It was an extraordinary conclusion for him to decide that, to edit his Opinion section, he wanted someone who had never worked on a newspaper, never been a reporter. 

Fuks: That is interesting. I had an opportunity to get to know Fred Stickel [publisher of The Oregonian 1975-2009] during that same era, and Fred was a pretty conservative guy. If you mentioned Nancy Reagan to Fred Stickel, he would glow. He had a great affection for her. But the editorial board seems to have had a pretty wide range of perspectives. Fred didn’t impose his worldview on the editorial board as much as he might have. 
SARASOHN: Yes. He would make his views known, but he would not insist on things. The Oregonian up to that time was a Republican newspaper. As a matter of fact, through the 1950s, its masthead would say, “The Oregonian: An Independent Republican Newspaper.” It had never endorsed a Democrat for president. When Bob Landauer became in charge of the editorial board, it was with the understanding that at some point this would happen. But Fred had some very, very strong feelings. He’d been a Marine in World War II. 

I remember the first week that I was editor of the Opinion section was the time that the Reagan effort in Lebanon had just collapsed. There was this massive bombing in the Marine barracks, and we ended up withdrawing all the Marines. My assistant put on the page a several-step cartoon showing the Marines planting the flag, then the Marines uprooting the flag, and then the Marines running with the flag. So the end of my very first week, we did the proofs, the proofs went around, and someone came back to me and said, “Mr. Stickel says, don’t go home today until you’ve spoken to him.” I was terrified; I saw my career ending before it ever got started. I waited, and he came around and just said, “The Marines didn’t run.” I said, “Yes, sir.” We replaced the cartoon, and everything went fine.

Fuks: I can appreciate his emotions about that given his experiences. He was a Marine during World War II. 
SARASOHN: He was a Marine during World War II. In the 1980s, Oregon was doing all of these efforts to expand the trade relations with Japan, and we would have these Japanese business delegations come in. He would come into the editorial board meetings, and beforehand he would say to us, “Were these guys who were shooting at me?”

Fuks: It just doesn’t go away. 
SARASOHN: Yes. Remember that part. 

Fuks: That’s very powerful. So I know you best as a writer, by virtue of your op-ed pieces, which I know you still continue to do. I wonder about that transition from being the editor of the Opinion section to writing the op-ed pieces, and how that came about.
SARASOHN: It was sort of always understood that after I’d been editor of the Opinion section for a while, I would become an editorial writer when a position opened up. Also, as editor of the Opinion section, I would print a lot of my own columns, which I had the power to do and which was very heartening. Then after a couple of years, I did indeed become an editorial writer, but I also kept writing columns. I would write a couple of columns a week as well as some editorials. The Oregonian never had a full-time editorial columnist before, and I guess it was actually not a conscious decision to have one; it was just sort of a position that I created for myself. 

Fuks: I remember you spent a fair amount of energy writing about children, youth, and family issues in the state. I’m curious as to how that came about.
SARASOHN: It was something I’d always been interested in. Children deserve a break, an opportunity. It was also that during a long part of the time when I was writing about this, Lisa and I were going through infertility. Possibly there was a connection to that too. You start to write about these things, and you find other things, and you get more interested in it. I found some really remarkable things at the time. Neal Goldschmidt was governor, and he was launching the Children’s Agenda, so there was a lot to write about. There were many issues and directions that seemed uncertain at the time. People were really thinking about the idea of businesses providing daycare. It eventually evolved that businesses had no ideological opposition to this, but it just wasn’t a business that they wanted to be in, so the childcare effort had to move in other directions. There were issues like that, and kind of expectations.

I remember there was another time when there was an issue, during the first Bush administration. It was a movement, sort of federal support of this. Some Democrats in the House were holding out to try to make this an entitlement, and finally, one person said, “Lyndon Johnson is not going to come back to sign this bill.” Again, there was a readjustment of what was possible and what was the useful direction in childcare. There were other things that I was interested in, such as higher education, from my own background and Lisa’s background. And also hunger, which was an extraordinary thing that I got interested in both because of my own interest in food, writing about restaurants, and also because we were just finding out at that point, in the 1990s, what a bad situation Oregon was in on the subject of hunger. 

Fuks: I remember that you were writing that the level of food insecurity in the state was really remarkable. 
SARASOHN: Right. Which was something that no one ever really imagined because we all had this image of Oregon as a progressive, supportive state. But for various reasons, we would turn out very high in the US Department of Agriculture surveys.

Fuks: It’s interesting also, if you look at Portland today, the level of homelessness that we are seeing and the impact that’s having on the quality of life in the city.
SARASOHN: Yes, although I do think that’s actually fairly common in American cities, especially West Coast cities. It has to do with a lot of things, like the more transient population and the cost of housing in relation to the wages. Yes, that too was something we never expected. I remember in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began dismantling a lot of the federal supports for this. Senator Moynihan once said that, “If you had told people at the beginning of the ’80s that you would be walking along the street and there would be homeless people lying there, and you would just step over them and keep moving, people would never believe that it was going to get to that point.” And yet it pretty much did. 

Fuks: Yes, here we are. Actually Reagan, during the ’70s when he was governor of California, was one of the leaders in the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill.
SARASOHN: But at the time, a lot of people thought that was a terrific idea. We’re going to get people out of these snake-pit kind of places, Cuckoo’s Nest kind of places. There would be community support for them, and everybody would be better. The point is, of course, that we closed down the places and did not create the community support. 

Fuks: It’s interesting how the kinds of issues that you have traditionally written about have been, to a significant degree, very progressive kinds of issues, issues of public policy and social policy that sort of fit some of the ethical background that you were exposed to when you were so young.
SARASOHN: I have never really thought of myself as a traditional progressive. I’ve always thought of myself as a Cold War liberal. But the idea that there were things that the government could and should do for people has always been kind of a given. 

Fuks: That really is traditional liberalism. 
SARASOHN: But you see, in the 1960s we were all so riding this steady stream of improvement of living standards. The expectation was that this was going to go on indefinitely, and we should just bring more people along with us on the route. Later of course, the outlook in general became more pessimistic, but the idea that there were still these kinds of responsibilities and possibilities was always pretty strong. 

Fuks:  I want to transition to your relationship to the Portland Jewish community. I mentioned that you’re a member of Temple Beth Israel. Are there other Jewish organizations or institutions that you have any kind of relationship with?
SARASOHN: Not really. I’ve had a strong relationship with Beth Israel. When we came up to Portland, people we knew at Reed were members, and we joined from them and came to meet some other people. Beth Israel started asking me to do things, being on the board and conducting events, and speaking. It’s been a long and strong relationship. I’m now on my second six-year stretch on the board, which I think is sort of unusual. I was on the search committee which hired Rabbi Cahana. When he asked me to come back on the board, I didn’t see how I could decline, although my experience the first time around sort of suggested to me that to be on the temple board you should really have more money than I had. So I deferred a couple of times but eventually agreed. 

Fuks: Well, it’s good to have some people that represent sweat equity on a board also. Not everyone has to just be able to contribute lots of money. It’s interesting, though, that you were there for a good part of Rabbi Rose’s tenure, and now Rabbi Cahana’s been in this community for a long enough period of time that he’s not a rookie at all. I wonder if you want to reflect on those experiences with those two different rabbis. 
SARASOHN: When I was on the search committee, the two things that were important to me were — and again, these were shaped by Rabbi Rose — that I wanted to have a rabbi whose sermons were worth listening to, and also a rabbi who would be a presence in the Portland community. This had been very, very much something that Rabbi Rose had done. It was also something that had been sort of a given in Beth Israel going back at least through the beginning of the 20th century when Steven Wise was a rabbi here. It seems to me a very important role that the rabbi of Beth Israel should have, and of course it’s a role that Rabbi Cahana has taken very extensively. 

Fuks: That’s an interesting parallel. I remember Rabbi Rose chairing the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, which was my privilege to staff, when I was an assistant to a county commissioner. He was the perfect person for that role because here were the chief of police, and the district attorney, and the circuit court chief judge, and the district court chief judge, and advocates of all sorts coming together to talk about how to coordinate and more effectively manage that system. And county commissioners coming in, which represented a level of volatility at times. Rabbi Rose had the stature to be able to stop an argument between very powerful local politicians, and said, “Let’s be focused on the outcomes.” He did have the moral authority to do that. You see Rabbi Cahana similarly, I assume.
SARASOHN: Yes, and Rabbi Cahana has been in quite a number of things. He’s very active in the same-sex marriage movement. He was on one of our various unsuccessful commissions on police review. Just recently, he’s been one of the three clergy who are the prime petitioners for gun control legislation, the gun control initiative. 

Fuks: So we were talking a little bit about Rabbi Cahana and Rabbi Rose, and your board work. You also still get invited to do a fair amount of public speaking. 
SARASOHN: Some amount. It’s come to be something that I think of as a contribution, and also something that I’ve come to enjoy and think that I’ve gotten better at. You want to try to maintain a presence and a profile. 

Fuks: I think it’s important too. You’re now semi-retired. You’re still writing op-ed pieces a few times a week. 
SARASOHN: I’m not writing for The Oregonian. I’m writing for various places around. 

Fuks: How has that phase of life felt for you?
SARASOHN: I’d like to be writing more than I am, but I find ways to do it. I watch a lot of baseball, and that’s very satisfying. 

Fuks: Who do you follow?
SARASOHN: The Mets.

Fuks: All right. I am still a Tigers fan. 
SARASOHN: See? You stick to the teams you grow up with, no matter where you find yourself living. 

Fuks: That’s really true. Well, what are your hopes? You’re still a pretty young guy. 
SARASOHN: Lisa’s finishing up a book, and I’ve been helping her on that. I don’t know. I haven’t really found a book to write myself. That would be sort of a satisfying thing to do. I have never really connected with it. 

Fuks: I think we’ve hit the moment of transition. 
SARASOHN: Okay.

Fuks: Let me thank you for doing this interview. 
SARASOHN: Certainly. Thank you!