The night before the Stacked Up crew was scheduled to jump in a Zipcar and take the scenic route to Southern Connecticut to interview Rich Cohen, our executive producer left her purse at a bistro. The purse contained her driver’s license and Zipcard, two crucial elements to the shoot. She didn’t know it then, but when she made a frantic call to the restaurant at one a.m. and conversed in broken Spanish with the dishwasher, Stacked Up was officially running at the Deacon.
In fact, we kept running at the Deacon even before we met Rich and learned what the expression meant. We solved the Zipcard and driver’s license problem by putting a different producer in the driver’s seat. Northbound rush-hour traffic flowed quickly on the Saw Mill River Parkway, and we got to Rich’s town with half an hour to spare. We stopped for coffee five minutes down the road from Rich’s house. But once we got back on the road, the five-minute trip turned into 30 minutes of wending through a labyrinth of roads that led to cul-de-sacs. After a series of phone calls to Rich, he guided us to his house.
Rich Cohen tackled one of the most explosive subjects of the past century in his most recent book, “Israel is Real.” His philosophy of not being afraid to run straight at a complicated problem helped him condense 2,000 years of Jewish history into a narrative that speaks to the present. To do this, Rich read a lot of books and probably encountered his share of dead ends. But, as he told us, “Reading is the really important part” to writing. Without books, he wouldn’t have a book.
We wish our story ended seamlessly with Rich waving good-bye from his porch as we pulled out of his driveway. The day’s challenges did not end with the interview. Our driver had left the lights running in the Zipcar, and the battery went dead. Before sending us off, Rich gave us a jump.
David Goodwillie tackles two of his favorite subjects, radicalism and New York.
