1/25/14

Is sex expert Esther Perel Jewish?

Yes sex expert Esther Perel is a Jew. The Times reports in an article about the: "Sexual Healer":
...The daughter of two Polish-born Holocaust survivors, Ms. Perel was raised in Antwerp, in a community of survivors; she went to college at Hebrew University and started creating workshops with Jewish immigrants about their cultural identity. Her work with interfaith couples grew out of that expertise. “Since I was 19, I’ve been creating conversations,” she said. “I create thought-provoking, challenging conversations about the unspoken.”

In her mid-40s, Ms. Perel, who has a master’s degree in expressive art therapy, started thinking about taking on a new intellectual challenge. She began reading and writing more explicitly about sexuality, an aspect of couples therapy in which she had not yet specialized. She feels certain that the decision to take on the subject of sex, like her interest in cultural identity before it, can be traced to her upbringing. “I remember saying as a kid, ‘No door will ever be closed to me,’ ” she said.

Growing up in a community of survivors left her permanently thinking about how people find their way to vibrant lives. “In my community there were two groups of people,” she said. “There were the ones who did not die and the ones who came back to life.” Her parents, a social couple who talked openly about what they endured in the camps, who were storytellers and who had humor, fell into the second category. In helping others explore their sexuality, as Ms. Perel sees it, she is helping foster a totally different, difficult conversation, and yet also helping individuals “be more alive — to have a more complex and meaningful lived life.”...

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