A Working Life: 50 Jobs in 60 Years

In my parents’ generation, most people had one or two jobs during their working lives. Today, the average is twelve. I had fifty! I started by delivering newspapers by bicycle and I ended sixty years later delivering career advice by Zoom. In between, I was a furniture mover, beer vendor, and Good Humor man. As an agricultural worker, I was a part of the most successful and longest lasting communal experiment of the twentieth century, the Israeli kibbutz. I was a community worker and social science researcher. I served in the most inept unit of one of the most elite branches of the Israel Defense Forces. I was a college teacher, a labor educator, and a freelancer who sometimes juggled as many as six jobs at the same time. I had the fun experience of working with writers, actors, and stand-up comedians in the unlikeliest place: JPMorgan Chase. I had some jobs that I was great at and others where I abysmally failed. I worked with and for some characters, scoundrels and even out-and-out crooks who stole millions of dollars from an organization devoted to helping poor people. I worked for incompetent managers, abusive managers and great managers.\nBut for the most part, I worked with wonderful, supportive colleagues, many of whom remain lifelong friends. My work brought me into contact with celebri ties like Ossie Davis, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Danny Kaye, Teddy Kollek, Michael Moore, and Chuck Schumer. I witnessed discrimination against groups of people and was personally discriminated against by a most unlikely source. Like many other people, my career was impacted by great social and historical events like the Vietnam War, a war in the Middle East, 9/11, the bank merger and downsizing era, the recession of 2008 and the pandemic. I have dealt with ethical issues like benefiting from nepotism, teaching in a religious school as an atheist, and advising students at Columbia University on how to get jobs on Wall Street during the day while attending the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in the evening.\nThrough my own work experience and as a career advisor for Russian immigrants, Orthodox Jews, and college students from the U.S. and dozens of other countries, I have encountered just about every work-related problem, so the book offers practical job search and career development advice. I think you’ll find it to be interesting, informative, entertaining, sad, poignant, uplifting and funny.