Who are you?
    What is your ambition? What is your identity? What is your destiny?  These turn out to be peculiarly American questions -- and they are especially trenchant at this frightening moment in our history.
    Much of my journalism career has followed the fortunes of idiosyncratic seekers -- many of them seekers of fortunes but all in search of a heightened sense of self.  Me too, I suppose.
    A crazyquilt 90-minute multimedia monologue, Ruggedly Jewish is an odyssey in search of the search for self:  the selves of the characters I've chronicled; the American self, informed by nothing less than the founding promise of the Pursuit of Happiness; the suddenly emerging threatened self, defined against a sinister Other and my own baffled self -- a secular Jew, playing the role of Odysseus, very much at sea.
    They laughed. They cried. They didn't believe their eyes. 

    Ruggedly Jewish is written, and will go out on the road beginning December.   We need funding to underwrite the production: direction, sound design, lighting design and so on.   
    This production is not so much the culmination of a 40-year reporting career, but the synthesis of a countless remarkable stories, countless astonishing experiences and a finite number of lessons learned .  And I hope with your generous support we can achieve a compelling, eloquent (and pretty funny) whole that vastly exceeds the sum of its parts. 
   Please help underwrite this journey, which -- I promise you -- is an adventure.