Rooted in one world. Curious about all the others.
I grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in a deeply traditional Jewish community. A small world shaped by faith, family, language, history, and a strong sense of continuity.
It was also a largely self-contained world, removed in many ways from the culture and life beyond it. As I got older, that distance awakened an intense curiosity in me: about America, other communities and beliefs, history, politics, people, and the enormous world outside the one I knew.
I never felt that discovering one required rejecting the other.
Instead, I have often found myself moving between worlds that rarely meet. Trying to understand each on its own terms, sometimes explaining one to the other, and approaching both with a deep respect for where people come from and the experiences that shape how they see the world.
That curiosity has taken me through all fifty states and into communities around the world. I have visited every state capitol, sought out Jewish life across America, walked through places shaped by war and conflict, explored histories close to my own and others seemingly far removed from it, and sat with people whose lives and beliefs are very different from mine.
Again and again, I have found that people and places become more complicated and more human the closer you get to them.
Again and again, I have found that people and places become more complicated and more human the closer you get to them.
Writing, Work & Public Life
Writing became one way of making sense of what I encountered.
My work has appeared in The Jerusalem Post, Ami Magazine, The Algemeiner, Moment, and other publications, covering subjects ranging from American identity and Jewish life to history, memory, politics, conflict, and the people I meet along the way.
Professionally, I have spent much of my career in business and commercial real estate. I founded Wachsen Group, working across strategy, positioning, communications, real estate, and business development. Earlier in my career, my work in commercial real estate was recognized by Commercial Observer as part of its 30 Under 30.
My education began in the traditional yeshiva world, with studies in New York and Jerusalem, and I received rabbinical ordination. Over time, my interests expanded into politics, history, communications, and public life, subjects I continue to study both formally and on my own.
But the different parts of my life have never felt entirely separate to me. Business, writing, travel, history, and public life all begin with many of the same questions: Who are the people involved? What shaped them? What are we missing? And what becomes possible when we understand one another a little better?
ROOTS & MEMORY
Much of what interests me begins with the world I inherited.
I come from generations of Jewish families shaped by scholarship, faith, migration, persecution, survival, and rebuilding. All eight of my great-grandparents lived through the Holocaust, and the family that came afterward was built in the shadow of that history.
My family roots reach much further back, through generations of rabbinic tradition and Jewish history. Preserving that story and understanding what it means to inherit a history we did not choose has become an important part of my work and of how I understand myself and others.
Today, I live in New York with my wife, Charny, and our two daughters, Rachel and Leah. I continue to write, travel, build, collect, ask questions, and follow my calling wherever it leads.
More than anything, I remain curious about what I have not yet understood, and about what I may still come to understand better.