Arts & Entertainment

INTRODUCI

Finding His Faith

Peter Jacobson plays a doctor
(Jewish, of course) on TV's House.

Peter Jacobson, left, as Dr. Chris Taub, with Olivia Wilde (Thirteen) and Kal
Penn (Dr. Kutner) on the set of House

I

n a February episode of FOX'S
hit series House that is due to
be repeated Monday, April 21, a
Chasidic woman, Roz, faints and starts
hemorrhaging at her Orthodox wed-
ding.
Six months earlier, Roz had been
a secular Jew. She worked in the
recording industry, did drugs and
likely abused her body in other ways.
Dr. House, misanthrope that he is,
is convinced that whatever is ailing

Roz had to do with her past life. He
believes people don't change and even
assumes Roz had an ulterior motive
for her "conversion:' He also believes
all patients lie.
House isn't the only one who views
Roz negatively. Dr. Chris Taub, the
only Jew on House's staff, claims he
doesn't hate religion. "I hate the reli-
gious people who are out of touch with
reality:' he says, meaning, in this con-
text, Chasidim.

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— he would write to figures like David
Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, and
they'd write back.
Brooks' initial interest in Judaism
came though her father. She recalls
that the first news story to which she
paid attention was the Six-Day War,
which her father cared so much about.
"It fired up my imagination:' she
says. "I became insufferable. I started
hauling around dog-eared copies of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
and The Diary of Anne Frank." For a
while, she wore a Star of David along
with her Catholic school uniform,
which was "rather perplexing to the
nuns."
She ultimately left Catholicism on
feminist grounds and was without
religion when she came to New York
to attend the Columbia School of
Journalism.
When she fell in love with Tony
Horwitz, now her husband and also

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April 17 • 2008

a Pulitzer Prize winner, she didn't
realize he was Jewish. When they
made plans to marry, she decided to
convert to Judaism. As she explains,
"It seemed like a gesture I needed to
make for history. I wasn't going to be
the end of the line of Jewish life." Now,
she and her family are very active in
a Reconstructionist community on
Martha's Vineyard.
Her father, who worked as a proof-
reader at newspapers after World War
II, also influenced her career choice.
She remembers visiting him at work
when she was 8 and going to see the
presses rolling.
"He reached onto a conveyor and
grabbed a newspaper and it was warm,
hot off the press. I was so excited to be
the first person to read the news. It was
big and important and something I
wanted to be part of."
The first one in her family to attend
college, Brooks studied journalism and